The State of Logging in ActionScript 3

19th October, 2008 – 12:14 pm

I’ve been looking at Logging Frameworks in ActionScript 3 over the past few days and I’m afraid that I’m slightly at a loss as for which approach is the best to take. There are a few Logging Frameworks out there, but Adobe has kindly supplied an intrinic Logging Framework, however, it’s not without it’s [...]

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Flash on the Beach 2008 - Tuesday Write Up

1st October, 2008 – 11:34 am

I went down to the Flash on the Beach 08 conference yesterday, here’s some of the notes that I wrote up on the train back:
Creating The Next Generation Happy Meal Toy
Julain Dolce
Julian is lead Developer for Fuel Industies, a creative agency that worked on a large scale campaign for the fast food chain McDonalds. [...]

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Ubuntu Netboot install with Windows (PXE)

27th September, 2008 – 4:59 pm

I’m the proud owner of a Dell X200 Laptop, which, due to it’s compact form factor (incredible seeing as it dates back to 2003!) lacks a CD-Rom and Floppy Disc Drive.  This makes installing operating systems a bit of a chore and seeing how my USB Pen Drive packed in at the weekend, the only [...]

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Typesafe Enums in ActionScript 2

8th July, 2008 – 10:24 am

Typesafe Enums are perfect when you want to get the message across loud and clear, with no room for error. The classic use for an Enum is handling events, to give some context I’ll demonstrate how you could handle events without using an Enum:

/**
 * This example method will send an event back to a [...]

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CNET TV Videos

7th July, 2008 – 9:45 am

I’ve recently been slaving away on Version 4 of the CNET Video Player. Today is the official launch of the new player and it would appear everything has gone smoothly. The player features numerous enhancements over the previous version including a full XSPF playlist, XML Configuration, Support for related content at the end [...]

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Actionscript - Loading Acute and UTF-8 Characters from XML into Dynamic Text with Flash

19th June, 2008 – 10:17 am

Writing flexible applications in Flash is easy, (/me points in the direction of my XML Configuration Class) and there’s few reasons why all your text strings should not be read in at run time to allow for easy internationalization.
However, one pitfall to be aware of is trying to use Acutes and other “non-latin” characters in [...]

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Validating Image Uploads in CakePHP

16th June, 2008 – 10:17 pm

Following on from my article on CakePHP - Uploaded File Validation in Models, today’s snippet will show you how to use Cake’s validation rules to reject invalid images, or images which do not conform to a specified mime-type. This code relies on the fact that you have LibGD installed on your webserver.

<?php
Class Image extends [...]

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Holiday Photography

15th June, 2008 – 9:20 am

I’m back from a week long holiday in the bay of Elounda, Crete. During my stay I took about 200 pictures using my trusty Samsung i6 my favourite of which were taken on the Island of Spinalonga which served as a leprosy colony until 1957, the following pic was snapped looking back towards Plaka.

The [...]

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CakePHP - Activating User Account via Email

3rd June, 2008 – 10:11 pm

Continuing on from my User Registration with the AuthComponent post I’m going to cover how to activate user account’s via email. Before we get down to the code lets look at a simple use case first.
Activating User Accounts Via Email Use Case
Goal: To confirm that users are registering with a valid email address, force [...]

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CakePHP - Open_Basedir Restriction in Effect

2nd June, 2008 – 10:37 pm

Just deployed a CakePHP on a domain running PLESK and dismayed by the fact that your screen is over-flowing with warning about open_basedir restriction in effect? Fear not, the solution is straight forward (if a little frustrating to track down!)
The problem is caused by this line (line 69, in CakePHP 1.2.0.6311) in /app/webroot/index.php:

ini_set(‘include_path’, CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH [...]

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