brettbrewer.com

I just wanted to vent a little bit today about the state of the Adobe Actionscript 2 docs. For years I have ranted and lamented how horrible and useless they are and today I once again suffered through hours of searching for a solution to a problem that:

1. shouldn't exist
2. should be much easier to find a workaround for
   

The problem is this: If you call _root.getNextHighestDepth() in Actionscript 2, you basically get a useless depth that collides with the Flash 8 depthManager's reserved depths. Nowhere in the docs is this mentioned.  The end result is that you get a wide variety of very strange bugs that are almost impossible to track down, even with the latest Flash 9 debugger. After hours and hours of troubleshooting and searching Adobe docs and forums, I finally ran across this post that clued me into what was going on:

"There is a movie clip called 'reserved' on level 1048575 and _root.getNextHighestDepth() will yield 1048576. But level 1048576 is part of the special levels that can't be properly unloaded and live in limbo in the player... meaning you will encounter weird bugs such as combo boxes not opening up"

Let me assure you, problems with combo boxes are the least of the strangeness, after all, what's strange about the v2 components not working as expected?...

Are you using PEAR MDB2 or PEAR DB with PHP5 and custom session handlers? I encountered a frustrating little problem today when trying to migrate a PHP4 application I wrote to PHP5. The app uses custom session handlers to save session data to a MySQL database. Unfortunately, after much hair pulling and messing around with using session_write_close() on various pages in my app to force the session data to be saved, I discovered that the problem was with the PEAR MDB2 database class. As part of my application upgrade I switched from using the deprecated PEAR DB class and moved to the PEAR MDB2 class. Unfortunately, in PHP5, the instance of my MDB2 class is destroyed prior to calling the "session_write" function, causing all session data to be lost when doing page redirects. I tried calling session_write_close() as a shutdown function using register_shutdown_function and it appeared to work. Then I did some more searching and discovered that someone else had already recommended this in the comments on the PHP web site. I don't know if this is really the best solution or whether MDB2 or PHP have a bug that needs to be addressed, but registering session_write_close() as a shutdown function appears to be the only solution that works transparently. So, if you are using PEAR MDB2 or PEAR DB and you find that your custom session handlers break when you move from PHP4 to PHP5, you can probably fix it by adding the following line to one of you global configuration files, or, better yet, just add it to whatever include file contains your custom session handlers:

register_shutdown_function('session_write_close');

Hope this saves someone else a few hours of debugging.  

Today's featured artist is Qwan . His real name is Krister Kalin and he hails from Sweden. While not quite as diverse and polished sounding as our first featured artist (Nagz), Qwan is also highly beat-centric and has some really cool stuff posted at amp.dascene.net. Qwan stays close to the chiptune genre while still remaining listenable and providing enough variation to keep the songs interesting. Qwan is all over the board with his songs and you never really know what you're going to get, so you'll want to listen to at least a few songs before deciding whether you like it or not. Download Qwan's modules here. Remember, to listen to these songs, you'll need to install the proper winamp plugins such as the ones available from chipamp.org .

In an attempt to introduce a few of my friends and associates to my new favorite genre of music known as "chip music", I'm starting a little "artist of the day" feature which will really be more like an "artist of the whenever I get around to posting a new artist" feature. 

Anyway, the artist of the day is David Halmi who hails from Hungary. On the tracker scene he goes by the name Nagz. 

If you like chip music that borders on hip-hop and crosses over into non-chip territory frequently, you'll love Nagz. In fact, I'm somewhat hesitant to even call it "chip music" because it's waaaay better than most chiptunes you may have heard. Like most of my favorite music, it is highly beat-centric. But unlike most of my other favorite artists, Nagz ranges over a vast mix of styles that can go from sounding like The Residents Commercial Album then to a pure videogame soundtrack, then to an ecclectic and spacey moog-like experience, then back to an angry dance beat.  You just don't know from one song to the next what you're going to get, except that it will probably be interesting and listenable.

Greets folks. Haven't had much time to update my progress on my PHP5 certification or my Flex2 training, due mostly to huge amounts of freelance work I've been doing lately. I just launched a new web site for www.bonobospants.com which is an awesome high-end pants maker for men with athletic builds. The site rocks. I'm quite happy with the way it is coming together. We're still making some tweaks to it, but the x-cart based ecommerce frontend is up and running as is their wordpress-based blog which is customized to to send feeds with thumbnail images to the homepage. Lots of future customization is planned for this site, but check out the schweet zooming images on the product pages .

I recently completed a small x-cart coupon mod for a UK web site called deadgoodundies.com . It gives you an additional coupon type called a "Manufacturer Coupon" which allows you to offer discounts that can apply to one or more manufacturers. There is a version for X-Cart 4.0.x and a version for X-Cart 4.1.x. The version for X-Cart 4.1 includes all the same enhanced coupon options as the "category" coupons in X-Cart 4.1. I will eventually release these mods as commercial products that you can download and install yourself, but for now, I'll have to install the mod for you. If you are interested in having this mod installed in your x-cart store, please click the "request a quote" link to the left and give me some info about your store including any custom mods you may already have that would affect coupons. In a stock version of x-cart I should be able to install the mod for a flat rate of $100, but on a hacked version of x-cart it will depend on the modifications that are already in place, so my normal hourly rates would apply. 

Due to popular demand, I have tested my old extensions in Dreamweaver 8 and since everything still seems to work, I have re-released them along with one new extension. The following old extensions have been made available:

• PHP Alternate Table Row Color
  
• PHP Alternate Table Row Color Deluxe
• Conditional Region (Show if Recordset Field Condition is True)
• Delete Record with Javascript confirmation

The following new extension is for people who work with PHP Smarty templates:

• Smarty Tags and Toolbar - For anyone who works with Smarty templates in Dreamweaver, you want this extension. I found a couple of extensions written by others in the Smarty WIKI, but liked parts of both of them, so I packaged them up into a single extension with a cleaner install footprint. There's a version for FlashMX and lower and a version for FlashMX 2004 and higher. Make sure you choose the right one or you'll get startup errors after you install it.

Head on over to my downloads section to download any or all of my extensions.