vosechu's blog

There's a lot of good to be said about the Brightcove iPhone SDK, it's easy, it seems to work really well, but there's also a ton of gotchas and the docs are a little conflicting and/or out of date. The OnePlanet app is also out of date. This post is my attempt to rectify some of these things.

There are three things needed to get your app going:

Imagination time: Imagine for a moment that you have an app, it has one button and one little window. When you click the button it changes the text within the window to something else. Now, when you get into flash development it seems like the easiest and clearest way to do this is to wipe out the contents in the window, but you would be wrong for thinking so. While it is the most obvious I intend to prove to you that to do so is both slower and prevents you from turning on the juice later with caching.

On to story time: We're building an app for the OpenPeak tabletop device, it's totally rad and you'll love it I promise but that's really not the point of the post. When we started the app we had what I considered a pretty awesome solution, we'd clear the state, build it onto a global, then write the global out to a window on the app. It actually worked great for a long time until we decided to start doing some caching where it became wildly apparent that I had actually written all three parts of that app dead wrong. It's pretty exciting to do something wrong enough that you can write about it later. :)

Convincing people that 10% time is valuable can sometimes be a chore but I'm probably one of the luckiest guys in the country because my bosses actually want to do 10% time, but aren't quite sure how to get to the point where we can afford it. But more than just being able to afford you it's important to convince yourself, your coworkers, and your bosses that you can't afford not to do something like 10% time.

The toad just finished a small project involving the Facebook API and by far the most confusing aspect of the project was the terminology regarding the many, many different API's and what each one actually does. I thought this merited a write-up and I hope you find it helpful.

FBML, Frames and the Canvas

If you've ever worked with a rich data model in drupal you know it can be a pain
to load up all the children and parents of a node within the templating engine.
One method that could save you a lot of time is to load the data recursively
in node_load and save your poor front-end guy some wrist pain (or yourself if you're
that guy!)

Lately I've been working on a project to allow drupal to intelligently manage legacy data, to display, edit, and work with all aspects of the data as securely as possible. Naturally, it's difficult to say the least but I've learned a great deal. One of the things I thought was going to be a pain but ended up easy was managing where the fields appeared on a form. Yes, I could set the weights manually through the Forms API but CCK actually gives us some really great tools to do this without sweating.

For reference, this is based on the wonderful if totally impossible to find article here: The Great Pretender.

Of all the powerful words in any language assertion is in my opinion the absolute most powerful. With affermative language we are able to create trust, enact people's will, and begin processes.

This week I had the wonderful opportunity to work on an interesting problem that as far as I can tell hasn't been documented. The call came out that we needed to generate a couple dynamic tabs on the top of our player for smart playlists. Now, we already have one dynamic playlist so I thought it was going to be a fairly simple logical step up to three but I was really, really wrong.

In my experiences in the past working with external contractors is often a pain, especially the final merge where you try to incorporate all their code. I've always been a huge proponent of Subversion for SCM but today I saw an example where Git knocked the socks off of Subversion.

Having only left Rubyville a couple weeks ago there are still a lot of Ruby-based utilities that I still find incredibly handy. One such utility that I've recently fallen hopelessly in love with is stakeout.rb from: http://pragmaticautomation.com/cgi-bin/pragauto.cgi/Monitor/StakingOutFi...