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Conditional logic in functions

jphillips — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:44:51 +0000

When defining a class method in ruby, you can put conditional logic around the function declaration. This allows you to define separate methods based on your environment.

Example:

if VERBOSE
def trace(message)
puts message
end
else
def trace(message)
print “.”
end
end

Ruby Library hpricot

jphillips — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:55:08 +0000

hpricot provides a nice dom traversal library for web scraping. When using hpricot to parse xml docs, I discovered that Hpricot automatically downcases xml nodes. XML files generated by Microsoft Excel generate nodes with capital letters.

example:

becomes:
doc:/workbook

kind of a small thing, that I’m documenting for myself.

mysql wordpress site url change

jphillips — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:10:01 +0000

Mysql statement for changing site url:

UPDATE {table_prefix}wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, ‘http://oldlocation’, ‘http://newlocation’) WHERE option_name = ‘home’ OR option_name = ’siteurl’;

Model.find_each

jphillips — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:59:36 +0000

If you’re recursively looping through all your active record models, using Model.find_each is more efficient than Model.all.each. This incrementally polls the database without requiring the entire result set to load into memory.

Injecting backup databases

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:39:54 +0000

Here’s a command for inserting .sql files into a new database

mysql -u root -p database_name < db.sql

Finding your adobe serial numbers

admin — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:22:05 +0000

I recently upgraded my computer to a macbook pro and realized that I didn’t record which of my company’s serial numbers I had used. I definitely didn’t want to duplicate our licenses forcing me to retrieve the serial number I had entered 6 months ago.

In Mac OSX, I found the serial number located in: Users > Shared > Adobe > ISO-19770 in a file called “Creative Suite 4 Design Standard-DesignSuiteStandard-CS4-Mac-GM-en_US.swtag”. The file wasn’t immediately recognized by any application but can be opened by any text editor. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the file, and you’ll see:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Voila….. your current serial number.

Switched up the blog theme

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 03:36:37 +0000

Figured I would switch up the theme of my site a little. Need to get my flickr, twitter and delicious feeds in here

Quick function for moving a sprite to the highest depth

admin — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:37:37 +0000

private function moveToHighestDepth(displayObject:*):void{
      var curParent = displayObject.parent;
      curParent.removeChild(displayObject);
      curParent.addChild(displayObject);
 }

Flash NetStream request headers

admin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:27:37 +0000

For the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with different ways of serving up flv’s through different servers (ie…. nginx with installed streaming module). However, we wanted to see how S3 would deal with our need for streaming video. S3 does not support the ability to change a get param into a request header for doing byte offsets. Why is this important?… typically, flvs served up by youtube and other services allow requests to pass in the start point of the stream. This allows a user to fast-forward past the download buffer to any section of a video. The servers are returning pieces of the video file.
I always wondered why this was such a big deal requiring specific modules to be compiled into nginx until I started playing around with http headers directly. So….. here’s the deal. S3 (a service of amazon), allows requesting byte offsets through HTTP Headers. This is great, but alas…. Adobe has let me down. HTTP Headers cannot be implemented through the NetStream Class even though the documentation says otherwise. The HTTP Headers supported by the netstream class are proprietary and only work with Flash Communication Server. This is completely ridiculous.
This also manifests in a couple other ways. You may have noticed that NetStream documentation shows an event attached to videos: NetStream.Play.Complete . I expected this event to be called when the video finished playing…. but nothing happened. After a little digging, it turns out that NetStream.Play.Complete is only available if you’re serving up videos from Flash Communication Server.
Flash video is one of the most frustrating things to deal with because of their closed source pos http request that’s clearly broken. Anywho… I feel like this is a pretty serious issue that needs to be fixed. Why can we use HTTP headers to request data, but not to request a stream? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Reset lost admin password in wordpress

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:46:34 +0000

Good quick tip on how to reset an admin password in wordpress.

http://www.corey-m.com/blog/?p=325