Combo Box Fails to Load in Parent Movie

Written by on February 28, 2006 in FlashMX - 10 Comments

So I am here struggling for hours (at least it looked like it was hours!) trying to figure out why my combo box wasnt working.

The Basic scenario is that I created a CB in a child movie for later being loaded to a parent movie.

->Parent
-->Child < -with Combo Box

Well, when you load the Child movie into the Parent movie you expect it to work whitout a problem right?... WRONG! some kind of bug or problem or whatever for some reason the Combo Box wont work, why? who knows.

Doing a light search I found out that in order for the Combo box to work on the Parent Movie you need to have a copy of the Combo Box component in the Parent movie even though you are not going to use it directly within the parent.

That's a lie! you might think (or at least that is what I thought) but in reallity it works.. now this is my set up:

-> Parent < -copy of Combo Box Component not being used
--> Child < with Combo Box used

Weird.. but it works, just in case someone is looking for the answer :)

Getting Rusty – Worst Nightmare!

Written by on February 27, 2006 in Just'cuz - No Comments

I have been working with PHP/mySQL development for the past few weeks and I haven't been asked to work on Flash ActionScript Development for a while. During the week I started to develop a simple Drop down menu. Just like any other time I sketched the drop down and wrote down how I wanted the drop down to behave.

All of the sudden I went blank when I started to write the functions and passing variables all over the movie. Not only that but I started to sweat when I realized that the scripting had to be done in AS1 instead of AS2. No that it is more difficult or anything but for some reason I just panicked.

Luckily all my memories came back soon but I was amazed at how easily you can panic when you can't remember something. I don't know if this has happened to any of you but if it has my most sincere sympathy :)

Google in a 1859 Book

Written by on February 23, 2006 in miscelaneous - No Comments

So.. Google is quoted in a book from 1859... maybe now we know where they got the idea of name from ;)

Google Quote

Bibliographic information

Title:                      Fisher's River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters
Author                  Hardin E. Taliaferro
Publisher               Harper
Publication Date     1859
Pages                    269

Some one commented that the head hits between Google and Apple start since the year that book was written, not that I know of any problems between Google and Apple, but its interesting to find that those two words are found in the same page.

Email me back…

Written by on February 23, 2006 in Productivity - No Comments

I am sure many of use give just a very small thought of how to use email properly to people. It can be from just replying to an email at our jobs or just by sending an informal email to any of our friends.

If you are like me who writes an average or 30 - 50 emails a day, you might have asked yourself How can I make my email communication better and how can I allow others to understand what I am trying to say with fewer words.

We can get all technical and cover all the aspects starting from saving bandwidth by structuring our emails better to also covering the benefits of CPU Processing, but that is just beyond the scope of simply writing an email better.

So yesterday in fact I was asking Felix Miata about what software he uses for email. He was kind enough to write extensive emails explaining the benefits of the email software he uses along with they way he writes email. Also he shared with me 2 very valuable links which I invite you to read so you can understand better the importance of writing emails in a better way.

Memo that covers the Netiquette Guidelines.
Netiquette Intel Corp. October 1995

Covering Bottom-Posting and Top-Posting from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom-posting

I dont want to change the way you use your email, I am pretty sure that many of use have been using email for years and we use it many times a day, so changing the way we do and see things might be too difficult to adjust. I just want to encourage you to take a little while and read the links above and discover the benefits and maybe there are some things that you can use in your daily life that can make our Internet a better place.

The TRUTH about PHP/mySQL security Part I

Written by on February 23, 2006 in PHP - 1 Comment

So I finished a small application that I am using only on my computer to avoid any problems on the net in regards to security (name it hackers/crackers/enthusiast/whichever).

Since there is no easy way to ask a question like What is the best way to create a secure applicationI decided to send the question out there and ask to what everyone thinks or believes is a secure way to create their applications.

I have been working with PHP/mySQL as user not much as developer for the past years but now trying to learn more about the developer side, I have hit a wall once I have faced Security.

For a while I was certain that putting my sql connection in a PHP file it was ok, this believe was even stronger while using different applications out there that place their connections logarithms inside folders named as simple as connections, and if we want to examine this theory further if you create a Database Connection in Dreamweaver the application itself will create a folder titled Connections and inside that folder it will write the scripts necessary to connect to your DataBase.

With all this in mind I ran into a basic tutorial that highlighted the importance of having your connections secure and one recommendation was to place your connections script (or PHP file) under a password protected directory. This would be an overkill IMHO and not only that but securing a password with another password?

To Be Continued....

Screenweaver New layout

Written by on February 2, 2006 in News - No Comments

Finally we got the new look for Screenweaver.org.

Screenweaver.org Screenshot

We are still working on tweaking the layout a little bit, but so far so good.