Codeigniter Excel and PHP’s Spreadsheet Excel Writer Pear Package and how to not have to use PEAR

Well that’s a long title but it sums it up. I wanted to generate Excel from Codeigniter. Because of that I needed a way to use it whether or not PEAR is running/installed, etc. My local dev box doesn’t (yet) have it but that’s a story for another time.
The talented developers at Pizza SEO repackaged [...]

A good short-list of PHP frameworks

I have had to come back to PHP after a long hiatus. I prefer Python but recent projects require PHP and thus my return. I did a project recently with CodeIgniter which really is a spiffy project. But I would like a true OOP PHP5 MVC fast lightweight framework that has user auth, session management [...]

Custom Flex Calendar controls

I have worked with customizing the Flex calendar components and will probably need to do so again in the future, but this is pretty neat. I’ll have to look into this more soon.
Refreshingly new Flex Calendar controls « My journey in the world of RIA
Flex is a very flexible language and I’m here to prove [...]

Getting rid of the dreaded “can’t encode” errors with Python and MySQL and SqlSoup

So I was getting problems inserting data that has the ‘™’ symbol in it. Brutal stuff. Couldn’t find a way around it. Did it by hand in the end. Nasty. The problem was that I was getting
UnicodeEncodeError: ‘latin-1′ codec can’t encode character u’\u2122′ in position 12: ordinal not in range(256)
where the ‘\u2122′ is the ‘™’ [...]

Python Excel file reader

This thing is just brilliant! I am working on a project that uses PHP. But I still do my data mangling with Python because of tools like SqlSoup running under SqlAlchemy. Using those under iPython has saved incredible amounts of time. I actually like working with data in this way. It just makes it more [...]

Loading assets in AS3 and Flash

Loading up assets can be a pain to track so this set of code aims to simplify that. Need to check it out later though.
AYAN RAY | AS3 / Flash: Introducing the AssetLoader Class
In Actionscript 3, there are many different ways to load external assets from the Internet. Unfortunately, this can become tiresome to find [...]

Animated Skins in Flex

Very neat. Very cool. You have to check it out if only to see dancing Gingerbread men in Flex…
Tink » Blog Archive » Seamless Animated Skins in Flex

In Joey Lotts session on styling Flex at FOTB (where he did a great job), one of the attendees asked about animated skins.
There’s
obviously many ways to [...]

Flash CS3 Open Source “Liquid Components” by Byte Array

I am just about to wrap up a project using Flash CS3 and… I wish I saw this earlier…
Liquid Components for Flash CS3 [ by Didier Brun ] < ByteArray.org
The “Liquid Components” have been created for the Flash people, freelance coders and designers who wish to integrate fully skinnable components in their website, [...]

AS3 URL class

Not having access to the mx URL utils with Flash (though I haven’t looked at the possibility just yet) I found this. Could be quite helpful!
AS3 – URL Class | Manfred Weber`s Weblog
I could not find it in the net so I hacked something together quickly. A simple URL class that parses an url string.

Problems using navigateToURL

Was just dealing with this… must check out!
Problems using navigateToURL – aron / philipp development blog

Hi there… we’ve been busy these past couple of days so there
wasn’t much time for new posts – sorry. But here is a little update.
While developing a flash website (AS3 & SWFObject2.0)
that heavily depended on opening URLs in a new [...]

Flex SDK coding conventions and best practices

Coding Conventions – Flex SDK – Confluence
This document lays out the coding standards for writing open-source Flex framework components in ActionScript 3. Adhering to these standards makes the source code look consistent, well-organized, and professional.
Some of these standards are completely arbitrary, since there is not always a “best way” to code. Nevertheless, in the interest [...]

Actionscript 3 Excel library

Adobe – Flex Extension
An Actionscript 3 library for reading and writing Excel files. Currently reading numbers, text, and formulas from Excel version 2.0-2003 and writing numbers, text, and dates to Excel 2.0 is supported. No server-side help is needed.