Monthly Archives: August 2005

Shared Hosting? Don’t Use Defaults

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Thanks to Dan, I realized that I was inadvertently sharing my blog feed with someone else. I use HostMySite.com for my CF hosting, and Dan noticed that my RSS Feed was showing up as http://www.cronkrightinteractive.com/ but I couldn’t figure out why. After finding out that Cronkright uses CF, I figured out what the problem was.

When I set up my blog, I left the name as ‘Default’. I think Cronkright set up their blog, which also had the name ‘Default’ and because we’re on the same server, the feeds just merged.

I changed my blog name and now I think everything should work. I’m a little wiser too.

Sparkle and Flash

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I saw this on Rob Rohan’s blog and since I’ve talked a lot about Microsoft and the future of Flash, I wanted to chime in.

When talking about “Sparkle”, you really have to talk about Avalon (Windows Presentation Foundation). Avalon is targeting current Flash developers by giving them the tools to create rich User Interfaces on top of the next version of Direct3D which provides some pretty impressive design capabilities. Add to that the fact that you will be able to use any .NET language to extend the capabilities and you have a significant product.

Flash will always be great because it isn’t platform dependant and the adoption rate is fantastic. However Macromedia/Adobe has really been able to corner the designer/developer market because there hasn’t been significant competition. This is the start of that competition.

Flex has taken Flash to the next level by providing the ability to easily create great RIAs with sophisticated UI. If the Expression Studio suite can do that for the Windows platform, then it will be very interesting to see what happens to the future of RIAs.

Hopefully we’ll know more after PDC.

Quick and Dirty FTP Tutorial for CFEclipse

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This question seems to have come up a lot on the CF-Eclipse list, so I thought I’d do a quick tutorial on how to set up ftp connections in version 1.2.

Switch over to File Explorer View, and click the right arrow as shown in the picture. Click on ‘Manage FTP Connections’.

That brings up a dialog box like the one below. Fill out the information and make sure you type the full path because it wouldn’t work for me by just leaving the ‘/’

When that’s finished, go back to the file explorer view, click the drop down box and select you’re newly created connection. If it worked, you’ll see “Connected to: ftp.yoursite.com” and you will be able to click the plus sign in the file explorer view to see your files.

You should be all set to go. As a side note, the FTP connection feature will only work with sites that support passive mode. If your server doesn’t support passive mode, your files will appear as read only and you won’t be able to edit them.

Sho Kuwamoto on MVC

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Sho Kuwamoto posted about why he thought using the Model View Controller pattern is overkill for most RIAs. I’m still in the process of creating my first MVC based app, but I tend to disagree with what he says. There are three people in our developer circle that have created apps using MVC. As each of us becomes more familiar with it, we could jump in at any point and know how the code works and what it’s supposed to do. For maintenance and extendibility, I think MVC (when used correctly) does a wonderful job.

If you take a look at his post, make sure you scroll down and read the comments. Steven Webster of iterationtwo gives a nice rebuttal.

Putting Equations into Flex

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As part of the project I’m working on, I need to show a bunch of equations within Flex and I spent a good portion of today looking at how to do that. In the process, I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know before. Hopefully some of it will come in handy, and I thought I’d share for other people who may be in the same boat.

MathML is an XML based W3C standard for representing equations over the web. Using MathML you can take this snippet of code:

<math xmlns=“http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML“>
<mrow>
<mi>&alpha;</mi>
<mfrac>
<mrow>
<mn>2</mn>
</mrow>
<mrow>
<msup>
<mrow>
<mi>&sigma;</mi>
</mrow>
<mrow>
<mi>e</mi>
</mrow>
</msup>
</mrow>
</mfrac>
</mrow>
</math>

And have it display like this (this will only work if you have a MathML enabled browser such as FireFox):

α

2

σ

e

(although it isn’t displaying correctly for me right now).

So what I was trying to find was a way to convert that MathML code into a vector based graphic format that I can use in Flex. I may be going overboard by trying to use a vector based format as opposed to a GIF or a JPEG, but I do want it to be scalable and since Flex has support for SVG, I thought it would be the perfect choice.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found an easy way to convert the MathML format to SVG. There is a white paper on it here but I don’t understand XML quite well enough to make it useful. I only got a chance to skim it so I may try to work through it tomorrow if it looks like the best solution.

I found some cool Flash based equation editors over at GalaxyGoo. And TerraDotta has a sweet app that you can try a live demo of, MathIWYG over at their site.

If anyone has any suggestions, let me know!

The 10 Best Resources for CSS

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Most people probably saw this on Slashdot, but it’s worth posting. SitePro News has created a list of the 10 Best Resources for CSS. The biggies are there, including CSS Zen Garden and PositionIsEverything but there are also some other helpful sites I didn’t know about. Ruthsarian Layouts provides some great info on using CSS for layouts and CSS from the Ground Up looks like a great beginner site.

Everyone should be using CSS, but if you’re not, these are some great places to start.