How to add duration info to a FLV file with the flvtool2 command

Very useful. Sometimes some flv conversion tools don’t include info that is vital for playback. In this case, the seekbar wouldn’t show up in the player until after playback finished. I’ll be testing to see if this resolves it but either way, this is good to know. The first hint was this post stating that [...]

Free DNS report tools

Excellent comparison and info on free DNS reporting tools which come in handy when DNS is doing what it shouldn’t… at least not what you think it should! In the end I used intoDNS, CheckDNS.net, and pingability.
Free DNS Report alternatives

Everyone that runs a web server or even a site needs to run a DNScheck from [...]

Photoshop color shift when doing save for web

Some very helpful and good steps on getting consistent color out of your photoshop setup. Uncheck that convert to sRGB before you save as well! We’ll try it out and see.

The Mysterious “Save For Web” Color Shift | Web Design Blog: Web Design & Innovation in web standards : Viget Labs
What we’re doing here won’t [...]

Django, Sphinx, and full-text search

This makes some interesting things possible. And it makes sense just looking at it. That’s even better.

Announcing django-sphinx 2.0.0 Full-text Search | David Cramer’s Blog

One of my tasks lately has been updating the django-sphinx
library to work with Sphinx 0.98, as it includes GIS components which
we have been wanting to possibly utilize [...]

Bash and Django - working together

A note… definitely something to come back to.
Talk Funnel » Blog Archive » Django bash shell shortcuts

SmileyChris had a post up recently on setting up bash aliases for Django. He uses the classic alias command which works for one-line shortcuts. I got inspired to put mine up too, but if you want to [...]

Snippet to update Django tables to utf8

So you get the dreaded illegal mix of collations:
Pythoneer » Convert MySQL table to utf8
Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE)
What do you do? Not too bad fortunately. And if you’re working with Django, it’s a little bit easier. Launch the shell with python manage.py shell. Then in the shell do something like [...]

Xcode and AS3 autocompletion

Just a tip. I loaded it but haven’t put it through it’s paces. But it’s still cool to have and XCode does syntax hilighting now. I am not sure if it did before.
Xcode actionscript3 code completion
As I really like to work with Xcode as my primary IDE, I created my own code completion for [...]

Show the date in the OS X Menu Bar

A good tip and set of instructions on how to show the date in the menu bar so you don’t have to click, hover, etc.
How To: Display Date in OS X Menu Bar - PaulStamatiou.com
While getting things settled down on my MacBook it became apparent that I did not want to rely on [...]

Python array copy

I had heard about passing by reference vs. passing by value. Here is a case of passing by reference.
In [76]: a=[1,2]In [77]: b=aIn [78]: b.append(3)In [79]: aOut[79]: [1, 2, 3]
That’s not what I was looking for. I was hoping to get ‘b’ to be [1, 2, 3] leaving ‘a’ unchanged. Oops. It passed ‘a’ to [...]

Textmate and FBML… Eclipse/Aptana anyone?

I sure wish there was something like this for Eclipse and Aptana! Perhaps this could be a start? Here’s to hoping…!
Facebook Platform Developer Forum / TextMate FBML plugin
Put together a start of a TextMate Bundle for Facebook. Does some cool stuff, like code completion and doc lookup. If anyone wants [...]

Good list of Eclipse plugins specific to Flex

This list has many of the plugins I already use, and there are more that I haven’t looked at yet. I’ll give them a shot in due time, but it’s a good reference.
dispatchEvent » Pimp my ‘clipse - a list of must-have Eclipse plug-ins for Flex/Flash Development
FlexBuilder may have its ups and downs [...]

Flex, MVC, Cairngorm and Universal Mind Extensions

This podcast with Thomas Burleson probably has the best description of MVC with Flex, why to use Cairngorm, challenges of using Cairngorm, why to use the universal mind extensions, the problem of view locators and how to work with those, etc. Good stuff. I wish there was a transcript of this.
UMEvent, UMCommand, Callbacks, and other [...]

Textmate the super text editor

Just a note to remember… blogging from textmate… wow. One more reason to get it…
Andrew Powell’s ColdFusion, Flex, Java, and AJAX Blog
OK, so a lot of Mac users use TextMate for everything from text editor to IDE. I didn’t realize this until recently, but you can blog directly from TextMate. If [...]

Eclipse, Quicksilver, and hopping to a folder or terminal quickly

You can pull the currently selected item in Finder into Quicksilver with Command-G. Neato! But you can also pull selected text in a current app. You probably need to install and enable the Quicksilver proxy objects. But once you do, you can grab selected text and it’ll show up in Quicksilver.
But! If you’re in Eclipse [...]

Pay as you go web hosting

Interesting concept. They don’t work with long running processes like Django or Web2py, but it could be good for static files and regular scripts.
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET FAQ
What happens if I get slashdotted?
A
“major slashdotting” of a site hosted on our service will cost you (on
average) less than $10, one time. The best part about that is [...]

Set up a remote forwaring port to develop Facebook apps locally

Oh this is so cool. Man webfaction is just changing my whole development life in a good way.
I want to be able to write an app in django with my normal tools here, but still have Facebook access it. I’ve done the “open the port on the router” bit and I don’t like it. I [...]

Flex form: indicating a required element

Customize the indicator on a Flex form to show a form item is required.
Changing a Flex FormItem container’s indicator skin at Flex Examples
The following example shows how you can change the FormItem container’s indicator skin which appears when the form item’s required property is set to true.

TODO/FIXME extension for Flex Builder 2/3

Gotta keep a note for this one. I was wondering why my tasks weren’t showing up in my new install of Flex!
richinternet.blog
I finally found some time to finish work on an extension plugin for Flex Builder 2 which adds TODO/FIXME Task support similar to Eclipse’s Java Development Tool JDT. This is the nice thing about [...]

Actionscript sprintf

I like python and the ability to do variable substitutions. In AS3 you have to do… well see the example below. Alas, this is for AS2, not AS3.
sprintf : Downloads : Nate Cook
Formatted strings are a real convenience—one that is sorely missing
from the Flash Actionscript library. This adds in the sprintf
functionality, which lets you reduce [...]

Bracketeer and working with images with bright brights and dark darks

Just a note. Helps when working with images that have really bright and dark areas. Check out some examples.
Bracketeer: Exposure Processing Software
Bracketeer is a front-end GUI for Enfuse.
Enfuse is a command-line freeware utility which uses multiple exposures
of a scene (bracketed exposures) and merges them together to form a
uniformly lit scene. It is similar [...]

Universal Mind Cairngorm Extensions

There are several issues I have had when developing with Cairngorm. It gets better with time as you work around the issues, but you have to “work around them”, as opposed to working within the system constraints. The constraints are good. They give form and function. But there are some headaches… certainly no offense to [...]

Simple XML creation with Python

I was so happy when I first found Amara. It was the easiest thing I had seen for creating XML with Python. It’s quite serious stuff because it can probably handle just about anything you throw at it. Then I heard about the wonderful web2py project. One of it’s beautiful aspects is XML generation, or [...]

Extract .bz2 on Linux

I am updating some python libs on my webfaction host. The python easy_setup isn’t working for this particular bit though which is unusual. It’s the first time it didn’t work. The reason? It seems it chokes on .bz2 archives. The one in particular is python-dateutil. Fortunately a quick wget later and it’s downloaded. On OS [...]

Local subversion on 1and1

1and1 had an update. Good. It broke subversion. Bad. After a short fight with subversion 1.4.6 (which didn’t work) I thought about using 1.4.5. Fortunately that’s pretty straightforward and… it works! So here are the commands for that. I develop on Eclipse using a JumpBox Trac/Subversion server locally. Changes to my Django app and [...]

Another python audio library that can handle FLAC

Just a note about another one.
TagPy | Andreas Klöckner’s web page

TagPy is a set of Python bindings for Scott Wheeler’s TagLib. It builds upon Boost.Python, a wrapper generation library which is part of the Boost set of C++ libraries [3].
Just like TagLib, TagPy can:

read and write ID3 tags of version 1 and [...]