WebGyver Revisited

Michael Fitchett, who runs the Fitchett blog, has posted a simple but very educational Flex example, showing how to display XML data from an RSS feed in a datagrid, using E4X as the resultFormat.

What’s so amazing (to me) is that :

1. It is simple
2. It works
3. It shows you ho the E4X syntax works
4. It does some extra stuff on top of that
5. Michael Fitchett is providing the source code for all of that

The majority of experienced Flex developers agree that E4X is the best format to work with XML data in Flex. Unfortunately, if you’re trying to find code examples of how to make that work, you can spend hours on end to find what you’re looking for. And even then, all you get are random snippets with partial solutions.

Thanks to Michael, I was able to finish a personal project (trying to learn how to work with E4X so that I’m prepared when I take on actual XML projects in the future). In the end, it was all about making a couple of syntax changes . . . and magically, everything began to work.

However, unlike some of the people I sometimes work with, I would never say, “Oh, was that all?”*

I am very grateful for the example and the inspiration.

*Have you ever worked on somebody’s computer to fix an annoyance? Or look at someone else’s code to get them over a hump that was causing work to be delayed? By the time they call you, it’s already been hours or a day since they last did anything productive. Then you come by and look at the problem, try a few things, and POOF, it works. After that, they just shrug their shoulders and say something like, “Oh was that all? I could have done that.”

Time-sensitive post: This post refers to an offer I received in my in-box on or about April 20, 2009. Because I have no idea how long this deal will last, I recommend you shop around and do some price comparison before taking my word for it.

Usually, I hate to plug other people’s products or services, but this deal seems too good to keep it all to myself. You get 600 TAIYO YUDEN DVD-Rs for about $129.00 (plus free standard shipping).

Nope, I don’t get a commission! At any rate, if you’re interested in deals like this, go visit Supermediastore.com and poke around.

Don’t blame me, if you end up ordering more than one thing, though. These guys have some pretty good deals on electronics and computer supplies.

The easiest way to switch the default application that handles the “View | Source” process in Internet Explorer is, in my opinion, using View Source Editor from Iconico Software.

The software is free. It’s amazingly simple. They don’t pay me a commission for plugging their product. No adware. No spyware. And have I mentioned already that it is simple and fast?

View Source Editor Download Link

However, if you crave pain and that “do it yourself” feeling, you can also use the Windows Registry to change IE’s default handling of displaying the source code for web pages.

The blog editor at My Digital Life has a nice explanation of the process posted. Here’s a preview of what they have to say:

There are some things in life that I just take for granted. Having e-mail links (mailto) in Firefox open up Gmail was one of them, until I had to start all over with a new computer at work.

To associate Gmail quickly with mailto links in Firefox, open up Firefox and go to Tools | Options | Applications. Then scroll down until you see the row with the “mailto” content type, and select “Use Gmail” from the list of available options next to it.

Then click OK and get out of there.

If you’re interested in additional information about making Gmail your default e-mail client, please check out Robby Stein’s tips at the Official Gmail Blog.

Hope that helps.

Disclaimer: This is not an April Fools joke.

If you just can’t find a file that you know should exist somewhere on your Windows Server, and you’ve been reassured that you have administrator rights, take a quick look under the hood of the built-in Windows Search utility.

By default (it seems), the “Search hidden files and folders” option has been turned off in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

This is very annoying, especially when you go to the trouble of setting up all Windows directory options to show hidden & protected files (in Windows Explorer by way of Tools / Folder Options / View).

Nonetheless, there is no connection between those settings and the scope of the Search utility.

To illustrate the terrible side effects all of this can have: Recently, I made a complete fool of myself in front of Marketing and Corporate IT, because I couldn’t find another employee’s Dreamweaver cache file in that user’s profile. Then I started digging through the directory manually and eventually stumbled across the file (which, of course, was not in a documented location, since they are using the latest version of Dreamweaver CS4).

Surely, I thought, the Search utility should find it now. Wrong. Even searching through the file’s parent directory — knowing the file was there — came up empty. As tedious as it seemed at the time, I poked around with the Search utility, turned on that important setting, and suddenly the files started showing up in the search results.

And then I started writing apology e-mail messages to everyone.

Lately, I’ve been using the Windows utility Remote Desktop (RD) a lot to work on various servers. One annoying thing I’ve noticed, as I moved from one computer to another and did remote work from various locations, was that the resolution and a few other settings seemed to vary. However, there’s a fix for that.

Although it never occurred to me to mess with this, I clicked Options and found a wealth of configuration settings. Best of all, I could even make this thing remember my preferred settings, save those settings to my USB stick and enjoy the rest of my life.

So click Options and let’s take a look under the hood:

For each remote connection, you can enter your user name and password — and RD will remember it, as long as you a) check the “Save my password” box and b) save the custom connection settings as a .rdp file (Save As…).

The thing that was of most interest to me were the Display settings. Holy Batman, that’s where you set up the remoted desktop size and the color depth. I was beginning to think those settings were immovable.

Now how cool is that? Finally, I also customized the Local Resources settings and removed all check marks for the Disk drives, Printers and Serial ports. If you need any of those connections, by all means, leave them checked. In my case, this was an easy way to prevent “siletn” system errors from occurring on one of the servers (especially since it tried to connect to non-existing printers).

That wasn’t so bad, right? And as I said, if you save the .rdp file with your custom connection settings, you only need to do this once.

For more information:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457106.aspx

Keywords: Remote Desktop, RDA, configuration, settings, connection, screen resolution, display, color depth, printers, serial ports, disk drives

Sometimes you just need a good graphics badge or seal, right? And usually, it’s just a starting point for something you will finish in Photoshop or Illustrator anyway, so you need it for free.

Obviously, when you generate a graphic, it’s up to you to import them into Photoshop or Illustrator and use them as templates or elements of a collage. Or, if you’re totally gung-ho, you could transfer your customized seals and badges to iron-on paper and create your own T-shirts.

Head on over to the WORDPLAY blog, where you can find good summaries of what the Official Badge Generator and the Official Seal Generator at says-it.com (where you can also find the famous Church Sign Generator, the Concert Ticket Generator and the Soft Drink Generator that lets you design graphics of soft drink cans).

Badges: Currently, you can choose from six (6) different badge designs. Once you’ve selected a badge design, you can then customize the text that shows up on the badge, fine-tune the colors and adjust the overall size of the badge.

Seals: Currently, they have 10 different seal shapes to choose from — and since I hate to end a sentence with a preposition, let me just point out that the customization settings for seals also include emblem choices and broder settings.

One word of warning: Once you start playing around with those graphics generators, it’s hard to stop. So if you end up spending an hour or more generating badges and seals for office pranks and humorous fake IDs, don’t blame me.

You know, for years I’ve been hearing jokes about the <blink> tag in deprecated HTML code by inexpoerienced web designers, and somehow, I though to myself, “Surely, nobody is actually still using BLINKING text anymore in today’s web development.”

Then I read through pages of PayPal developer documentation for a recent project and found this beauty:

Hey, I’m not saying it’s really, really bad, but I was a bit surprised. Perhaps it is an internal issue at PayPal, and perhaps they’ve been getting a lot of support calls about finding the link for the PDF version of the Order Management Integration Guide. Then I thought, “Aren’t there better ways of addressing such issues?”

Then I took a quick look at the source code:

Because I, too, do silly things if I don’t get enough sleep, I am not going to make any snide remarks about the web design practices of others. They have their own reasons for doing what they’re doing, right?

Still, after a while, the blinking “PDF” text really started to annoy me. Why? Because I’ve been told over and over again that it’s bad practice and poor usability to use BLINK? Or because it’s simply . . . annoying? I don’t have a good answer, but I know I won’t be using the BLINK property in any of my web work if I can somehow help it.

If you’re so smart, what would you have done? Good point. How about nice little icons? One for the PDF link, and another one for the forum? After all, the idea is to catch someone’s attention, right? Perhaps something along these lines:

Of course, I am not saying that my quick-and-dirty idea is better than what the developers at PayPal did, but it’s different. In the end, as I said, we all have our own reasons for doing what we do — and the way in which we do it.

jQuery 1.3.1 has been released about 11 hours ago, and it has resolved all of the previously encountered 1.3 issues (see my previous entry).

Having installed and tested this latest release, I’m happy to say that all of the IE7 JavaScript issues my clients were reporting a few days ago have gone away. Apparently, there was a problem when end users accessed web sites that had their domains forwarded & masked. Since doing so will basically place the web sites into an HTML frame environment, a portion of jQuery, specifically dealing with frames, was encountering problems.

At any rate, all is well, the clients are happy, and I want to thank John Resig and the jQuery team for all of their hard work.

Editor’s Note: Corrections added (Jan. 21, 2009 / 2:00 p.m. MST).

jQuery 1.3 will throw several errors in Internet Explorer 7 if you are:

1) forwarding a web site and

2) masking the URL.

The jQuery team has acknowledged several bugs and stated on their web site that an updated version (1.3.1) will be released some time this week. As of this morning (January 21, 2009), no updates have been made available yet.

Just in case you’re Google-ing this issue — and you can’t find much, and you think you’’re going crazy — the following JavaScript errors has have occurred on one of my client’s web sites.

1. Access is denied

In the debugger, the following jQuery 1.3 syntax is highlighted:

Here’s the text:

if(document.documentElement.doScroll&&!l.frameElement)

Summary: This is obviously not a big deal, as long as you don’t have picky clients. And as long as your clients don’t forward and mask existing web sites to different domain names.

Solution: For the time being, revert to jQuery 1.2.6 and wait for the jQuery 1.3.1 release.

The following error disappeared after I had stripped the page down to its bare minimum and disabled various IE7 add-ons.

It seems that this particular started disappearing when I disabled the add-ons from GrabNet (which, I believe, are a result of installing the free Orbit file download utility).

Let me make this clear: Although there seems to be a conflict with jQuery 1.3, this particular error went away after I disabled the GrabNet add-ons. However, for reference purposes, I’m leaving the error description in this article. Thanks to John Resig (!) for helping me figure this out.

‘n.props’ is null or not an object

And the debugger highlights the following jQuery 1.3 syntax:

And here is the text:

F=G&&n.props[F]||F;