Don’t bother.

It appears that Comedy Central is blocking all streams from their server from Canadian IPs. See a blog post with an embedded clip? Want to watch it? Well you can’t if you are from Canada. Comedy Central and CTV have effectively broken the Internet. Their embedded player displays no error message and doesn’t even try to redirect you to a “valid” server.

CTV doesn’t appear to want to allow you to embed content so the only way to view it is to go to CTV’s Broadband Network site (no link as I don’t want to promote the site).

This is an inexcusable attempt on the part of CTV to artificially drive traffic to their site by breaking the basic principles of the internet.

Today marks the flood of press regarding Bill Gates’ departure from Microsoft and it is interesting to see just how much positive and effusive press this is generating. Probably the worst of these puff pieces about Gates is Anil Dash’ post Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is probably an obvious point to some people but considering some recent issues I had with a clients website I would like to recommend that when you are looking for a domain to register that you test the name for interesting typos that may lead your visitors to, for instance, gay porn websites when they leave out a vowel in your domain name.

In addition to an Event page I also did a form for the Potomac.org website to do letter writing campaigns. The image to the left is a sample with dummy text.

The idea is that the site has a page where concerned citizens can enter their details and send an email message to a legislator or other body to express their opinions on a subject. The site is built using Wordpress and the intent was to give the site’s administrators a tool that they could use to easily create a form that would allow for it to be edited but also be safe from inadvertent coding errors making the form or form processing invalid.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Potomac.org website required an Event page to allow them to display events on the site and allow users to easy view and browse events.

Read the rest of this entry »

So the final version of the Flex Wordpress category browser was posted to my news blog today. Strangely enough I actually rewrote the entire app from scratch on my laptop. Not sure why.

I’ve added some tooltips and datatips for the date column, a loader to indicate when, and what, data is being loaded as well as local data caching.

It was a fun app and its always good to be able to build useful applications when you are learning a new language. This certainly does show the benefit of Flex as a web application development tool since this entire application is just 142 lines of code.

I think my next application will be some sort of editing tool so I can learn to write two-way code that polls and stores data remotely.

The Flex Worpdress category browser I wrote is now up and running on my news blog.

Its a simple Flex example that uses two php pages, and some Wordpress API calls, to display data about posts on the website. The only minor changes to the app from my last post are the addition of a “launcher” to view pages as well as some local data caching. So now it will store the XML data locally and then use that cache if you request the same category again.

After a belated attempt to get CF 8 running on my Mac it is now installed and serving up pages.

I’ve been doing some tests with an old CFForm based form builder that I was working on last year and I am going to use that code base as a sample to work on some Flex data components and code.

So I’ve managed to put together a working Flex app.

Its a simple application that loads an XML file of the parent and child categories on one of my blogs and then allows you to double click a category to load a new XML file that contains the article data and summaries for that category.

The data is generated via two php files that hook into the Wordpress API to generate data and then format it into an XML file. The data is also made “XML safe” prior to creating the XML files.

I spent a bit of time tonight getting the layout working the way I want to so not all of the functionality is there. Next up is the ability to double click on an article title to open it in a new browser window as well as a caching system and some sort of better feedback when you load data.

Another quick Flex application. This time to poll a Yahoo web service for search results. Enter a search string, click “Search: and then click/double click on the results.
Read the rest of this entry »