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 [...]

Enums, Objects and the joys of being typesafe

I like autocomplete. I also like it when the compiler (or IDE) tells me I am doing something wrong BEFORE I compile. Flexbuilder is my AS3 compiler of choice. Although FlashDevelop 3 has come a really long way. It’s PC only though.
Anyway, just did some reading about Enums in AS2. This bit of [...]

Enums, Objects and the joys of being typesafe

I like autocomplete. I also like it when the compiler (or IDE) tells me I am doing something wrong BEFORE I compile. Flexbuilder is my AS3 compiler of choice. Although FlashDevelop 3 has come a really long way. It’s PC only though.
Anyway, just did some reading about Enums in AS2. This bit of [...]

Pure AS3 preloader

Well I wasn’t making a game but I just went through what the author describes: finishing up the app, gotta set up the preloader. I did a manual version of this but I like this idea. However I am not using FlashDevelop. I am in the Flash IDE for compiling. I have thought of [...]

Howto: Flexbuilder 3 to debug Flash CS3 projects?!

I have to say… if you EVER have to code in AS3 for Flash, using Flexbuilder is just downright awesome. Code completion (that ignore case unlike the Flash IDE), refactoring support, all kinds of goodness in general. Man… even things like searching for references to a particular function throughout the code base of the project. [...]

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 blogging apps…

that are more or less ready to use. The list is at the following link.

Empty Thoughts: Django Blogging Apps
People ask about blogging apps for the Django platform all the time. I
have not investigated each and every one of these, but so far I still
feel pretty confident that not one of these is fully [...]

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 [...]

Full-text search for Django

Just making a note…
Extending Django’s database API to include full-text search (Mercurytide)

Flash Javascript combo upload script…

Pretty cool. Just making a note of it.
SWFUpload News | SWFUpload
SWFUpload is a small JavaScript/Flash library to get the best of both worlds. It features the great upload capabilities of Flash and the accessibility and ease of HTML/CSS. See it in action….
* Upload multiple files at once by ctrl/shift-selecting [...]

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 [...]

A Django HttpRequest QueryDict is not your normal Python dict - i.e. getting ids from a friend request-form

Doesn’t work:
ids=request.GET['ids[]‘]
Does work:
ids=request.GET.getlist(’ids[]‘ A typical Facebook friend invite sends the ids to be invited to your site as an array in ‘ids[]‘. Normally, you can pull values out with just request.GET['key']. But since the value of this particular key is an array and not just a string, you can’t (at least I wasn’t able to) just [...]

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 [...]

Concat Django Querysets

Here is a good discussion on concatenating Django Querysets. Very helpful! It also introduced me to itertools. This leads to some other talk about itertools. Very interesting!
The jist though is like this:
How do you concatenate two querysets? - Django users | Google Groups
import itertoolsq1 = Model1.objects.all()q2 = Model2.objects.all()for thing in [...]

Jump to path in OS X finder

Not sure where I saw this, but if you have an OS X Finder box open to, say, upload a pic to Facebook, if you hit Command-shift-G, it’ll give you a box you can paste a path in. You can also type the path in and it should give path completion so I’ve heard.
Nifty.

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 [...]

Django snippets to check http_referer

Django snippets: Referer-checking view decorators

Here are a couple of Django decorators for limiting access to a view based on the request’s HTTP_REFERER. Both raise a Django PermissionDenied exception if the referer test fails (or a referer simply isn’t provided).

The first, referer_matches_hostname, takes a hostname
(and port, if specified) and matches it against the referer’s. [...]

1and1 and http compression

I have not been able to find any info about 1and1 and http compression. It’s a shame as it really reduces bandwidth, increases transfer speed, etc. Fortunately this little script does a really nice job of it. It’s in PHP and it works a treat on 1and1. With a bit of rewrite magic I should [...]

Neat little Facebook snippet for Django

You can use this to set up a Facebook User within you Django app. This of course uses the middleware which is optional as described here.
Django snippets: Little middleware that create a facebook user

Install **PyFacebook** package.

After make all steps in tutorial above, put this code in your [...]

Django, generic views, and setting the media url via a template context processor

So far I haven’t really used Django for “web sites”. It’s really been used as a data backend. Well the time has come for some web stuff. It’s set up to use a dev, staging, and production server. All is well and good. But each has a different media server. In Django, how do you [...]

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: updating Buckminster

Recently I have had trouble doing any updates in Eclipse. Buckminster always failed with a 404 not found. My current Buckminster Update Site is:
http://download.eclipse.org/technology/buckminster/updates
Later I found this bit:
Nabble - Eclipse - Buckminster Dev - Has something changed on buckminster update site?
yes, something has changed. Eclipse 3.3.2 was released and Buckminster headless-site.xml was updated [...]