• LAMP

  Linux, Apache, MySql and Php. No Windows please. Not because Windows sucks, but because Windows has no shell access. Cli’s for mysql and php are a plus.

• Shell access

  For me, there is no better way to work than through ssh and scp. Working through ftp is balls. Also required is easy-to-set-up shell access. Let me check a box on a control panel somewhere and wait at the most 10 minutes. Please do not make me enter my phone number, wait for a call, get a confirmation code from the call, enter the code somewhere in the control panel, and then wait 72 hours for my shell access to be “activated”.

• Source control

  Binaries. At least Subversion. Git would be ok too. Repo hosting is a plus.

• Vim

  The ultimate editor.

• Other binaries

  Curl and/or wget. Ant would be nice too. Xmllint and tidy.

Let's parse with E4X:

The first 3 examples work great. Even though there are no <animal> nodes, E4X still returns an XMLList. Even looking for more siblings under nodes that don't exist works great - it always returns an empty (but valid) XMLList. Always returning an XMLList makes it easy to work with because you can always for-each over the result.

What I don't understand is the 4th example. It fails because not every <person> node has an id attribute. But so what? If you look at the 2nd and 3rd examples, not every <people> node has an <animal> node. So why don't we get the same result - an empty XMLList?

Turns out that there is an easy solution/work-around, that Roger mentions in his tutorial:

A bit wtf, but at least it works like the other examples.

Yahoo! invasion

Is that a Yahoo! ad in a Youtube player? No. It's a Yahoo! logo in a Youtube player. How did it get there? Via Flash's secret javascript api!

Ok, so it's not really secret. More like old, surely deprecated, and forgotten. I've been working with flash for a good while now, and I had no idea this existed until my friend Robert Ames stumbled upon it.

What's cool (or not cool) about this api, is that it's part of the Flash plugin itself and has nothing to do with Actionscript. All you have to do to enable this api is... well... embed a swf. Try going to a youtube video page like this one, and then entering this in the address bar:

I want to play around with this a bit more... I wouldn't be surprised if some of these API methods bypassed some of the Flash Player's security restrictions.

Every directory in your project will have a .svn folder.

Fortunately, Eclipse provides a way to filter files in the Navigator, but a) it's rather hidden, and b) it's not obvious how to add filters. In the Navigator panel, hit the down arrow in the top right corner and select "Filters...".

Navigator panel options.

Here's the list of filters you get by default:

Default Filters

What? No "add filter" option? No "edit"? I guess you could use the ".*" filter, but that would hide every file or directory whose name starts with ".". That may or may not be acceptable, depending on the type of project or files your working with. What if you had a .htaccess file in your project?

Fortunately again, there is a mechanism for adding additional filters, but it's not obvious. It involves editing the plugins.xml file for the Flex Builder editor plugin. You can find this plugin in the eclipse plugins folder (located in same place as Flex Builder.app) in your Flex Builder install. It's called com.adobe.flexbuilder.standalone_3.0.194161, and it's located for me at:

So navigate there, and edit plugins.xml. You're looking for the extension node whose attribute point is "org.eclipse.ui.ide.resourceFilters". Under that node is where the default filters are defined. All you have to do is add another one and save the file:

Flex Builder editor plugin.xml, with svn filter added.

The remaining step is to restart Flex Builder, using the -clean option. Since the plugin.xml file is either cached or compiled in somewhere, using the -clean option tells the Eclipse executable to reload all plugins and configs. This requires use of the Terminal:

When Flex Builder launches, you should now see the filter you just added in the filters window. Thanks to Robert Ames for telling me how to launch Flex Builder with arguments.

New filter added.

Grouted! All the shower needs is some finished plumbing and little bit of caulk.

Vanity, medicine cabinet and lighting.

More pics on Flickr.

Great. So a sprite is tinted red when its clicked. But what happens when you have to tint that sprite at other times, like when the application loads? All the code that does the tinting is locked up inside the event handler - the problem there is that the event handler needs a MouseEvent to run.

A better, more reusable, and more modular approach would be:

You see? The event handler just notifies us that something needs to be tinted. The actual tinting happens elsewhere. Now, code that does work does not need anything other than a reference to a DisplayObject to run! Now, you can tint an object when the application loads. You can tint an object on a timer. Now, you can tint anything, at anytime! Now its testable and reusable! And, it's a very easy concept to master.

Get what you need from an event object, and get out.

When you write event handlers, think about what they are actually doing. What do you actually need from the event object? How would you test the event handler? Or better yet, how would you make the same thing that happens in the event handler, happen without the event?

So save yourself some headaches and searching, and put the following in your root .htaccess file:

Just make sure those files (error.html) actually exist.

I don't exactly know why this works, but it does. I also don't know who is to blame. Textpattern blames Apache configurations for not having valid error documents to serve (they also have the solution). Dreamhost blames overly aggressive rewrite conditions, but I don't know about that either. Seems to me the rewrite conditions are being used correctly. Sure, the requested uri needs authentication, but it exists on disk. Props to other folks too for other ideas, and the final solution.

All the security articles I've read recommend setting up basic authentication. I understand that the point is to have password protected access, but basic authentication is not secure. When your browser is challenged with the basic authorization protocol, the user name and password you enter is just base 64 encoded. If someone intercepted a request header on the way to your server after you've authenticated, there would be virtually no work at all involved in decoding your user name and password.

Alternatively, and just as easily, you can use digest authentication, which is considered to be much more secure than basic. It uses MD5 encryption, and other techniques to make the output nearly one way.

Consider the following exceprts from a .htaccess file:

Both should be fairly easy to setup with the Auth directives, and Apache ships with CLI tools for easily adding users and password files: htpasswd, and htdigest.