radiac.net

May this year bring you much happiness and success!

I'm a day late on this one, but here's a proper entry seeing out last year, which had many incredibly good things and many incredibly bad things, and seeing in the new year, which brings with it many challenges and blah blah blah. How about I skip all that and get down to what really matters; my predictions. Last year I predicted many things, and got them all bang on, so this year I'm going to do the same again and see just how well I can do.

• Scientists will invent a small space ship with impulse and warp drives, and give one to me.
• Microsoft will declare bankrupcy, Bush will reveal himself to be the anti-christ, and the Lib Dems will lose yet another general election.
• I'll go on some holidays, mostly involving climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, serving as a mercenary in the Congo, line-dancing, running away to join the circus, going round the world in 80 days and spending the rest of the year with the pygmies, where I will finish USML and the websites that depend on it

I saw the new year in at my local pub with some friends, and since then have been very successfully working through my short-term to-do list... 18 down, 15 to go!

I have created an account on mp3search.ru, apparently legal, but could just be a front for the Russian Mafia. It would be an alternative explanation as to why it hasn't been shut down, due to the authorities being afraid. And as various government authorities are keen to tell us, the mafia funds prostitution and drug smuggling and dvd counterfeiting and terrorism and other evil things. So I may have just contributed to their funds. However, I prefer to believe what I read, so I've actually just bought 330 songs for $30. Whatever.

This shouldn't be funny, since it's quite sad, but read the first paragraph of this and note who wrote it, then read this... Maybe my sense of humour is just a bit messed up. Hey! What's worse than finding a maggot in your apple? Mmmaybe not. Well, not here...

Here are a couple of distractions for you: a game and these two monsters are actually the same size.

These paragraphs have been brought to you as a result of talking to Andrew. Thanks :)

So, today I woke up with the aim of getting down to some work. I've been holding off as long as possible in the hope that someone I'm working with would send me his work before I start so I can make sure we're going in the same direction, but with the deadline looming (less than 3 months away now), I thought it was probably time to just get started.

So, up at 8.10, scared Laura by waving at her, had a shower, had breakfast, greeted the gas man and pointed him at the central heating that had gone wrong again, and upstairs I went to the computer to begin work.

Having completed the extensive planning stage over Christmas (2 sheets of A4), I opened up Flash and got started writing my ActionScript library. Testing my movie, it didn't work.

Strange, I thought. I am a coding god, things I write do not have errors.

I created several test movies to try to figure out what was happening, and eventually tracked it down to... saving. Well, publishing to be precise - when I published a movie (to test or eventually to finish), the result would be mangled beyond the SWF player's recognition and it would show me a pretty white box. Of course, it worked fine on my local machine, it was only when I tried to publish onto my file server via Samba that it caused a problem. So, I had cut it down to a problem with Macromedia Flash 2002 (version 6) and Debian stable's version of Samba, version 2.2.3a.

The next step, as usual, was Google. Google will save me, right?

You know you're in trouble when your Google search about a problem concerning a Windows program and a Linux daemon comes up with 64 results, and number 21 is a RISC OS products directory...

I found many e-mails to various mailing lists and newsgroups from people in a similar situation as me, but all of their problems were unresolved. Someone said that it worked when you unticked the 'compress movie' option in publishing settings, but that's not a real solution. Eventually (3 hours later) I found the most relevent sentence of the morning in the middle of a post in Google Groups - "Macromedia Flash 2002 does not work with Samba 2.2.3a". Helpful.

In a last-ditch attempt to solve my problem, I hit backports for a newer version of Samba, and upgraded to 3.0.10, and now as quickly as the problem arose, it has gone. I can now publish my files with reckless abandon and they all run as smoothly as a poor analogy slides on its knees through the corridors of time.

I still have not found out why it did not work, and I doubt I ever will. For now, I will settle with the restored feeling of Flashy goodness flowing through my veins and return to my work, leaving you, the humble internet, with a record of my latest journey through the land of problem obscurity, in the hope that my adventure can eventually help someone else in a similar position. Come on, Google, re-index my page.

So much work. Woke up this morning at 9.30 to many many e-mails from one person wanting updates done to the website, had a phone call later from another person wanting things fixed and added to something I did for them, so I have spent all day fixing/updating/whatever their stuff, and I still haven't got on to the Flash to catch up on what I missed yesterday because of what I missed the day before because of the samba thing. So now I have lost an entire day from the Flash project, and although I would say I'd do it tomorrow, I have a feeling something's going to keep cropping up. Just not enough hours in the day. Partly why I'm doing 18 hour days and working for most of that.

The other part of the reason I haven't been to bed before 3.30 recently is that I've decided I'm going to allow myself half an hour or so on a personal project at the end of every day's work, and I've got a new website that's taking shape quite nicely - yay! More soon...

(Yes, yes, I know the phantom menace was episode 1, but this is my second annoying obscure Flash bug of the week, and 'Attack of the Ghosting Caret Clones' didnt have quite the same ring to it)

Well, I've just wasted THREE HOURS trying to work around a stupid stupid bug in Macromedia Flash MX Version 6. The problem was that when I used the Selection.setFocus() method, a static non-functioning caret (a ghost caret, if you like) would appear in every TextField that I had, because they were stored in a MovieClip for ease of use. Not a big thing, you may think, but this is a pretty key component to my next 4 months work, so I kinda want to get it right, and ugly vertical lines all over my text fields didn't look very good. Think I've dropped enough keywords for google?

After three hours of trawling through google and google groups with various combinations of keywords, I came across one single post from 2002 in google groups (my new favourite place in the whole wide world) which said:

I've recently had exactly the same problem.

Awesome.

To fix it, I changed all of my TextField types from 'input' to 'dynamic'. That means you cannot type in them, so they cannot have the cursor any more. Cunning. However, they can have the focus, so when they get the focus, change them to an input so you can type. When they lose the focus, change it back to dynamic. If you've stumbled across this page trying to fix the same problem as me, I've recently had exactly the same problem. You may find the following code helpful:

myTextFieldName.onKillFocus = function() {
    this.type = "dynamic";
}
myTextFieldName.onSetFocus = function() {
    this.type = "input";
}

Now leave me a comment saying you found it useful! Have a nice day :)

Last week was mostly spent working, most days from approximately 9 or 10am to 3 or 4am. Monday I fixed the samba problem with my server and then worked, Tuesday I worked, Wednesday I worked on something different, Thursday I worked, and Friday I worked and then helped celebrate Peter's birthday by visiting the pub and then going to the cinema to watch Team America: World Police. Damn I love that film. Then on Saturday I did some work, Leela came over and helped me eat some chocolate cake, and on Sunday I bought a stapler and some white stickers, and did some more work on my other website. Yesterday was a bit of a waste really - I planned to swap my servers over and move the hard drives from one to the other too; instead of a morning it managed to take all day, and it turns out the 250gb hard drive is actually totally broken. Hurrah. I then decided to play counterstrike: source for the first time in about a month, but steam couldn't connect to the cs servers because I'd managed to choose the very day they released a big upgrade. So I gave up and watched some TV instead. But now, and for the rest of today, back to the work.

When does 1 - 1 not equal 0? When you're writing ActionScript.

Well, not quite. But in the world according to Macromedia, one value of 0.0078125 is different to another value of 0.0078125. What's that I hear, but they're both the same number, easy to represent in binary (1/2/2/2/2/2/2/2), so their value should be 0.0078125? Well, yes, I would agree, but after a while looking at my algorithms to figure out what I was doing wrong, I have actually discovered that Flash does not agree with us. And I quote from my debug output window:

     val1=0.0078125
     val2=0.0078125
val1-val2=8.67361737988404e-19

Bloody toy language.

How a company can manage to get software as buggy and crap as Flash to become the de facto standard for interactive web-bloat, I don't know. Must have been taking tips from Microsoft...

Oh how I hate ActionScript. I was fed up with it not having hashes, so I wrote my own hash algorithm. It's called like this:

#include "hash.as"
myHash = new Hash();
myHash.set("this key", "some value");
myHash.set("that key", randomObject);
thisText = myHash.get("that key");

Yes, I am lame. I even automatically generated documentation using my automatic documentation generator, and I have added a new section called flash, where my various exciting outings with flash will go. Please let it end here.

Well, since my last entry I have gone home for several meetings with people, and redesigned the tonbschl site again. Hurrah! Last week I also went for two all-you-can-eat meals in one day - accidentally, of course. Pizza hut for lunch, followed by F:east for tea. F:east have all you can eat puddings! Result. And then on Saturday I went to Ask with Leela which was great, they do fantastic pizzas.

In between eating and working, I have finished my new site, Yay.org.uk - let me know what you think! But only if what you think is good, otherwise Yay is not for you!