Penguinspeak

Now this is seriously cool.

The developer Levi Cook has taken the domain lvh.me (short for: local virtual host me), that resolves to the localhost IP address 127.0.0.1 and supports wildcards (accommodating dynamically created subdomains). No network configuration needed!

Especially useful when developing an application with dynamically created subdomains. I found out about this from http://github.com/fortuity/rails3-subdomain-devise/

In Flex 4, if you are creating an itemRenderer for a Gumbo component, you have a couple options.

The easiest way is to simply create a subclass of spark.components.supportClasses.ItemRenderer

Your other option is to subclass some other display object, have it implement spark.components.IItemRenderer, and have the host component implement the IItemRendererOwner interface.

In Flex 3 there was a TileList component, mx:TileList. The Flex 4 version of this component would look like this:

Wow, I spent 2 days trying to figure out why after upgrading a server to Fedora 11, the system wouldn’t boot. It would either throw a system boot failure error or hang at the ‘Verifying DMI Pool Data’ line. This was only when I plugged in a third drive — it didn’t matter which one. And in the BIOS boot order the only thing listed would be ‘Bootable Add-In Cards’, and not my drives. Turns out it really matters the order in which you plug in drives with the ATA cable! I’m still not totally clear on in, but once I saw this image I switched the cable around and it worked!

I have a Linux server with Fedora that I use mainly to host storage drives. It has one boot drive, and 4 storage drives, the fourth of which is connected through a Promise Sata 200 Tx2 Plus controller.
All was great for a year or more, til I started getting a hang on boot at “Verifying DMI Pool Data”. This only happened when I plugged in a drive through the Sata Controller. I saw lots of threads with various (complex) possible solutions, but my fix luckily turned out to be simple enough, just took a lot of time to figure out.
In BIOS settings, under ‘Advanced BIOS Features’, ‘Hard Disk Boot Priority’, ‘Bootable Add-in Cards’ had made it’s way to the top, so it was trying to boot off that 4th non-bootable data drive. As soon as I moved that down below my bootable drive, everything was peachy.
Yay, finally!

Just add this into your AIR app, and run it:

< mx:Label text="Installed AIR Version:
{NativeApplication.nativeApplication.runtimeVersion}"
fontWeight="bold" />

After ages of neglecting to figure out how to resolve the issue, I can now post to this blog again. At some point I could no longer create the body of a post, and blog entries are usually pretty lame if nothing but a Title.
Sounds like the most common fix is to verify you go to the same url as you have in the configuration, specifically paying attention to whether or not you have ‘www’ included.
More here: http://forums.movabletype.org/2009/05/authors-cant-create-entries.html
That didn’t work for me, but now that there’s a new version of Movable Type, I have upgraded to 4.261, and I’m back in business!

Some things seem so straight-forward once you figure them out, but sometimes it takes some experimenting to find the working solution. One thing I got stumped on for a bit recently was trying to set an itemRenderer in Actionscript. So I thought I’d share this one-liner — you just have to cast it as a ClassFactory:

listObj.itemRenderer = new ClassFactory( com.martine.components.myItemRenderer );

I’m currently creating an app where I make a TileList scroll when the cursor is over it and far enough to either side. I found that if the cursor is left in place while the TileList moved underneath it, the itemRollOver event wasn’t getting fired so the rollover highlighting of the TileList items wasn’t working. It only works if the cursor itself is moving.
Alex Harui pointed me in the direction of faking an event. It took me a little while to figure out exactly which event on which object to have trigger it (i.e. I kept trying it on the itemRenderer itself.) In the end, the solution was simple.
On the TileList I jsut captured mouseOver:
mouseOver=”{itemRolledOver(event)}”
Then created this method:

private function itemRolledOver(event : MouseEvent) : void
{
var mouseOverEvent:MouseEvent = new MouseEvent(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, true, false, event.localX, event.localY);
event.target.dispatchEvent(mouseOverEvent);
}

… and voila! My rollover highlighting was back!

I hope y’all are all enjoying your Betas 3′s! AIR and Flex have come a long way this year and it’s so exciting to see what everyone’s building both internally at Adobe and out there in the “real world”. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback along the way too. I just got to play with Brio ( http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/brio/ ) for the first time, and it seems super cool and we’re constantly seeing new sites pop up out there that blow us away. Keep it up!
With the Flex framework being open-sourced and now BlazeDS remoting and messaging being out in Beta and open-source I really can’t wait to see what people do.
It’s been ‘scenario’ time lately for some of us on the Flex team where we build applications with Flex and see how the experience is, what we’ve done well and what we can do better. It’s a really fun time! Now back to coding…