By sexy I mean good-looking but I knew using the words “free”, “sexy”, and “photo” in a post title would be worth at least 50 Google bonus points, so I couldn’t pass it up. Here’s the premise of my post:
1) I have my own web server (which supports PHP).
2) I’m too cheap to purchase good photo gallery software.
3) I’m too cheap to pay for photo-hosting services like Google Picasa or Flickr.
4) I want my photo gallery to be sexy (smooth, clean, silently loads upcoming photos, doesn’t have to load a new page for each photo, etc.).
5) I want my photo gallery to be able to support categories/events.
6) I want to be able to host hundreds of photos.
5) I want my photo gallery to be as hassle-free as possible.
So, after looking at my options, I found they were much more limited than I had hoped. Don’t get me wrong–there were a lot of options, just not a lot of good ones. In the end, I found a solution that seems to appease me for the time being. Here’s the end result for all you instant-satisfaction-seekers: http://hardyhacienda.com/photos/
…I want more!
Tags: free, gallery, photos
Posted in PHP | 2 Comments »
In Flex, we sometimes need to find the component nearest to the mouse cursor. The following example will show you how to do so. Here are the basic steps:
- We will set up an event listener to watch for mouse movements.
- On every mouse movement, we will loop through all the application’s children, evaluating each one.
- We retrieve the bounding rectangle for the component we are currently evaluating.
- If the cursor is to the left or right of the component, we find the distance between the x position of the cursor and the x position of the nearest vertical side of the bounding rectangle. If it’s not to the left or the right, the horizontal distance is zero.
- If the cursor is above or below the component, we find the distance between the y position of the cursor and the y position of the nearest horizontal side of the bounding rectangle. If it’s not to the top or the left, the vertical distance is zero.
- We use the Pythagorean theorem to find the actual distance between the cursor and the component using the two distances previously determined.
- If it is a shorter distance to the component we are evaluating than the distance to any of the components previously evaluated, we’ll make note of it.
- Finally, we report the closest component found.
…I want more!
Tags: closest, distance, Flex, measure
Posted in Flex | 1 Comment »
Unless you’ve lived under a rock over the last year, you’ve heard our economy is in a heap of trouble mainly due to mortgages our country’s homebuyers can’t pay for. And if you actually have lived under a rock, I salute you for not being part of the problem.
So who’s to blame? Oh, there’s plenty to go around alright. Jimmy Carter? Ronald Reagan? Bill Clinton? George Bush? Franklin Raines? Jamie Gorelick? Chris Dodd? Barney Frank? Phil Graham? The plethora of banks? Wall street? Predatory lendors?
Let me share a reader’s comment I found online while reading Bankruptcy, not Bailout, is the Right Answer that I believe encompasses the mindset of many American citizens:
…I want more!
Tags: bailout, bankruptcy, Community Reinvestment Act, foreclosure, mortgage, Politics, responsibility
Posted in Life in General, Politics | 3 Comments »
Yesterday I took the Adobe Flex Certification exam. I did pretty well and passed, so I thought I’d share the resources I used to study:
http://partners.adobe.com/public/en/ace/ACE_Exam_Guide_Flex2.pdf
This will give you a brief intro to the exam, a few ideas of where to start your studying, and a short sample of questions to get you into the testing rhythm. The questions on there are a fairly good representation of what you might find on the exam.
http://office.realeyesmedia.com/blogs/jun/samples/certification/Flex20Blueprint.htm
This does a good job of breaking down all the topics that might show up on the exam. It would be helpful to look through the various items and focus on your particular weaknesses.
…I want more!
Tags: certification, exam, Flex, study
Posted in Flex | 1 Comment »
Fellow citizens and countrymen, I feel like I’ve had bounteous opportunities to express my gratitude for your zeal for sharing, but never so much as now. Please, allow me.
Thank you. Thank you for ignoring evacuation notices so the coast guard can come rescue you at 100x the cost just a few days later. Thank you for living below sea level where hurricanes rip through several times in a decade. Thank you for coming back after each one, rebuilding, and pretending it won’t happen again in the next few years. I can’t express enough how I love paying for levies and FEMA trailers. We just don’t have enough open land in this great country of ours–what better way to make use of our scarcities than to create artificial ground!
Thank you for purchasing homes and cars that far exceed your income. Thank you for simultaneously opening multiple credit card accounts and filling them to the brim with the latest designer fashions. Thank you for racking up bills into the hundreds of dollars for your ten-year-old’s text messages. Thank you for participating in lotteries, gambling, and pyramid schemes. After all that, could you do me a favor and turn around and declare bankruptcy? I just love paying for this stuff! I can’t get enough of it!
…I want more!
Tags: bankruptcy, debt, education, health care, hurricanes, lobbyists, nuclear energy, social security, taxes
Posted in Life in General, Politics | 4 Comments »
If you’ve read my article on Action Message Format (AMF) you’ll already know that AMF is a super-duper way to transfer data between a Flex/Flash/AIR application and its server-side counterpart. Essentially when the client application makes a call to a service, the server can return a Java (or PHP, Python, .NET) object and when it gets back to the Flex application, wallah, its converted into an identical object in ActionScript. Similarly, if the client application sends an ActionScript object to the server during a service call, it arrives as an identical Java object.
While that’s impressive, when it comes to implementation in a medium-to-high complexity system there are questions that still need to be answered. In this article, I’d like to address where to translate custom AMF classes.
…I want more!
Tags: amf, class adapters, coupling, Flex
Posted in Flex, General Programming | 8 Comments »
There isn’t one. At least not for everyone. That’s the bottom line and hours of googling won’t change it. I’ll explain what I mean–but first, here’s a real intro:
…I want more!
Tags: cairngorm, Flex, framework, guasax, mate, model view controller, mvc, nimbus, puremvc
Posted in Flex | No Comments »
A couple weeks ago I was talking with some family about technological advancements and our predictions of what the future holds. I predicted in 20 years we would have wireless power. What does this mean? It means no cables and no outlets. Free from tangles, power strips, power converters, three-pronged plugs, and restrictive tethers. True wireless. As you might imagine, quite a few obstacles stand in the way of wireless power, number one being how to do it without the consequences of giving birth to kids with five legs and a nose growing out the elbow.
As it turns out, just a few days ago Intel showed off its new wireless power transfer gizmo:
…I want more!
Tags: cables, power, wireless
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
One of the great things about running a blog is the ability to share with random, distant strangers ideas that only a decade earlier would have been sequestered by a particular region or culture. Today, I’m officially declaring to the world one of the Utah’s greatest gifts to mankind: fry sauce. Utah’s mountains, fluffy snow, KFC, and rock climbing don’t hold a candle to the gift of fry sauce. Fry sauce is a brilliant, salmon-colored mixture of ketchup and mayonnaise, often creatively enhanced with BBQ sauce, garlic, chilies, and/or seasoning. Think I’m pulling your chain? Google frysauce and you’ll find hundreds of others who will never go back to plain ketchup for fry sousing. …I want more!
Tags: Arctic Circle, fries, fry sauce, Utah
Posted in Life in General | 2 Comments »
Like many of the readers that will probably come across this article, I too was intrigued by the notion of the free trades that Zecco offers. Can it be true? What am I sacrificing in exchange? Is the pain worth it? I did my fair share of research by sifting through numerous blog posts and found a wide variety of opinions and experiences. I have now had over three months of the Zecco experience with two different trading accounts and am ready to add my story to the pile.
Having read about many difficulties opening Zecco accounts, I made sure I gave myself plenty of time to open my Roth IRA account at Zecco in order to fund it for the 2007 tax year by April 15. Here’s my journey of running the Zecco Gauntlet. …I want more!
Tags: free trades, Investing, stocks, Zecco
Posted in Investing | 3 Comments »
