Thank you Robot Chicken for taking yet another childhood memory and flushing it down the toilet.



Don't mess with Mr. Brown!

Labels: halloween, pumpkin, robot chicken

Twitter looks fun, I think, but AIR is awesome! Just downloaded the award winning SPAZ created by Ed Finkler and I'm looking forward to twittering a bit throughout the day. Give it a try, it will really show you how powerful AIR apps can be!

I've become interested in Twitter recently and I'd like to use Blogger to update my twitter feed simply when I publish a new blog post. The WordPress community has created a plugin for WordPress called Twitter Updater and it's exactly what I'm trying to do. I've been searching around and haven't found a similar plugin for Blogger. I'm wondering if there's one even out there yet. You'd figure there would be since Blogger and Twitter are both Google services. You'd expect them to play nicely together, but alas.

It's just one more issue that I've discovered with Blogger vs WordPress. It seems to me that Blogger has a lot of constraints, limited mostly by the fact that google hosts all the content on their servers in contrast to WordPress, which is really open for whatever you want to do because you're hosting the database on your server. Both have HUGE communities and honestly, both produce a similar high-quality product. I'm just at a crossroads as to which I should be using. I'm comfortable with Blogger now, but I'm seeing more and more useful features, features that I'd like to be using, for WordPress that are lacking in Blogger. Come on Google, get those Blogger boys in gear!

It's a dilemma for sure. To add confusion, I have the baby blog which is built on the Simple PHP Blog system, a text document based blog which is simple enough and does it's job well. So many choices out there, what to do...what to do?

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Speaking of Daft Punk!

So I'm helping a co-worker build an online form that requires a combo box of both U.S. states and the counties within those states. I figured I'd be able to find a database with this list somewhere or at the very least an XML or something useful. After 30 minutes of unsuccessful google'ing & wiki'ing I found an HTML site that had a list of the states and their counties.

So since I needed this data in a useful format and figured that it would be some information that I could use over and over again for other projects I made an XML file with all the data nicely formed so that everyone could use it for their online forms.

The data structure: (brackets removed because blogger won't display the list properly despite using a pre tag or textarea)

states updated="2003-02-04"
 state   
  name Washington /name 
  abv WA /abv 
  counties
    county King County /county
    county Pierce County /county
  /counties
 /state
/states

The XML includes all 50 U.S. States and all of their counties as of Feb04, 2003.
Please respect my bandwidth and download this file for your uses but don't link directly to it.
Happy Coding. w00t.

At work I've been tasked with creating a database driven blog with a Flash front end. While this may sound simple enough, it can get pretty complicated. I've done this twice already and each time the app gets better and better. My first version was built with the flash front end first. The Flash front end read in XML and displayed it in a creative way. To get the database integration I simply wrote a PHP script that queried the database and then echoed out formatted XML that was read into flash and displayed. Easy enough right? Only took me a few day to wrap my head around it. Flash->PHP->database->PHP/XML->Flash was the data flow. The tricky part was to build a blog creation tool. I used PHP/AJAX/MySQL for the back end in this case. The tricky part here was that since this blog was going to be displayed in a Flash front end I needed to build in a preview step that showed the author what it would look like once it was in Flash. This created all sorts of problems with moving data from PHP to Flash to XML and back and keeping it all current. I finally got it all working but it's pretty clunky and buggy.

Today I did this tutorial from Wouter Verweirder which does something similar with SWX and cakePHP. The great thing about this approach is all the PHP,SQL queries,XML formatting is all done for you. It took me a while to get everything up and running on my webserver (the tutorial is written to be built locally). With a little help from Wouter (awesome name btw) got it all set up. Now I can integrate my Flash WYSIWYG interface with these clean method calls to cakePHP and I get all my data in native Flash objects (thanks SWX). It's super easy. Once I get it all put together I'll put up a link so that everyone can see it. For now, just wanted to get the props out there for all the people in the PHP and Flash communities that are smarter than me and making my life easier. I hope I do you proud!

w00t on!

I attended Flashforward Boston 2007 this past September. PBJS sent me which was awesome. I met some very cool people and saw some very nice flash work. My primary focus in attending was to get up to speed fairly quickly with ActionScript 3.0 and start developing with it. Problem is, PBJS doesn't have Flash CS3 for me to use yet. I've got the trial downloaded and installed, but I don't want to activate it before I know we'll be moving to CS3 soon. Kinda sucks!

I wrote up a little Summary of my experiences at the conference. I'm still working on adding in the AS3 and OOP portions of the summary, I'll get those up soon. For now there is lots of information about Flash Video and general Design Stuff.

ALSO, if you're interesting in general design related topics, Anthony Rotolo, has a new podcast Design Guy. I met Tony at Flashforward. Check out his podcast, great insight into general design principles.

iPhone...why not! :) Since I'm already an AT&T customer I can get the service for this bad boy for only $20/mo. Not bad.

So this list was going to just get too darn long. Instead I made a wish list on Amazon.

In an attempt to begin actually blog about web-dev issues on my blog, I'm going to write up about a problem that I've seen, but hasn't been well documented. The new Office 2007 file extensions (docx,potx,xlsx,etc) turning into ZIP files when they are downloaded.

The new Office 2007 file formats are now using an Open XML file format system so they are more compatible with other office programs from Google, Open Office...etc. Essentially they are ZIP files that are full of XML files that when opened with the a proper application turn into a friendly word document. While that's pretty nice of Microsoft, they haven't been to good about release MIME type information for these file formats which can cause some interesting issues when trying to upload and download them to a webserver.

I stumbled onto this problem while I was working with MediaWiki. I was uploading Office 2007 files (docx to be precise) and when my co-workers went to download them on Vista, they would save as .zip files. When they tried to open them up they were just a bunch of XML files which to the untrained eye would be a bunch of gobbledygook.

I was tasked with solving this problem. After searching the internet for a good 2 hours I stumbled onto a post on a DRUPAL blog. Someone was asking about this problem using Drupal. So I thought, what do Drupal and MediaWiki have in common...php/mysql backend was what I came up with.

So after doing some more research I found a blog post written by Dave Overton. He was trying to solve that same problem for a local SBS server. He found a solution that involved the MIME Types on the server. The lightbulb went off.

Since Office 2007 is new and Vista is new a web server isn't going to know what application runs what file extension. At some point Microsoft will release an update (I hope) but until them we can just add in the appropriate MIME Types to our web servers and that should give us the results we want.

I put up the list of office 2007 file extensions and their MIME Types on to the server hosting my MediaWiki and just like that everything worked. Here is the list of Office 2007 MIME type associations you can add if you run into this same problem.

".manifest", "application/manifest"
".xaml", "application/xaml+xml", 
".application",  "application/x-ms-application", 
".deploy", "application/octet-stream"
".xbap", "application/x-ms-xbap"

".docm","application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12" 
".docx","application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document" 
".dotm","application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12" 
".dotx","application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template" 
".potm","application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12" 
".potx","application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template" 
".ppam","application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12" 
".ppsm","application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12" 
".ppsx","application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow" 
".pptm","application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12" 
".pptx","application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation" 
".xlam","application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12" 
".xlsb","application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12" 
".xlsm","application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12" 
".xlsx","application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet" 
".xltm","application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12" 
".xltx","application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template"