Technology

How to disable a plugin if Firefox crashes

March 12, 2009

I installed the “Create and Print” plugin as part of a website I was evaluating. This had the unfortunate effect of making Firefox crash as soon as it started up. This made the instructions on the Firefox support site redundant as they all required me to disable the application through Firefox itself which, of course, [...]

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How to create a basic PHP template

February 9, 2009

When you’re creating a website with lots of pages all using the same look and feel, headers, CSS etc, it obviously makes sense to create a simple template. Begin by creating a page in XHTML/HTML that looks and works exactly as you wish. Now cut and paste the header into a new file and put [...]

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Reference an MXML object from an AS Object

February 6, 2009

Flex/AS3 can be extremely frustrating, as well as being very powerful. I’ve spent a couple of days creating a generic class for communicating with PHP, catching the response and sending it back to the calling object. I’d got fed up with having multiple, almost identical, event catching functions all over the place. So, having done [...]

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Removing Spaces from a String in ActionScript 3

January 29, 2009

Here’s a simple, two line function for removing spaces (can be adapted for any other character) from a string in AS3. I used it for removing any spaces typed into a Post Code. public function stripspaces(originalstring:String):String { var original:Array=originalstring.split(” “); return(original.join(“”)); } All we’re doing is splitting the array using the space character and then [...]

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FireScope

January 28, 2009

A cracking new plugin for Firefox produced by Sitepoint, FireScope provides an in-browser reference for HTML and CSS. It’s actually an extension to the Firebug plugin so you need to install that first and then FireScope. Once installed, it adds a “reference” window. Type a CSS or HTML element in and it opens a window [...]

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Captivate Loading

November 28, 2008

If you’re a Captivate user, you’re probably aware that there are a number of Captivate variables that you can access from Flash. In other words, you load up a Captivate SWF inside a Flash movie and can then access some information about that Captivate movie including, for example, the number of slides, the current slide [...]

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Apache

October 16, 2008

Let’s say that you want to add a file upload facility to your website via PHP. The key to this is to ensure that the permissions on the folder you are copying up to allow PHP to do the copying. This is a classic Gotcha that can waste a whole load of time. The first [...]

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Let’s hear it for HEREDOC

September 8, 2008

I’ve been using PHP seriously for a while now, and overall I think it’s the most productive programming language I’ve ever encountered. However, one of the things, as a PHP programmer, you need to do on a regular basis is to output HTML to the browser in order to draw web pages. The problem is [...]

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5 Things I Hate About Apple

July 21, 2008

Having to pay for software service packs. The latest is the upgrade to version 2.0 of the iPod Touch software. This costs £5.99 in the UK and, whilst it does include some nice little extras, is essentially a service pack that most other companies would give away for free: especially given that the device itself [...]

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My perfect development PC

July 8, 2008

The mission: to buy a PC with plenty of punch, storage space and a long term future for under £500. As a developer, this PC needs to be optimised for developing Flash, Flex and PHP rather than games but, as it happens, the end result was a capable games machine as well. Given how much [...]

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