Presentation on Photoshop Color Correction at CPPUG

April 29, 2009

SHAMELESS PLUG

(that’s what blogs are for, right?)

I’ll be presenting a few Photoshop tricks I’ve learned over the years at the upcoming Central PA Photoshop User Group (CPPUG) meeting on May 12th (6-8 pm) at Penn State Hershey (more information is here on the CPPUG site). If you’re interested in joining the discussion on improving your own photos (and are in the area), I hope to see you there!

Categories:	Harrisburg, photography, photoshop

AS3: Passing an array into a function using the …rest parameter

April 14, 2009

I’m building an accordion menu for a current Actionscript 3.0 Flash project and have decided to use the … rest parameter in my accordion-building function to allow for a variable list length. The catch I’ve found is that while …rest is an array type, simply passing an array into the argument will treat it as a single String. An example:

function myFunction(... rest):void {
   trace(rest.length + ": " + rest);
   trace(rest[2]);
}
var myArray:Array = new Array("this","is","my", "list", "of", "arguments");
myFunction(myArray);
/*
OUTPUTS:
1: this,is,my,list,of,arguments
undefined
*/

You’ll notice that the length of the argument array is 1 and that querying a specific key beyond the argument length yields undefined.

If you want to instead submit the array as a series of arguments (and take advantage of …rest) do this instead:

function myFunction(... rest):void {
   trace(rest.length + ": " + rest);
   trace(rest[2]);
}
var myArray:Array = new Array("this","is","my", "list", "of", "arguments");
myFunction.apply(this, myArray);
/*
OUTPUTS:
6: this,is,my,list,of,arguments
my
*/

Categories:	ActionScript, Flash, flex

My Favorite Drupal Modules

April 13, 2009

My friend Dave presented on his favorite Drupal modules and WordPress plugins during BarCamp Harrisburg earlier this year, but has yet to publish his presentation. His blog (currently in reboot mode as of this writing), doesn’t host the Keynote yet, so I figured I’d post my favorite Drupal modules here for any BarCamp attendees and see if anyone wants to expand upon it.

I must say that I’m not the biggest fan of Drupal given it’s not as friendly out-of-the-box as, say, WordPress (though that’s the beauty of it in some ways), however, it’s great for mult-user applications, and is pretty customizable, provided you work with a build that has sufficient module support. So here goes (FYI, this relates to Drupal 6.10):

Content Construction Kit (CCK). This allows for creating custom fields within nodes.
Date API. Essential for date formatting.
Simple Access. Allows for private/public access to nodes. Great for when you need to give access privileges to only those logged into the site.
WYSIWYG API. I make a habit of installing TinyMCE for clients for its ease-of-use. This is the successor to the TinyMCE module.
Views. I know some people shy away from the complexity of Views, but it definitely makes it easier to make Blocks in to Nodes and display lists.
PathAuto. Definitely needed, although watch out when deploying on an IIS server. I tend to question why this isn’t part of Drupal’s core. After all, who wants site.com/q=node/3 as a URL?
Admin Menu. This makes navigating through the admin infinitely easier.
Devel. I must confess, I’ve only used this for theme generation/debugging, but it’s pretty helpful in that department.
Webform. This allows for developing forms as nodes. I’m a fan of front and backend form validation (this only provides backend out-of-the-box), however, this makes form building much quicker, provided you don’t want to submit to a remote URL.
reCAPTCHA. More of a shoutout because I love what they’re doing, but I defer to using them for recaptcha methods.

Categories:	webdesign
Tags:	drupal module

Central PA Tech Meetup–WYSIWYG MySQL Queries?

April 9, 2009

I finally made it out to the Tech Meetup of Central PA the other night after a few months of being too busy or outright missing it. The topics weren’t really the catalyst for my attendance, as I’ve been familiar with WorkXPress for some time now (thanks to Dave), already knew about LEEF: Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum (I built the Website, check it out), and prefer CodeIgniter to CakePHP thanks to performance tests like this.

I was impressed with the turnout, and the one interesting thought I walked away with came during WorkXPress’s presentation. Their CMS includes a WYSIWYG interface/form for generating SQL queries. It got me to wondering why no one has built this and distributed it ala PHPMyAdmin–or licensed it ala CPanel.

I asked Treff (WorkXPress’s owner), who said he’d look into it. Someone in the audience asked why I’d give away a free idea like that. I guess I’m just too lazy to build something like that myself