Joined Up Typing

Joke…

glenpike — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:00:06 +0000

What’s the largest of the 52 United States of America?
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Yay Snow!!

glenpike — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:59:43 +0000

Finally we have some proper snow in Cornwall… It’s been about 5 years in the making, but today the weather let rip and gave us a good dousing of the cold white flakes.

As per usual, as soon as the first flakes fall they shortcircuit everyone’s driving ability and we have major gridlock everywhere with my lovely lady taking nearly an hour to travel between Pool & Redruth… To avoid the prospect of trying to get down then back up two notorious hills, even she had to leave the car a few minutes away from home, but good job too because anyone else who ventured further would have had to abandon their no-longer trusty steeds to fate, sledgers and idiots who think that because they have a Scooby, they can drive like Colin Macrae. This idiot could not even go 10mph without hitting 2 cars, even when the smarter kids on the street suggested he give up. Anyway, he distracted our community copper long enough for the kids to start bombing down the hill again!

Check out some pics of the new craze that’s hopefully not sweeping too hard, but skimming down a hill near you. I would have joined in but I did not have anything slidey that…

a) …belonged to my grandad/older brother/Cormac

b) …I cared about too little not to trash - my sponge.

And, contrary to popular current opinion, a bin lid doth not a slidey thing make…

Oh well, here’s fingers crossed for a snow day tomorrow.

Best Job Ever…

glenpike — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:08:16 +0000

I have been freelancing for the past year and was getting on okay, but in July I stumbled across a job advert that spiked my curiosity. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I applied for the job, got an interview, trialed - part time over 2 months and started full-time again in October. I am now helping to build an army of robots to take over the world*
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Firefox 3 - CSS Float problem.

glenpike — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:12:25 +0000

Great, yet another browser to test things on - by rights, my code that works in Firefox 2, should work in Firefox 3, but checking through a site I had built recently, I noticed my floats were not floating.
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Google Chrome…

glenpike — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:52:41 +0000

So much for my rant about relying on Google to much - I have been running Google Chrome too, yes I admit it, but hey as a web developer, I have to check out browsers to make sure my sites don’t break…
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Bloody Google

glenpike — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:46:33 +0000

Why does the whole world seem to revolve around Google…

I have been trying to work on 3 different web projects today and have been hampered because something is wrong with Google - i.e. their entire infrastructure appears to be down from where I am sitting.

This would not seem to be a huge problem as I can use Yahoo to search, but the as so many websites rely on Google Analytics & Adwords, etc. I am still stuffed: When Google’s servers go down, all the other sites break because they hang when trying to load content from Google.

So, I can’t download the latest version of Wordpress, I can’t seem to read all the blogs from one particular aggregator. I am having problems using my time tracking tool, plus a load of other stuff, which means I can’t do my job today through circumstances beyond my control.

So much for the internet being unbreakable - back to the drawing board people - although this does highlight the fact that relying heavily on one particular provider could bite you in the a** if they go pear shaped.

This provides a good example of why monopolies are bad: if you rely on Google, Amazon, or any of the other big players for your livelyhood, you are stuffed when they screw up. I guess it’s a bit like investing all your money with some cronky US bank, although at least with the internet, “investors” are as stuffed as the “customers” as it is more democratized, which is one nice thought.

Tip of the day - Web designers, put the effing analytics code and any other JavaScript that relies on external resources at the bottom of the page just before the tag. To do otherwise is a bit of a schoolboy error and I shall swear at your incompetent web offerings, then go somewhere else.

SWFAddress and a tip

glenpike — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:33:06 +0000

Working on a revamp of a website, I decided to try out SWFAddress to make the back button work instead of a hand-rolled solution…

I managed to get this up and running really quickly, which was nice, but then I spent 2 hours working out why it no longer worked when I integrated the SWFAddress into the site…

The Flash bit worked okay - change something and the address bar got updated, but the back button never worked - or did not send any events back to Flash.

2 Hours later, after stripping my code back, I found the problem:

If you are using SWFObject, the javascript for this needs to be included before the SWFAddress javascript. Doh!

Apart from that small hiccup, it’s nice and fairly simple to use…

I won something!

glenpike — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:17:28 +0000

I received a cool poster through the post today, courtesy of Ethan Eismann, who works for Adobe.

http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/2008/02/25/poster-for-adobe-air-launch/

Ethan ran a mini-competition on his blog asking for the best comments on “optimisation” and I got an email a few days later saying mine was the best out of 4. I had not realised it was a competition I was just having a slightly sarcastic rant on a pet subject of mine

Anyway, it made my day and I have a limited piece of artwork by Eboy now too!

regular expressions…

glenpike — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:10:48 +0000

Tip of the day for Dreamweaver users.

If you are doing a search and replace for ellipses with the corresponding HTML entity - … - remember to turn off the “Regular Expressions” check box, especially if you have selected “Entire Current Local Site.

Otherwise your computer sits there and starts making pretty patterns and if you go and make a cup of tea, it might make it through your entire site.

SAS SOS

glenpike — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:34:15 +0000

I finished a big project last week for Surfers Against Sewage called Save Our Seas.

This is another free educational resource like Operation Beach Clean which I had done previously.

Anyway, this time I did some animation myself and also re-used part of the intro from OBC, adding some extra audio and lip-sync’ing to this.

The Flash is a bit more modular this time, so we can easily create new content and add it to the XML sitemap to be loaded in. It still runs in AS2 as it borrows some code from the OBC project.

Some cool stuff which helped a lot: the XPath implementation from XFactorStudio, Jobe Makar’s Wordsearch game from Flash MX Game Programming Demystified was ported to AS2 and I used the Tween Lite package for the first time when the ripple transitions started slowing everything down - nice and simple. I also had some great help from the FlashCoders mailing list with some tricky problems, cheers guys.

Anyway, check out the finished project and if you know any teachers who might like it, let them know too.

http://www.sas.org.uk/education/sos/

Tip - don’t launch PDF documents as a URL in Firefox, Acrobat Reader keeps hanging the browser for some reason…

Here is some code to help:
Quick Code



private function _showPDF(_pdfURL:String):Void {

//use JS to pass in the browser variable to Flash: - http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html

 

var browser:String = String(_root.browser).toLowerCase();

 

if ("firefox" == browser) {

_useDownload = true;

}

if (true == _useDownload) {

var fileRef:FileReference = new FileReference();

if(!fileRef.download(_pdfURL)) {

trace("Failed to download.");

}

} else {

getURL(_pdfURLl, "_blank");

}

}