Blog

PHP 5.3 on OSX

February 22nd, 2010

I wanted to play with Symfony 2 and so needed to install PHP 5.3 on my OSX 10.5. What seemed like a simple task turned into a huge waste of my time. I use MAMP because it’s a nice out-of-the-box solution. The problem is, it still doesn’t ship with 5.3 because it’s waiting for it to […]

Building a conference website

February 19th, 2010

Building a conference website as the conference was being organized is probably one of the biggest challenges I ever faced. It is also the project I’m the most proud of. I’d like to share that experience with you. By the way, the event is still in progress, so my work on the site is not […]

PayPal DPRP in Sandbox

December 18th, 2009

Note: This article is no longer relevant as PayPal’s interface has changed since my publishing the article. I ran into a problem this week when testing PayPal’s API with recurring payments in the sandbox. I kept getting a “DPRP is disabled for this merchant” response. After reading dozens of blog posts and forum threads, I did […]

ZendCon 2009 Review

October 26th, 2009

Now that I’m back from ZendCon and recovered from the jetlag (and the partying), I’m ready to share my impressions of ZendCon 2009. The conference took place in San Jose, California, on October 19th – 22nd. The sessions There were a number of interesting sessions, such as the security tutorial by Arne Blankerts and project […]

Simplify camera parameters in pv3d

September 4th, 2009

I’ve been supplied a 2D sketch of what my 3D world (PaperVision3D) will look like. The hardest part was matching the perspective by carefully positioning the camera. Having no other way than trial and error and a total of 7 different parameters, I quickly went nuts. This is a time consuming task: changing the values, […]

When garbage collection does more than you want

September 4th, 2009

I had an interesting Flex bug to solve a day before the project deadline. I was showing a progress bar while some images were preloading in the background. The application was only allowed to fire applicationComplete event once these images have finished loading. The client complained that the progress bar stalls the first time you run […]

PaperVision3D and JigLib

August 31st, 2009

I experiemented with PaperVision3D and JigLib last week. Since JigLib had a plugin specifically designed for PaperVision3D, making the two work together was a breeze. The only thing that really bothered me is the fact that when I applied a force on a body, it rolled instead of gliding smoothly along the surface. I’m used to […]

doctrine:insert-sql for MAMP users

August 11th, 2009

One of my computers has MAMP installed. I was trying to build a database schema from a YAML file. When time came to insert the SQL using… >php symfony doctrine:insert-sql the following error message appeared: >Couldn’t locate driver named mysql MySQL worked fine on this computer for many years so a missing driver was out […]

LinkBar was meant to be used with a ViewStack

July 27th, 2009

I had to read the source code for LinkBar and its parent NavBar to understand why my LinkBar wasn’t highlighting the clicked item. Turns out, it’s because I use an ArrayCollection as a dataProvider. According to the documentation and the source code, it is possible to use an IList (such as an ArrayCollection), a String […]

Flex: non-UIComponents in the Display List

July 17th, 2009

There are 2 main ways to add non-UIComponents to a Flex Container. 1. You may add the object to a SWFLoader, which does not require its children to extend UIComponent. 2. You may add the object to Container.rawChildren. You have to be careful with the 2nd one. First of all, know that whatever is contained in Container.rawChildren is not […]