ericd.net blog

[Solved] Printing HTML with SWF(s) not as empty containers

2009-10-29T08:20:00.000-04:00

I've been pulling my hair out a bit lately wondering why some websites with SWF content on pages print with the SWFs rendered to the printer and some websites don't. You end up with a page with empty holes where the SWFs reside.

After digging around a bit and testing some local content, here is the trick.

wmode = "window" works, wmode = "transparent" does not.

That's really about it. I was playing around using SWFObject, various javascript embeds, etc. and it all boiled down to that one parameter value. Gah. At least now I have my SWFs printing like they should.

Megadeth Radio

2009-10-23T22:23:00.000-04:00

iPhone: UIWebView with images

2009-10-21T08:46:00.001-04:00

In many iPhone applications I have noticed rather tidy and nice about screens, or simply people getting around having to code up tables, etc. and they opt to use HTML and a UIWebView to display their information. This is indeed cool, but if you're using images in your HTML, you'll need to make sure that you set your baseURL properly so that you can simply reference the images like so: <img src="image.jpg" alt="image"/>.

One thing to note... if you want to populate your HTML dynamically, you can compose an NSString, etc. with your HTML in it so that you can dynamically populate information based on your code.

The code below sets this up and loads an html file into a webview properly so that you can reference the images easily.

- (void)viewDidLoad {
 NSString *mainPath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath];
 NSURL *baseURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:mainPath];
 NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"default.html" ofType:nil]; 
 NSString *pageHTML = [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:path encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding error:nil]; 
 [webView loadHTMLString:pageHTML baseURL:baseURL];
    [super viewDidLoad];
}

This will make things a whole lot easier when pulling images, etc. into your HTML in your UIWebView. This is pretty common knowledge, but I still had to Google around to find out why my images weren't being loaded properly.

Verizon FiOS media manager for OS X

2009-10-20T21:29:00.001-04:00

I was excited to see a Verizon FiOS Media Manager desktop client for OS X to access photos and music on my wife's laptop (as long as we're connected to the FiOS router directly wirelessly and not another access point). I fired it up, jumped on the FiOS router, and there was all my wife's content on the set top box.

I tried playing a track, and the media manager crashed (laptop) and then immediately the set top box itself borked and rebooted. Reboot took a while. It's done this a few times now. It looks like it's not ready for prime time, but I'm glad it's out there at all.

Yinz Cam: Live video streams from around the rink!

2009-10-20T17:36:00.000-04:00

This is super, super cool. If you're at the Igloo (Mellon Arena, Pittsburgh) taking in a Pens game, check this out!

The Pittsburgh Penguins and Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up to provide a first-of-its-kind fan experience at Mellon Arena.

Yinz Cam allows fans at the game to experience live video from unique camera angles throughout the arena by using your WI-FI enabled mobile phone or MP3 device. Examples include Bench-Cam, Penalty Box-Cam, Overhead Cam and Tight-Action Cam.

On-demand replays of goals and fights are available. Fans can also "rewind" live video to immediately watch a great play again.

Build Succeeded. It would make a great shirt.

2009-10-20T14:58:00.000-04:00

When you're squashing bugs, replacing methods, and you're arms are covered in delegate dust, Seeing that pop up on compile is a welcome sight. In fact, I am wondering if anyone has made a custom t-shirt with this thing in mind and attended a Macworld. I'm sure someone must have at some point.

Now to break this build and add more stuff.

Is there colorCorrection for AIR HTML component?

2009-10-13T14:12:00.003-04:00

I am developing a mini-site that can be accessed via a traditional browser and also through an AIR application that uses an HTML component within it.

No problems there, until you look at how colors are rendered in a browser (Safari) versus AIR using Webkit.

The screenshot supplied in this post shows the browser on the left and the same page rendered in AIR on the right.

There is a lot more saturation in the AIR version - making the same page render differently in each viewing situation.

This isn't a good thing. I could always remove the background image and vanilla the user interface of the site a bit, but I don't think that's a solution.

I have started to look into color correction, but I haven't discovered anything unique to this situation yet. Does anyone have ideas or found a workaround here to get this to work properly?

I appreciate any feedback.

Ian Anderson tonight

2009-10-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

I saw Ian Anderson perform tonight, and while I've seen him in the past, tonight he was on fire. The concert in Worcester, MA started off a little shaky... Dun Ringil, some outtakes from Aqualung recordings, etc. but after he got warmed up, he was accurate as hell, his voice didn't sound so bad, and he started really getting into it.

He playfully started raising his leg while playing the flute in spots, egging the crowd on to do his patented stance. Normally I don't like Aqualung and Locomotive Breath, but Ian played expanded versions that eclipsed 8 minutes or so for each, and his flute playing was obnoxiously awesome. He still has it. He left it all out on the table for the encore, and the normally passive crowd (of mostly grey-haired, pony-tailed, leather jacket wearing hippies) went bonkers in the aisles near the stage. Ian was simply tearing it up like I haven't heard before... except in videos of him playing with Tull in the distant past. And yes, Ian balanced on one leg for the last few songs.

I heard Ian play a Fat Man that was about 8 minutes long too, and it was amazing.

Ian had some young voila player with him & she was pretty astounding.

In all, I was quite surprised at how great this concert was. I went because I felt the need to see Ian again (any time I can really). The last time I saw him was with Ben, Matt & my Uncle Stas at Darien Lake (I think it was) - and while good, it wasn't great. This gives me faith that Tull might put out a decent album sometime (last few were dreadful). If not Tull, then another good solo album.

The jazz drummer from the East End was pretty great too. Flamenco guitar on Tull tunes? It kind of worked, but I missed Martin. Thanks Ian, that was really awesome. Night.

AIR HTML Component Printing?

2009-10-09T11:58:00.001-04:00

Printing the contents of an AIR HTML component should be as easy as browser.htmlLoader.print(). Why does it have to be so convoluted?

Poland is magnificent

2009-10-08T10:56:00.000-04:00

It has been a while since my return to the United States returning from Poland and I seriously cannot get that country and it's people out of my mind.

It's a trip that went perfectly, we had special access to a great many things, we were surrounded by exquisite people, the cuisine was out of this world (don't think kielbasa and pierogie because that's not even close to what people normally eat over there), the sites utterly breathtaking, the history seeps from everything, and the devotion to Faith overwhelming.

I have been in contact with a data recovery company and they have been able to recover 250 photos so far from my ailing 8GB card. They have about 200 more or so to recover (God willing), so that I'll have a complete record of the trip.

I'll post up images and commentary once I have all my ducks in a row.

kocham Polskę z wszystkim moim serce (serdeczny).

Finally a royalty check!

2009-10-05T18:06:00.000-04:00

After I don't know how many years I finally have a royalty check! This one is from Apress. It's decently sized, and it's welcome as every other title never came close to covering the advance. This is a Foundation Actionscript for Flash 8 title. Published April 2006. Yikes.

AS3 Flash projects compiled to the iPhone? Good idea?

2009-10-05T14:58:00.001-04:00

I love Flash and AS3, I've been using Flash for nearly everything for a great number of years.

I have since been learning Objective-C and iPhone development and I can't help but wonder what is actually going to be available upon AS3-ObjC compilation. Simple games might be okay, but there are tons and tons of APIs available to the iPhone developer. Will there be quasi-calls that turn into real calls somehow? Honestly I can see a huge plate of spaghetti forming if this ends up being akin to iPhone-Lite or something like that. Will this be just simple stuff for games, or can we get access to CoreLocation, data services, native iPhone controls, etc?

We have AIR and we have special calls made to communicate with the hardware. I suppose this CS5 compiling to iPhone application will be similar, and probably use Device Central somehow. It would be cool if it used the developer Simulator.

Throw out your Obj-C and iPhone development books? Not on your life. Learning another language is a huge benefit for many reasons. I suppose once I know more, I can evaluate in a more fundamental way.

Update:
What's out: Embedded HTML, RTMPE, loading SWFs (well you can but since there is no interpreter you wouldn't want to), PixelBender filters, microphone access, and no video camera access.

What's in from the iPhone point of view: Multitouch, screen orientation, saving images to photo library (think bitmap operations), accelerometer, geolocation, and cut/copy/paste.

So it seems like you've gotten a somewhat decent set of tools you can play with. I wonder if Adobe will provide iPhone components or else there is going to be an explosion of custom-made components built just for use on the iPhone, I'm sure.

The best meal on the planet

2009-10-03T09:24:00.000-04:00

Recipe for Zurek

The base for zurek ("zakwas"):
3 cups of rye flour,
small piece of crust from rye bread,
2 minced cloves of garlic,
2 cups of warm water.
Place ingredients in a jar, mix them well, cover the jar with a piece of clean cloth, let the jar stay in a warm place for 4-5 days. If mold forms on top, remove it before using the zakwas. Discard the bread crust and garlic before using.

Zurek
2 cups of zakwas
3/4 lb of white sausage - chopped (or just use polska kielbasa)
1/2 lb of bacon,
1 onion - minced
2 cloves of garlic - minced
1/2 cup of sour cream
1Tbsp of flour
1 bay leaf, 2 corns of allspiece, 5 black peppercorns,
1 Tbsp of marjoram

Fry bacon (chopped), add onion, add garlic and sausage. Fry a little more. Add 3 cups of boiling water, add bay leaf, black pepper, allspiece. Cook for 20 minutes. Add zakwas. Mix sour cream with flour, add to soup, add marjoram, mix the soup well. Bring to a boil (although I think you should heat until almost boiling... boiling soup is never a good idea). You can also add chopped, cooked potatoes and chopped hard boiled egg.

SanDisk 8GB SDHC #fail

2009-09-25T10:58:00.000-04:00

I took over 500 photos on a SanDisk 8GB SDHC card using my Canon EOS Rebel XS in Poland recently, and the card erred on me. Suddenly and without warning. I had to send it to a data recovery company in Clearwater Florida and I pray that they can retrieve all of the photos. So after that nightmare, I inspected my second 8GB card I took more photos on in Poland.

Playing them back through the camera after having taken them off on onto my wife's Macbook... and guess what? It erred and failed on me too. WTF is wrong with these cards? If I hadn't JUST taken the photos off the card before it erred on me, I'd have had to send that card to Florida too.

Beware these things.

Polska

2009-09-19T16:41:00.003-04:00

Greetings from Krakow, Poland. This country is simply, utterly amazing. More details to follow - especially if I can rescue a 8GB SDHC card I have that suddenly has some kind of error on it. Staying in the Hotel Kossak within viwing distance of the castle.

Dinner tonight was resplendant. The waitress was perfection. Night all.

And then poof the SWF instances turn into missing blue plugin icons

2009-09-11T12:24:00.004-04:00

I have to admit the new Safari catching Flash crashes is pretty nice. Just ran into a big one on ESPN.

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Thread 0 Crashed: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0 ??? 0000000000 0 + 0
1 ...romedia.Flash Player.plugin 0x13730e38 0x13695000 + 638520
2 ...romedia.Flash Player.plugin 0x1385590b 0x13695000 + 1837323
3 ...romedia.Flash Player.plugin 0x13a28c2a Flash_EnforceLocalSecurity + 688010
4 ...romedia.Flash Player.plugin 0x13980f02 Flash_EnforceLocalSecurity + 610
5 com.apple.WebKit.PluginHost 0x0000e9aa 0x1000 + 55722
6 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x92ed6eee __CFRunLoopRun + 6846
7 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x92ed4d34 CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 452
8 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x92ed4b61 CFRunLoopRunInMode + 97
9 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x96d49fec RunCurrentEventLoopInMode + 392
10 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x96d49da3 ReceiveNextEventCommon + 354
11 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x96d49c28 BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode + 81
12 com.apple.AppKit 0x94044c95 _DPSNextEvent + 847
13 com.apple.AppKit 0x9404450a -[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] + 156
14 com.apple.AppKit 0x9400669b -[NSApplication run] + 821
15 com.apple.WebKit.PluginHost 0x00006a09 0x1000 + 23049
16 com.apple.WebKit.PluginHost 0x00002845 0x1000 + 6213

9/11

2009-09-11T07:24:00.001-04:00

Almighty God, the past year will be indelibly inscribed in our memories.
We looked with horror on the terrorist attacks of last September 11th.
But we looked with honor on acts of courage by ordinary people
who sacrificed themselves to prevent further death and destruction.

We shed our tears in a common bond of grief for those we loved and lost.
We journeyed through a dark valley, but your light has led us to a place of hope.
You have turned our grief into determination.
We are resolved to do what is good, and right, and just.

Help us to remember what it means to be Americans—
a people endowed with abundant blessings.
Help us to cherish the freedoms we enjoy and inspire us to stand
with courage, united as one Nation in the midst of any adversity.

Lord, hear this prayer for our Nation. Amen.

- A U.S. Navy Chaplain

No more spinning beach ball for Snow Leopard

2009-09-09T15:06:00.002-04:00

My love affair with Safari was waning. And then it grooved to all of my browsers under Snow Leopard (OS X). I had installed the latest Flash plugin after reading about how SL actually downgraded it. I don't blame Apple really... it was probably tested under the previous rev. and they didn't want to slap in the latest really late into the release cycle.

Anyway, all of my broswers started to beachball on me. Even after just a few minutes. I uninstalled the plugin, installed it again, repaired permissions and then restarted.

Everything is running well now, but I have to wonder if just the restart after my Flash re-install a while ago was the fix. You see, I don't shut my Macs down at night or anything, they stay up and running for a long time, unless a Software Update requires a restart.

So that might be the magic sauce.

Steeler Nation just got a little bigger

2009-09-08T18:05:00.010-04:00

Me: Ryan, guess who is playing football tomorrow night?

Ryan, my almost 4 year-old son: The Steelers!!!

Me: That's right, it's their first game of the season

Ryan: I hope they win daddy, I love da Steelers.

Amy, my almost 2 year-old daughter: Touchdown!

Ahh... parenting is so much work all of the time, but it's random choice moments like these that just make you sit back and smile about this amazing people and how lucky we are as parents to see them develop and grow.

Menlo

2009-09-08T15:16:00.003-04:00

If you have Menlo installed, I'll use it for code views here.

#import <foundation/foundation.h>

@protocol MyCLControllerDelegate
@required
- (void)locationUpdate:(CLLocation *)location;
- (void)locationError:(NSError *)error;
@end

@interface MyCLController : NSObject {
CLLocationManager *locationManager;
id delegate;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) CLLocationManager *locationManager; 
@property (nonatomic, assign) id  delegate;

- (void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)manager
   didUpdateToLocation:(CLLocation *)newLocation fromLocation:(CLLocation *)oldLocation;

- (void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)manager didFailWithError:(NSError *)error;

@end

One of the coolest™ things I have seen in a long time

2009-09-08T09:48:00.008-04:00

Video Page Link

My first cousin Ben (one of my brothers really) sent me a URL today that just made me smile from ear to ear.

The Penguins have players deliver season tickets to some holders, and two years ago Sidney Crosby surprised Alice Kilgore of Castle Shannon (a suburb of Pittsburgh) with her tickets.

She has been a season's ticket holder since 1971. When she got over the thrill of having Sid at her house, she told Sidney that she didn't think that the Penguins were ready that year but would be the following year. That's a pretty ballsy and honest prediction to make with Sidney Crosby standing on your door stoop.

She proved to be correct as the Penguins lost to the Red Wings, but beat the Red Wings the next year.

So this year Sidney remembered that and came to Alice's house again with her tickets, but also with a surprise... he brought the Stanley Cup to her house.

You can watch video of the meeting here - just try to avoid rolling over the huge Adobe advert (the first time it's okay... but it gets annoying). The video take a while to start streaming too (it took a minute for me), so just give it a little time.

Adobe Ad - HUGE

2009-09-04T16:17:00.003-04:00

I just viewed the largest and most interactive ad I have ever seen, and it's for the Adobe Creative Suite.

The thing is a real mini-site, it has all kinds of layers of information, video, etc. and it took me by surprise. It's very engaging and it's very... huge (dimensions). It consumes a ton of the browser window, but why the hell not I guess. Well done whoever put this together. A lot of work went into it.

Hey Sony, fix your PS3 What's New thing...

2009-09-03T23:38:00.002-04:00

So I tried that Batman game, Arkham Asylum Demo. It sucked so I deleted it. However, it's showing up as a recently played item in the What's New grid.

Guess what? I can't delete it from the grid. I can't even select it (which is better than some weird game not found error.

But when deleting a game, you might want to also purge it from the XML file or whatever you're using to compose that grid. It's a little annoying.

Poll: Are you satisfied with Flashlite?

2009-09-03T16:30:00.000-04:00

Book: Coders at Work

2009-09-03T10:59:00.002-04:00

Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a brand-new companion volume to Apress’s highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting.

Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 15 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed:

Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow
Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang

Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google

Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger

Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!

L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1

Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation

Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal

Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer

Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler

Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX

Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI

Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress

Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX

Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker