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Mar 14 2009

Drupal | Programming | Tips

2 invaluable Drupal development tips: list all available variables and backtrace a page

The Drupal Devel module includes some invaluable functions that make working with Drupal much much easier. A short list of these functions can be found at this post. One of these is the dpm() command (which I would guess stands for “Drupal Print Message,” or at least that’s how I remember it). Given an array [...]

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Dec 05 2008

AS3 | Flex | Programming | Tips

Cairngorm versus PureMVC, the most basic example application!

Awhile back when I was learning to use the Cairngorm framework, Nicolas Lierman had a very basic example of a Cairngorm application. At the time I was trying to slog through the Cairngorm Store example, racking my brains trying to figure out what was going on. I didn’t need such a complex example to start [...]

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Oct 08 2008

AS3 | Data Structures | News

Coraldata merged into BirdEye

Thanks to the interest of Jason Bellone at the United Nations, Centre for Advanced Visual Analytics, I am happy to announce that my data structure library, coraldata, has a new home in the BirdEye Information Visualization and Visual Analytics Library. It may take a little time to get all the classes up there, but it [...]

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Sep 04 2008

AS2 | Programming

Recursively convert XML into multidimensional array (AS2)

This is a code snippet I wrote awhile back that recursively works through an XML file and converts it from XML into a multidimensional array. This was from the days before E4X was a part of ActionScript, and as such this is an ActionScript 2.0 example, so it may not be as useful as it [...]

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Jun 30 2008

AS3 | Flex | Programming

Scaling a DisplayObject to fit to a container’s dimensions

I’ve often run into the problem of proportionally scaling an image (or other DisplayObject) to the dimensions of its parent container. I always end up having to scavenge around in my code bank for the line of code to do this—which really is a simple bit of code—but I prefer to copy-and-paste it than rewrite [...]

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Jun 04 2008

AS3 | Data Structures | Programming

Spring <br /> 2008 Presentation

This past Tuesday I spoke about Data Structures at the 2008 Spring <br /> Conference in Baker Center, at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Since I was involved in organizing the conference this year, it was a pleasure to have the big day finally arrive. I enjoyed some technical wizardry by Samuel Agesilas Pastel, a [...]

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May 24 2008

AS3 | Programming

Setting private property values of a cloned ActionScript 3 object

Sometimes when cloning an object it is desirable to set a private or read-only property on the clone. Since these properties aren’t writable from outside the class itself, how can their values be changed? Drawing from the ideas of Grant Skinner’s post on Singletons the same internal class technique can be used to set properties [...]

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May 07 2008

AS3 | Flex | Programming

Encapsulating interactive behavior in Flex applications for better code readability

Consider for a moment dragging an element within an application. The steps required for this operation are as follows: Behavior Description Event to listen for START DRAGGING… When the mouse button is pressed down over the element. MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN DRAG… While the mouse is moving and the mouse button is pressed down over the element. MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE [...]

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May 01 2008

Programming

Efficient storage and retrieval of boolean values using bitwise operations

Since each digit in a binary number is only composed of one of two possible values, 0 or 1, a binary number can be thought of as a series of switches. Each of these switches can be thought of as a TRUE or FALSE value if it is 1 or 0. So a binary number [...]

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May 01 2008

Math

Formatting decimal as binary

While most of the time you will see numbers in the decimal number system (using the digits 0 through 9), internally within your computer these numbers will be represented in binary. In the binary numeral system each number can only be composed of a sequence of two values: 0 or 1, ON or OFF, TRUE or [...]

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