Michael Bianco

Xcode Actionscript Integration: The Next Step

I’ve tried the whole Eclispe setup, but I’m just too used to Xcode to really like it. So I decided to improve the support of Actionscript/Flash Development in Xcode…

Cool Apache Trick

I recently came across this cool apache trick. You can change the value of a PHP configuration variable using a .htaccess file in your server. For instance if you wanted to change the include_path php configuration variable you could use the following .htaccess command: Every PHP file contained in the same directory, or child directories of the .htaccess command will have the include_path variable changed to the new value. Its strange that there isn’t much documentation available about the php_value derivative, no information is available on apache.org, and even google didn’t seem to turn up any ‘real’ documentation about the command.

NaturalDocs

A few weeks ago I was searching around trying to decide what documentation system to use in my Actionscript/Flash projects. There are alot of options out there, but these are the ones that I found viable for my situation: as2api AS2Doc VisDoc NaturalDocs As2api: overall as2api seems like a good solution but I really didn’t like the style of the documentation as2api created and the os x binary didn’t seem to work on os x. AS2Doc: looks like a good package, but it costs money; I cant see paying for something that has a free alternative which has very similar functionality. I’d rather donate to an open-source project. VisDoc: looked really nice- exactly what I was looking for, I was very close to buying it until I saw NaturalDocs…

Free iPod

I finally gave in and decided to try one of the those ‘Get a free iPod’ offers. I did some research before signing up, and it seems as though this offer is totally legit. To get the free iPod you have to complete 1 offer (some offers are free, some cost less than $5), and get five people to do the same using your referral link. From what I’ve read gratis (the free ipod company) gets ~$100 for each person who signs up for an offer. That means that when you complete the requirements for a free ipod they already have $600 in their pocket and an ipod costs ~$300. So, if your interested in getting a free ipod, and are feeling really kind, please sign up with my refferal link.

XASH: Flash Help File Viewer

XASH, a Flash help file viewer written in Cocoa whose goal is to make it easier & faster to view flash help files is now available. At the moment the implementation is very simply and doesn’t provide any advantages over Flash IDE help viewer (other than its faster, open-source, and a native Cocoa application); but I’m planning on adding filtering and searching features which should make finding the right help pages alot easier. If you have any feature requests or bug reports please let me know!

Dreamhost Review

Ok, so heres my mini review of Dreamhost. Dreamhost is definitely not as easy to use as my previous host, alot of features that were provided automatically with hostm.com have to ‘manually’ configured. For instance, hostm.com had a 1-click install feature for blogs and forums. Now dreamhost claims to have a one click install, but it really isn’t one click, dreamhost simply sets up the mySQL database and automatically fills out the database config file, Hostm did everything for you. However, dreamhost provides alot of power with their hosting. Since you have SSH access to the server you can compile custom versions of PHP, or any other command line application you need. I compiled CSS Optimizer on dreamhost without any problems…

Woops: Software Versions

I accidentally uploaded older versions of all the software on this site over to the new server. If you downloaded any of the software on this site within the last few days, you probably downloaded an outdated version. Just wanted to give everyone the heads up 🙂

Switched!

Everything has been successfully switched over to the new Dreamhost server! So far so good, the only gotcha I came across was that Dreamhost has disabled allow_url_fopen for security reasons, so including files in this fashion would not work, all paths had to be relative: [code lang=”php”][/code] I ended up adding the root server directory to include_path to allow me to reffer to files with an absolute filepath without using the http://blabla.com. Other than that everything went pretty well, Dreamhost has a very extensive k-base and wiki which helped me very quikly resolve other small issues that I came across…

Downtime Tommorow

I’ll be switching this site, along with my freelancer site, over to my new dreamhost server tomorrow. Expect a few hours of downtime. I have few new things that I will be announcing once I get the site successfully transfered over.

AS3

Wow, those engineers at Macromedia must really be coding hard. Less than 2 months after Flash 8 was released we now have Flash Player 8.5 and AS3. I cant keep up with all these new technologies. 😛 I looked through the AS3 FAQ and all the new features are very exciting. AS is really moving towards being a full featured language like Java or C. We now have types such as int, uint and variable identifiers such as const- sweet. Flash 8.5 (finally!) has a regular expression class, why did it take them so long to add this? Lots of additional classes have been added, AS3 is looking more like a framework like Cocoa; very cool…

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