The site is sort of back to its normal theme. I still want to tweak the colors a little bit becuase I don’t think they look quite right. At least the graphics are all up and it looks close to what it looked like before the switch.
TweetI finally made the plunge and signed up for a Cold Fusion hosting account. I decided to go with HostMySite and their customer service has been fantastic.
So now I’m using Raymond Camden’s BlogCFC program to run the blogging duties here. AS you can see, it’s using the basic default layout but I’m planning to add and modify that this week. Hopefully by Friday I will have the old look and feel up and some other things on the right hand side. I also need to convert my old entries to this new format.
I’m really excited about having a CF server to code with. It’s going to be great for the blog, for creating apps for my trip reports and as a learning experience. I’m much better at CF than PHP so I think the depth of the site is going to be much improved.
TweetCiara and I got back Thursday night from Germany. It was my first time overseas and I had a really, really good time. We both want to take German and go back in the very near future. It was a little strange to be gone from work for so long (13 days) but it doesn’t look like I missed much and since we’re starting a new round of projects it was a good time to take off before they start.
Buying a car is getting closer and closer. I’ve narrowed it down to two cars – the Diesel Volkswagen Jetta or a Honda Civic. If you have any advice on either of those, let me know. I can’t wait to be able to get out of Philly and go backpacking. It’s going to do wonders for our enjoyment of the East Coast.
TweetAs I’ve mentioned before I think that there is a lot of promise in using Flex to create applications that are supported by the Flash Communication Server. In order to get more familiar with how Flash Comm Server and Flex interact I started to work through the tutorials on the Flash Comm Dev center and convert them from Flash to Flex. Specifically, I’ve been trying part one of the MP3 Player Tutorial.
Mostly I make small errors in the ActionScript code or the way that Flex handles certain things. It’s annoying but it has helped me learn some of the nuance of the two languages. Unfortunately, these small errors have kept me from getting anything to work. The Flash version works, but my Flex version does not.
I had a hard time debugging the problems with FlashComm and Flex but found a couple of useful resources. One is the Flex Trace Panel which helped me figure out where my current problem is.
I have a Flex interface set up to control the playing and pausing of MP3s (Screenshot). When the user pushes the ‘Activate’ button, the application is supposed to set the label on that button to ‘Deactivate’ and then it is supposed to enable the Pause button and the stop button. Here’s the code:
if (login_pb.getLabel() == “Activate”) {
mp3_nc = new NetConnection( );
mp3_nc.onStatus = function (info) {
Dumper.dump(“The connection code is: “ + info.code);
Dumper.dump(info.code == “NetConnection.Connect.Success”); //Check to see the status
if( info.code == “NetConnection.Connect.Success” ) {
//for (var i = 0; i<mp3ArrArtiste.length; i++) {
// mp3_lb.addItem(mp3ArrArtiste[i], mp3ArrSong[i]);
//}
Dumper.dump(“Hello World”); //Check to see if we’re in the if statement.
stop_pb.enabled = true;
pause_pb.enabled = true;
}
}
mp3_nc.connect(“rtmp://myserver/cs_mp3/defstream“);
mp3_ns = new NetStream(mp3_nc);
id3_ns = new NetStream(mp3_nc);
mp3_ns.onStatus = function(info) {
Dumper.dump(info.description);
//if (info.description==“Stopped playing “+selectedMP3+“.”){mp3_title_txt=“”;}
}
login_pb.setLabel(“Deactivate”);
}
}
The problem is that when I push the ‘Activate’ button and then run through the check to make sure the connection has been made, the buttons stop responding to changing their ‘enabled’ property. stop_pb.enabled = true and pause_pb.enabled do nothing. Using the FlexTracePanel I can see that it is running through the if statement and if I move the two .enabled = true lines from the mp3_ns.onStatus = function(info) they work just fine. Something with that onStatus function is causing the problem but I haven’t figured it out yet.
That’s the project for tomorrow.
TweetI’ve got a couple of posts but I want to break them up for organizational purposes.
I installed SynergyFLEX by Scott Barnes on my Flex server here at home tonight. I didn’t get a chance to play with it a lot because I got sidetracked on a Flex/Flash Communication Server problem that I’ll post about in a minute.
As I get more into Flex, and become a more mature programmer I’m starting to realize the value of frameworks. We don’t use any kind of framework for our projects at work and to be honest, I don’t know enough about them to be able to push for implementing them if I wanted to. The two frameworks I am most familiar with are MachII and FuseBox. Both are very OO heavy, and both look interesting. When I get back from Germany I’m planning to install MachII on my ColdFusion server. SynergyFLEX is an application framework for Flex that is loosely based on Mach II.
I won’t get to experiment with it this week much, but when I’m back from Germany after the MachII install I want to dig in a little deeper. I want to use it for the Stock Charting/Tracking app that I’m writing because I think it may make some of the programming go faster and allow me to focus on the interesting coding problems instead of the tedious ones.
TweetI have been remiss in my blogging duties partly because some bad men took the NHL away from me this year and I’ve been trying to pack as much of the World Hockey Championships in as I can. I’ve been downloading the games and watching them when I get home from work. That coupled with the NBA playoffs has pretty much filled my evenings with sports (much to Ciara’s disappointment).
Luckily, we are leaving for Germany on Friday so I’ll be touring around Deutschland instead of wasting away watching hours of hockey and basketball. I’ll be gone for a couple of weeks so as of Friday you won’t be hearing from me.
I did find a couple of cool Flex things today though. One is an article by Peter Ent from way back in February. He talks about using Remote Objects and a trick to speed them up by using unique endpoints with an arbitrary variable at the end.
I also saw something posted by Christian Cantrell today that uses AJAX and Flex. Words don’t do it justice so you can just check it out for yourself here.
TweetThere’s nothing like sports. Denver 107, San Antonio 107 – 1:38 in the morning EST but it’s an awesome game.
TweetMy hockey deprivation has just gotten to be too much. The Hockey World Championships are going on right now in Austria and I ordered the internet package (there is no TV package in the States) which allows me to watch the games live (streamed over the internet) or download them and and watch them later.
Verizon, our internet provider, is having issues and my internet connection is really slow so I’ve only been able to download the first game which was Canada vs. Latvia. The announcers are…..not quite as good as I’m used to, but it makes for some nice unintentional comedy.
Honestly it’s just nice to watch NHL players playing hockey again. I like the international rules much more than the regular NHL rules becuse there’s much less thuggery and more skill. It’s just a better game – the way it should be. USA won their opener against Slovenia 7-0 so maybe that means good things for us. I think the USA goal is just to medal, but I’m an optimist so why not go for gold.
TweetI have a confession to make. For the last year I’ve been living a lie. Ciara and I have been living in an apartment in downtown Philadelphia, going to musicals and ballets, dining at fancy restaurants and living up the city scene. Despite all this, I am a country boy. I like backpacking, clean air, John Denver, wide open spaces and I don’t really enjoy large groups of people. So we’re moving to the suburbs.
Actually, Ciara and I really like living in the city, but unfortunately, we wanted to get a car, and a bigger apartment, so the city just didn’t make sense any more. Assuming there are no catastrophes between now and July, we’ll be moving and buying a car so that we can go backpacking and explore the East Coast.
We have both missed backpacking a lot, and are getting excited about finally having a car and being able to go. In fact, originally this site was supposed to be a place for me to talk about technology and also post trip reports from backpacking trips. We haven’t been backpacking in what seems like forever, so it just turned into a technology blog.
From now on, it’s going to be both. Once we start taking trips, I?ll be posting them here but also blogging about technology and a lot about Rich Internet Apps. Sometimes, the topics will intersect and other times I’ll just be blogging about economics, stocks or hockey.
Also, if you have any good car suggestions, let me know. We’re planning to buy one sometime in early June.
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