blog-j: Symbolizing, Coding, Objectifying, Processing

Sadly, I haven’t had quite the chance to dig into AS3 (and Flex2) that I had hoped. My one big-ish project went out the window (an FTP client), as I had almost no time to work on it (I got the basics going, connection, but not much beyond there). I have mucked about a bit, but…alas, such is life. We recently got a copy of the Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook in the office, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to bang out some subway time and do some reading to get up to speed.

And, I have to ask, did Actionscript 3.0 miss the boat?
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I’m not. I have nothing against dogs, but I’m not getting a dog.

Hear that, box people? No dogs for me.

This public service announcement has been brought to you by the Campaign to Not Get Jay A Dog. It was publicly funded and no government money was used in the its creation. No dogs were harmed in the production of this announcement.

Holy hamsters, Batman! This kid is unbelievable. He lost his eyes at age 2, and has mastered the art of echo-location to “see”. Daredevil, anyone?

Tip o’ the hat to Andre.

I think I’ve mentioned this extension before (got pointed to it by Chris, and have been using it happily since. Instead of trying to come up with a witty description of what it does, I’ll quote:

Once you have installed Aardvark as an extension (as opposed to running the demo), start it by right-clicking on the page and choosing “Start Aardvark” from the menu. The extension will run until you leave, refresh, or stop it by pressing “Q” for quit.

As you glide the mouse over the page, you will see a red rectangle framing each element under the cursor. You will also see a little yellow caption showing the HTML element type and its class or id if they exist.

Now, that comes in hugely handy when developing sites. Go figure. So you’ll imagine my dismay when I installed Firefox 2 last week and…whammo…no more Aardvark. Man. I’ve been on a mission since (ok, maybe not so much of a mission as a kind of get-frustrated-do-nothing-about-it). Decided I’d try again tonight, thought to rename the .xpi to .zip and see where I could get. Turns out I was on the right track. After “hacking” through the zip (and by hacking I mean looking at all the files and wondering which one I should edit to make the sucka work), I decided that maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am and that asking Google has usually helped me in the past and maybe now would be a good time to try that.

Deep breath.

Voila. Someone else seems to have been frustrated by this. And there is now an unofficial build of the Aarvark .xpi for you to install on your FF2 installation…

The Aardvark Firefox Extension
Getting Aardvark extension to install in Firefox 2
How To Update (Some) Firefox Extensions For Firefox 2.0 *

Happy Foxing.

* - And I just read through the comments there - apparently there’s a tool that force-activates all FF plugins, regardless of compatability. I suppose this will only help if you’ve upgraded your installation (as opposed to a fresh install of FF2), but anyway…check it out @ users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/nightly

I just ran into (what I believe to be) a bug in Dreamweaver 8(.02). I was working on some CSS skinning a Community Server install, and wanted to find all the “color:” attributes in a bunch of .css files. Tried a couple different searches to try and trim my results down (didn’t want ‘background-color:’, for example), and finally settled on a little regex (that could probably be written better, but who cares…): “\s(color:)” [sans quotes, of course].

Well, my search worked perfectly, but when clicking on any of the results in the results pane, I got a message box popping up telling me that:

This search result cannot be displayed because this portion of the document has changed or been removed since the search was performed.

Now, I knew I hadn’t changed the file. Especially since (I believe) DW uses indexes to map the results to the position in the document, and those characters were definitely still there. Getting annoyed, now, of course. Search google, which yielded absolutely nothing (unsurprisingly, actually…searching for dreamweaver “search results” bug I don’t know what I was expecting…). So that left me tinkering.

And, as it happens, there’s a quick fix. There are 4 wee options when doing a find in DW: Match Case, Match Whole Word, Ignore Whitespace, and Use Regular Expression. I had checked off ‘Match Whole Word Only’ in one of my previous attempts at crafting my (simple) query. As I changed to use the regex, the option remained checked but disabled (it gets disabled as soon as you have non-apha characters in your search query - for example, searching for “it’s” will not allow you to match on a whole word only). It stays checked, though, which (I think) causes the issue: if ‘Match Whole Word’ is checked and your query contains non-alpha characters, you can’t click on a search result to jump to it in the document (you did know you could do that, right?).

Solution: clear your query, uncheck ‘Match Whole Word’, re-enter your query and run. Right as rain.

Pain in the ass, I tell you. Pain in the ass.

I’d throw in some images to really illustrate this, but I’m just too lazy to take screen grabs right now…

Wow. The .NET Framework 3.0 has RTM’ed. Woo! I caught a couple sessions dealing with 3.0 at VSLive, and, man, it smokes. There’s some really impressive shtuff in there. Can you say LINQ (Language INtegrated Query)?

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX), is the new managed code programming model for Windows. It combines the power of the .NET Framework 2.0 with new technologies for building applications that have visually compelling user experiences, seamless communication across technology boundaries, and the ability to support a wide range of business processes.

More info @ netfx3.com/blogs