Blogs

Late nights with IIS (or why I'll stick with Apache)

I just recently ported a php application for a company from a Linux box to a Windows server running iis, and have been struggling all week with performance problems on the site. So after much digging around newsgroups I finally found why the new server is being so slow. It really boiled down to two things:

Flex adding subelements as properties to a custom component

I was trying to extend a TextArea control, and all was working well untill I tried to use my class like the following:

  1. <widget:myhtmltextarea> <mx:htmltext> <!--[CDATA[
  2. <DIV STYLE="text-align:LEFT;"><SPAN STYLE="color:#7DB73F;font-size:20px;font-family:'Times New Roman';">Title Text</SPAN></DIV>
  3. ]]--></mx:htmltext> </widget:myhtmltextarea>

 

which of course resulted in the nice cryptic error message :

 Could not resolve <mx:htmltext> to a component implementation.

 

Finally updated the site

Well it was a long time coming but I finally converted my old wordpress blog into a full fledged drupal cms. I figured now that I've spend the last year working in drupal, it was about time I moved over.

Porting over everything was extremly simple using the drupal wordpress importer, very impressive module. I'm also very happy with the drupal geshi code formatting module, much more intuitive than the equivalent wordpress version.

I'm an open source contributer!

Drupal private messaging module updates

Check out case 634194, sure it's not much, but I'm excited anyway, for all the amount I've used open source projects in the past, it's great to finally have contributed something back to one.

Hopefully once my current project is released I can actually contribute some full fledged modules to drupal.

PayPal Mass Payment Api and Drupal

I had the task of determining a way to pay out commissions to users on our Drupal marketplace. At first this seemed like quite the daunting task, even with the PayPal MassPay API right in front of me.

Canada finally progressing into the digital age

Michael Geist, the crusader of Canadian copyright has a interesting story posted here.

Finally it looks like the Conservative goverment has realized how backwards the DMCA is and looks like they might finally be progressing in the right direction. Either that or in this recession the lobby groups funding has dried up...

Flexing the Youtube Chromeless player

Getting youtube and flex / flash to work together can be a nightmare. Our original implementation ended up having us being forced to do "hack" youtube  to tease out the path the the flv and play that in a native flex video player interface. This solution works well and lets you have multiple videos playing inside your flex application at once, but unfortunatly youtube doesn't like this idea at all.

Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup

A good interview with Bjarne Stroustrup by James Maguire. He discusses the current state of CS graduates and the industry in general. Stroustrup is probably one of the few famous computer scientists I can relate to and I share many of his views on the state of computer science and the business world.

This advice is priceless:

Meteor over Edmonton

Very Cool that this happened right in my area, wish I was outside at the time and actually saw it instead of stuck in my office working.



Police dash cam of Meteor over Edmonton, Canada

Goodbye Micheal Crichton

Micheal Crichton Succumbs to Cancer Wow, very surprised by this news. His books were a favorite of mine in my teenage years. He will be missed. Thanks very much for all the great stories, they were a joy to read with rich imaginary worlds to explore.