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AIR Badge plugins for WordPress take away all the hard work!

This is soooo cool.

Creating an AIR badge for an Adobe AIR application is a bit of a hassle, but the following 2 WordPress plugins really do take all the work out of it. Any post where you want to add an Air badge, you’re done in 3 minutes.

You’ll need either one of the following plugins:

– The Original plugin, made by Peter Elst, which is easy to use
– The Updated plugin with built-in click tracking (requires a bit more work)

I decided to use the original plugin, and you need to do just 3 things to use it.

  1. install the plugin (in your admin menu, just go to the plugin section and use the “search plugins” button to search for “air badge”
  2. upload your .air file to the server (if you want to use the wordpress “Add Media” uploader, you might also need to install an additional plugin called “PJW mime-config” and add .air to the list.
  3. create your badge by writing the following magic words between the words ‘airbadge’ : application name, full URL to .air file, application version, image.jpg

You’re done ! Admire your work (and that of the guy who made it possible, Peter Elst)!

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Webfaction is my new hosting site

I’ve changed webhosting providers recently, moving to WebFaction because I have plans to develop some applications. The fact that on my original webhosting provider (which is very reliable) I only had 50 MEGABYTES where I now have 10 GIGABYTES for about 10 euros more (plus access to the Python scripting language, plus unlimited domains, plus emails, plus databases, etc) sorta clinched the deal for me.

The WebFaction control panel takes a little bit of time to get used to, but once you take your time to work with it a bit, you realize how flexible you can be in your setup. Domains are your basic dns domains. Each domain can have multiple websites (sub-websites). Each website can have multiple applications. Each application can be used in one or more websites.

Reminder to self : when installing wordpress on Webfaction, in order for it to send mail you need to install the “Configure SMTP” plugin, otherwise your notifications will not work.

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Senator Al Franken is going places

I’ve seen him two times on YouTube now, the first time responding to angry protesters, guiding them to dialog, and now the second time when he questioned an arbitration laywer about a case where a woman was gangraped in Iraq, and her contract stipulated that she could not go to court about it. He introduced and got approved an amendment so the government would no longer hire parties with those binding agreements.

Talking down protestors:

Questioning the arbitration lawyer

A man worth watching. I wouldn’t be surprised if this man, a former comedian with a great sense for timing and apparently a great sense of justice, is going (upward) places.

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Adobe Max 2009 Video Sessions

Adobe Max 2009 video sessions can be found here.

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Migration troubles (are over)

I just migrated to a new web host ( Webfaction )  and it took some time and a support ticket over troubles with https settings, but all seems fine now ! Sorry if you got a blank page or other error message during the transition this weekend…

Just noticed that I lost my Akismet SPAM count though, which I find a bit sad. I think the last count was 24 000 or so spam messages blocked, which I am actually quite proud of (although the good work is all done by Akismet of course) !

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Blog News Programming

flex error 1180: Call to a possibly undefined method SortField.

Here I was, following a very nice tutorial showing you how to use an XMLListCollection with a nice example with source view enabled (thank you Bruce Phillips, btw!) when suddenly flexbuilder starts to complain about error 1180 : Call to a possibly undefined method Sortfield.

Even when the sortfield function is right there in the same function !?

It turns out, after quite a bit of googling around finding not very much, that flexbuilder for once did *not* automagically write the import statement for the sortfield. It did so for the sort function, but not for the sortfield function. I don’t know if this only happened to me or if this is so all the time.

But here, the advantage of working with flexbuilder turned to a disadvantage – I expected it to add the import statement necessary for it all by itself; for once, it did not do it.

All I needed to do was to add the  import mx.collections.SortField; to get things working again. Still, I lost some programming time looking for a solution to this problem, so I’m blogging this in case you have a similar experience.

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Squid: oktapodi

You can find more information about this movie on it’s official website.

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What would Twitter sound in real life ?

This is how Twitter sounds in real life – proves all sorts of points about it…

Watch Real Life Twitterдивани and more funny videos on CollegeHumor
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Getting easy_install to run for Python 2.6

StackOverflow is a great new website for all kinds of programmers.

Flex, Python or any other language programmers can ask questions there and receive answers, or usually, find out their questions have already been asked before and the answers are already there.

Python 2.6 has just come out, and a very easy install tool (called, appropriately, easy_install) has not yet been ported to the windows version of Python 2.6.

StackOverflow has the question, and several answers !

Once easy_install is installed and has been added to your PATH, it’s a breeze to install additional site-packages to your python setup, like pyodbc or the cheetah templating engine or pyamf just by running the command ‘easy_install <programname>’ in a dos box where <programname> is the name of your program.

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Blog News Programming

Revoking a Flex 3 License Activation is not easy.

This is a bit of a weird story, which most people probably won’t have happened to them. Still for those out there in the same situation, this is what happened.

Previously I had bought the “Flex builder Standard edition”, which comes without graphic elements (bars, charts, pies, whatnot). In order to show the results of filtering in my flex program I found it didn’t do all I needed. So I purchased the Flex Builder Pro edition (the full build, not an upgrade).

When you register your products on the Adobe website, you can see on your adobe.com profile page that each flex builder product can be installed two times – typically used for installing once on Windows and once on Mac, so you can test your products on both environments. This suited me fine, as I have a windows XP laptop and an iMac.

Each time you install Flex builder, you can see in your profile page on Adobe.com that the license count for the registered product decrements by one. My standard edition was installed on both my Mac and my XP, so I had zero licenses left to install (which it showed on my Adobe profile page).

After buying the full Flex Builder, I no longer needed the Standard edition. So I wanted to uninstall and if possible sell the standard edition. So I searched for a deactivation routine inside of the Flex builder Standard edition. Most recent Adobe products like Photoshop and so on have online activation, but I did not find one, so I uninstalled my standard Flex Builder 3 completely, thinking that uninstalling would also revoke the used Flex license with the Adobe server. This does not appear to be the case, as the license count does not increase again.

Erasing the license key from your machine and replacing it with the full flex license also does nothing for the used-up licenses on adobe.com.

So in the end I asked for help at Adobe (Benelux). They too asked me if I could not start the deactivation routing, but admitted they did not have much training in supporting Flex builder. After some more mails and phone calls, the technicians could not help me further, and had no further information to give me, as Flex Builder is a server product, only used in big corporations ( I told them I had bought it in via the Adobe.be online shop as a retail customer, so it’s not only just for big corporations) . After inquiring internally, they told me the only support for Flex on the issue I was experiencing was in America, which I could try to call, but probably would not get in as I would need a support contract.

I reopened the by-now closed support case and wrote quite a lengthy mail explaining that I was not satisfied with the solution. An extremely helpful (dutch) lady has since then tried to help me and has herself contacted the Flex support guys.

It seems Flex is considered an enterprise product, so it is not supported by retail support people and you need an enterprise support contract.

However, the upshot of it seems to be that a normal uninstall should be sufficient. There should be no penalty or license deactivation apparently needed, you can reinstall the Standard edition elsewhere. However, I have not yet tried to sell my license, and probably will not for some time. I’m a bit scared of trying it, and not everybody around me is so deep into programming as I am…

All in all, I have mixed feelings about the support I’m getting for this issue. On the positive side, I was always courteously treated by the support people, and all of them were helpful (but in particular Helene was helpful above and beyond her duty, for which I thank her). On the negative side, it seems that Flex is not considered a retail product, although there are scores of people out there using it to create lots and lots of cool things with it in flex/flash.