It (cURL) works in the browser but not when in console. I didn’t think that it was this simple to fix. The PHP CLI uses a different config file (php.ini) compared to the one used by WampServer/Apache. You can see the location of the config file being used by typing:

Result:

You can then fix the curl problem by enabling it in the php.ini file being used. Make sure this is not commented out:

Requirements

• Download the extension from the Yii Framework extension page or GitHub.
• Install Firebug and FirePHP plugins for Firefox.
• Enable output_buffering in php.ini.

Installation

1. Download and extract the “shiki” folder to your extensions directory. This is usually “/protected/extensions”.
2. Download the FirePHP core class and put it somewhere in your “/protected” directory. I usually put these files in /protected/vendors.
3. Modify your config file to include this LogRoute class and set the “fbPath” property to the path of fb.php. Use a Yii alias (i.e. application.vendors.FirePHPCore031.lib.FirePHPCore.fb):

config file code (i.e. /protected/config/main.php)

Usage

Once you’ve got the extension setup in the config, you can use Yii’s logging methods to log messages to FirePHP.

First off, all credits go to this guy. I’m just listing the steps on how I did it in Windows 7 with PHP 5.3. Also, I tested this using WampServer but I believe it should work on any PHP install.

Install memcached

1. Download the Memcached Win32 library here: http://code.jellycan.com/memcached/. Extract the downloaded archive file in a directory (i.e. c:\memcached). There should be a memcached.exe in there.
2. Run a command prompt as an administrator. Some info on how to do that here.
3. Install memcached as a service. Go to the memcached directory, type and run:
   memcached -d install
4. Start the memcached service by running:
   memcached -d start

Install PHP Memcache extension (php_memcache.dll)

1. Chances are you don’t have php_memcache.dll in your PHP extensions yet. You can download a build of it here. Make sure to download the correct one for your system. Mine was 32bit and PHP 5.3 so I used this: php_memcache-cvs-20090703-5.3-VC6-x86.zip. The archive should contain php_memcache.dll. Extract the archive to your php extensions directory. On my system (WampServer), this was C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.0\ext.
2. Edit php.ini, add this line to enable the extension:
   extension=php_memcache.dll

   This is a little easier for WampServer users because there’s a menu for enabling extensions ^_^x

Test

Test the installation using the sample PHP code here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/memcache.examples-overview.php

It seems to happen when 2 people push to origin/master at almost the same time. This makes Dropbox update the same file and seems to be the cause of the error. When this happens, you can bet that one of the people who did the push will lose his changes to origin/master. So you’ll have to fix it accordingly.

The “funny ref” error does not have any critical effect on the repo and Git seems to work perfectly. It will just annoy you every time you try to fetch ^_^x It turns out that this “master (Shiki’s conflicted copy 2010-01-14)” is a branch in the main repo. Simply deleting it will remove the error. In terminal, go to your main repo’s (Dropbox) root folder:

If you’re not sure of the name of the conflicting branch, you can execute “git branch” to show all branches. There should at least be a “master” branch and your conflicting branch.

Here’s a sample class we use to create an oriented box shape:

As you can see, the class inherits from CollisionShape and overrides the doCreateShape method in order to create the actual Box2D oriented box shape from there. Use it in the level files like this:

Important: This tutorial is now deprecated due to the new and awesome, fully rewritten, rendering components. You can see some discussions about it here.

I’ve been working with PushButton Engine for a short while now but last night was actually the first time I tried integrating/using a MovieClip from a SWF into PBE. Unfortunately, there are no documentations on how do this at the moment. The examples mostly use images (pngs). I won’t b*tch about it because that is totally understandable. The PBE team are working their a**es off to get to 1.0 and the documentation is the least of their worries. I could at least thank them for doing such a good job — PBE’s a well thought-out framework, everything I learned from it made a lot of sense.

Anyway, what I wanted to do was simply to put my MovieClip in a SWF library into the stage. I am using FlexBuilder 3 + the latest PBE code from the SVN. I somehow got some ideas on how to do this when I was hanging out at the #pbengine IRC channel. And I did a lot of digging on the PBE code and did lots of experiments to try to understand how to use them. There are 2 different components we can use:

• com.pblabs.rendering2D.SWFSpriteSheetComponent. This one actually had a class description: “A class that is similar to the SpriteSheetComponent except the frames are loaded by rasterizing a MovieClip rather than a single image”. Assuming you’ve gone through the PBE examples, I think this means that instead of creating the frames from a sprite sheet image and have it used by SpriteRenderComponent, you’ll be getting your frames from a loaded MovieClip instead. Nevertheless, this isn’t what I was aiming for.
• com.pblabs.rendering2D.SWFRenderComponent. This component somehow works like SpriteRenderComponent, only it uses MovieClips. A little code investigation later, looks like this component will need to be subclassed in order for it to work. From that subclass, you can do what you want to do with your movieclip  using a protected _clip variable.

Since I still wanted control over a movieclip, I used SWFRenderComponent. I’ll explain below how I did it. Please do note that I am still a novice with PBE (and Flex for that matter) so the method I used might not be good practice.

Requirements

• Latest PBE code. You can get it from the SVN here or download here. As of this writing, I’m at revision 470 (Sep 10, 2009)
• SWF. I have a compiled SWF containing exported assets (movieclip classes) that I want to use in PBE.
• Flex compiler / IDE / or whatever your preferred tool is. I’m using FlexBuilder + Flex Compiler.
• A PBE Project. Our team used the PBEngineDemo project as the base project.

Embed the SWF

In Resources.as, embed the SWF using the same method as the sample embedded resources in the PBEngineDemo project.

I thought that the above would be enough just like embedding images. However, I was getting this warning from the log:

This resulted to the gamemovieclips.swf not getting embedded in the final swf. I tried to look at the problem in ResourceBundle.as, and somehow, adding this to Resources.as fixed it:

Subclass SWFRenderComponent

Next, I created a new class which inherits SWFRenderComponent and overrides the getClipInstance() method. For this example, let’s say in my embedded swf (gamemovieclips.swf in the example above) I have a car animation movieclip exported as CarMC. I will then need to have getClipInstance() return an instance of that movieclip. My class would then look like this:

A problem with this method is that I’m using ResourceManager to load the swf and then the movieclip. This means that loading the movieclip is not instantaneous. I did try a different method for this but somehow couldn’t get the movieclip loaded into PBE.

Add the component to the level file

Now that I have a render class (CarRenderComponent). I can add it to any entity with a spatial component. (Please see PBEngineDemo for more info on this)

One thing I noticed was the properties <sizeReference> and <rotationReference> didn’t seem to have any effect on the render. I’ll have look at that another time. Maybe I’m just missing something.

That’s it. I was happy enough to see the movieclip embedded, rendered and animated on the scene. Hopefully, this will be of help to someone.

The problem now is Zend Studio doesn’t seem to support this kind of setup. At least, that’s what I concluded after so many hours of googling. Then I found this super awesome article. We can use Putty! Or just plain ol’ Terminal on a Mac (Linux should be the same I think).

Tools needed

Of course you need Zend Studio for Eclipse. You just need Putty if you’re on Windows. You’ll just need the already available/installed Terminal on a Mac (it’s in Applications > Utilities).

Proxy setup

Open up Putty/Terminal. Enter this into the console:

The “8080″ should be an unused port on your machine. In most cases, port 8080 is fine. The “username” should be the user name you need to login to the proxy server (ie proxydomain.com). You should be prompted with the password after entering this command. This will create a tunnel on the port 8080 where all HTTP traffic will go through the proxy server. That is, if an application uses the port 8080 as a proxy. This won’t have any effect on your current applications (i.e. browsers) unless you modify your settings to use this proxy. Please note that you’ll have to keep the terminal window open so your proxy session won’t be destroyed. There are probably other ways to make it work without the window left open but I’m content with this.

Modifying Zend Studio settings

Since we now have a proxy available, we need to instruct Zend Studio to use it.

1. Open Zend Studio.
2. Go to Preferences (located under the Application menu on Mac and under Window on Windows)
3. Navigate to General > Network Connections
4. Set the proxy setting to Manual proxy configuration. And enter 127.0.0.1 in the SOCKS proxy field and 8080 on the Port field beside that.

Your setup should look something like this:

Zend Studio Network Settings

Save the settings and you should be ready to open up a connection to the target server (in this case, the main development server). Create a remote connection to your target server like you normally would. I couldn’t discuss that here but this might help.

Other References

• How To: Surf Securely with an SSH Tunnel
• Use SSH to Create an HTTP Proxy
• Use PuTTY as a secure proxy on Windows
• Zend Studio Remote Systems View

Yeah so I’m a little late on this. Primarily because I’m no designer and I don’t use Photoshop that much. But I just found out that the Extract filter has been removed from CS4. Or maybe CS3 too? I didn’t notice until I needed to use it at work today where I just had to take out some cats and dogs out of their backgrounds.

So, with some googling I found this article by John Nack. There he explains why they took Extract and other filters/plugins away. I still wish they retained Extract though, it’s kinda useful for us noob Photoshop users :p Thankfully you can still install the missing features. Just follow these steps:

1. Download the plugins package. Download here for Mac, and here for Windows.
2. In the package you should find 3 language folders. Open the one you need (ie English) and copy the child folder named Goodies and paste it somewhere safe like the Photoshop application folder. That’s /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Mac and somewhere in C:/Program Files/ for Windows (sorry I can’t be too precise).
3. Open Photoshop. Go to Preferences > Plug-Ins. Find a setting named Additional Plug-Ins Folder and set that to the Goodies folder.
4. Restart Photoshop.

That should do it.