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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Google, Search, Flex

Oooooh sweet. According to this article, Yahoo’s search API is still more “developer friendly”. Either way, having them available is quite cool.
Google Search REST API
More than one year after Google discontinued the SOAP Search API, it finally got a proper replacement. The AJAX Search API can now be used from any Web application, [...]

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 [...]

VideoEgg Egg Network

Monetize monetize monetize… it’s the big mystery. How to do it? So that it actually works? VideoEgg has done interesting stuff so this is another one to take a look at in the future.
Ad Platform - Publishers | Videoegg
You can integrate the EggnetworkSM AdPlatform in less than a day and begin monetizing your [...]

Free open source video platform?

So says Miro. Interesting. Will have to look into it more later.
Creators: publish your videos the open way.
If just a few companies dominate online video, creativity will be restricted. If the most popular video tools rely on closed, proprietary distribution systems, free speech will suffer.
Miro is specifically designed to give video creators and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

autossh - keep your ssh tunnel running

Automatic reconnection of ssh tunnels. This could be quite useful. Found this from here.
autossh

FEATURES

autossh is a program to start a copy of ssh and monitor it, restarting
it as necessary should it die or stop passing traffic. The idea is
from rstunnel (Reliable SSH Tunnel), but implemented in C.

The author’s view is that it is [...]

How much of my vehicle registration fee is tax deductible?

In California, there is a helpful calculator to figure that out.
Vehicle Registration Fee Calculator
Vehicle Registration Fee Calculator
Enter the following information to determine VLF paid for tax purposes.

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 [...]

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 [...]