itarato

Comics to PDF

2011-08-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

I'm not a comis guy but there are some I'm really interested to follow. The more I read online the more I realize it's a horrible experience for consuming.

I was checking the image format and fortunately it had a sequence number: comic_#.png, where # is the number of the comic. So I created a small script that shows only the images in a plain html page:

<style>body {background: #000;}</style>

<center>

<?php

$from = $_GET['from'];

$to   = $_GET['to'];

for ($i = $from; $i <= $to; $i++) {

  echo '<img src="SOURCE_URL' . $i . '.png" /><br />';

} 

?>

</center>

That was much better already. But then I got the feeling I want it on my iPhone/iPad. But from the browser you would have to pinch each image, again, horrible ux.

Let's create a PDF. First you need the source, so I downloaded all the images with cURL's sequence feature:

curl -O http://URL_TO_COMICS/comic_[1-3000].png

Now I need a tool that compose all into one single PDF. I played with the built in Preview app, if you open the first image, save as PDF, and then drag the rest onto the first slide you can save it, but it gives a terrible margin around the images. I was looking for apps online, but no one could make it without margin - else it wasn't free neither.
So I downloaded fPDF and compose this little script that makes my perfect PDF of comics:

<?php



// Call: script.php?from=1&to=3000



require_once 'PATH_TO_FPDF_LIB/fpdf.php';



$from = $_GET['from'];

$to   = $_GET['to'];



$pixel_rate = 3.778; // Don't ask, just use it ;)



$pdf = new FPDF();



for ($i = $from; $i <= $to; $i++) {

  $imagesize = getimagesize('comic_' . $i . '.png');

  $pdf->AddPage('P', array(($imagesize[0] / $pixel_rate), ($imagesize[1] / $pixel_rate)));

  $pdf->Image('comic_' . $i . '.png', 0, 0);

}



$pdf->Output();

It's actually faster than I thought, creating a document of 500 slides takes ~2 seconds. Pretty good.

Cheers,
Peter

Making an iPhone app - Part 3 - Minimap App

2011-03-02T22:25:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

In this episode we will create a very minimalistic application so we can test a lot of iOS features with it. The application will have 1 UIView and a UIButton on it. On clicking the button an alert will pop up.
Let's cut to the chase. Look at your dock bar and run Xcode.

You should have Xcode version <= 3.2.5. [Soon Xcode 4 becomes available.] On the Xcode welcome screen click on: 'Create a new Xcode project'

Now you are offered a bunch of project templates. It's a good thing to try all of them out. Now, for out purpose, we need 'View-based Application'. This kind of template will create as a base project with a UIView prepared to use. Be sure that and the 'Product' part 'iPhone' is selected.

Give it a project name, I call it 'iTest1'.

Now we can start to do our magic. In Xcode you will find all your files that are added to your project. (It doesn't reflect your physical file structure.) In 'Groups & Files' look for Classes/iTest1ViewController.m. This is the main UIView's controller class. In a nutshell, on running the compiler will start in the main.m file. It will create one UIApplication instance that is accessible from anywhere in the code. The application then will create a iTest1ViewController with the bundled UIView and add them to the main window view. Logically it's the iTestViewController.h file the right choice to begin with. Let's open it add the event handler function definition:

- (IBAction)pressedButton:(id)sender;

IBAction means void if you check the definition. The difference is that Xcode's UI builder will know about this function and can be connected to events.
Now let's add the function body to iTest1ViewController.m:

- (IBAction)pressedButton:(id)sender {
 UIAlertView *alert = [[UIAlertView alloc]
        initWithTitle:@"Hello"
        message:@"World"
        delegate:nil
        cancelButtonTitle:@"Cancel"
        otherButtonTitles:nil];
 [alert show];
 [alert release];
}

This little code snippet will fire up an alert window.
The code part is ready. Let's make the UI. In the 'Groups & Files' panel find Resources/iTest1ViewController.xib. This a nib file that wraps up the UIView of the controller. Double click on it will open Interface Builder. It has several window. Library is for assets, you can select classes and UI elements, drag them and drop to your UI. The Inspector window is to set an object's parameters, look and several other options. You should see a window named iTest1ViewController.xib. There you can check your objects that are in the xib file. And finally you have a View window, the UIView itself. Let's add the button. Go to the Library window, select the Objects tab and look for 'Round Rect Button'. Drag and drop it to your View window. Double click on it then and give it a title. Save the project.

Now we have to tell Xcode that on clicking the button it should call our pressedButton function. In the iTest1ViewController.xib window select 'File's Owner'. Hit CMD + 2 or open the Connection Inspector window. You should see the pressedButton: function and a small grey circle next to it. Now drag that circle, don't release your mouse, and move it to your button object. Now you can drop it, and it offers you a selection of events. Select: 'Touch Up Inside'.

In the Connection Inspector you should see that it's paired now.

Now go back to Xcode. At the left side of the toolbar you will see a selection list. Be sure that 'Simulator' and 'Debug' is selected. No hit on the 'Build and Run' button. [fingercrossing]

If everything went well it shows the iPhone simulator with the created application.

Click on the button. There should be the alert window.

That is that. If you want to know why we did it this way, read the Beginning iPhone 4 Development book's first couple of chapters. There is quite some things behind this and it's not this series' task to cover it.
Now, that you have this minimal application, you can play with the tons of ui elements, iOS capabilities, etc.

---

In the next part I'll talk about some code practices I've learnt during my first app development.

Have fun,
Peter

Making an iPhone app - Part 2 - iOS

2011-03-01T23:04:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

This time I'm gonna introduce iOS we reveal the toolkit we have for iPhone development.

iOS is the main operation system for the iPhone (and iPad) device. What makes the difference for programming Objective-C? Check the official technical overview. There are some important aspects. iOS is closed for apps. Every app has its own sandbox environment, which is great for security, maybe not that great with flexibility, but that's a good trade-off. In iOS you have some limitations relate to the device (remember of iPhone versions). You have to prepare your app so that it can release all the unnecessary objects to gain some resource. Your app environment is signed, so you can't add new files during the app's lifetime. Obviously you can store data, but there are other solutions for that. An iOS app has response time limit, it can't be unresponsive for minutes.

And next to these restrictions you have the amazing libraries, like UIKit, the accelerometer, the media frameworks, graphical (2D/3D) frameworks and so on.

I assume you have Xcode, you do know how to write Objective-C code, it's time to learn iOS programming. Some tested sourced I encourage you to read:

[* - highly suggested]

You need some time to learn how a normal app is structured. On iOS the preferred methodology is the good old MVC or more specially the PAC modell. In UIKit you have lot's of view objects, like labels, imageviews, tables, form elements, etc. Some of the 'abstract' view object has its bundled controller, like ViewController or TableViewController. UIKit provides these pairs for a very good reason. When you work with tables or maps you almost always need a controller for handling events and set configurations. It's a huge help so you don't have to create them.

The view hierarchy starts with a window, which is the root view. You can add any view into a view object and that is how you build a ui. If an element needs control or event handling it has a high chance that it needs a controller.

You can create views in two ways: using NIB files (ends with *.xib) or creating them in code. With NIBs you can easily drag and drop ui elements on them, with a few clicks you can assign action handlers to events. In code you have the freedom to customize it towards, but obviously, it's more code and you have to be more careful with that.

---

In the first times you will always need a base app to play with, to try features out as fast possible and get feedback. And remember: fail always a good thing! In the next part I'll explain how you can make a minimal application you can use for testing.

Bests,
Peter

Making an iPhone app - Part 1 - Prepare

2011-02-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

In a nice little series I'm gonna walk you though the raw basics of an iPhone app creation.

This part is about preparing yourself for development. Before you do anything you have to know Objective C. If you don't know it yet, better to read some materials:

Learn Objective-C on the Mac (book)
Introduction to The Objective-C Programming Language (official Apple introduction)
Learn Objective-C on Cocoa dev Central

You have to know the basics of the language. Couple of keywords that you really have to take attention: messaging, objects, properties and categories, memory management, delegation.

In the meantime you need Xcode, the all-in-one developer environment from also Apple. For this you need an Apple ID account, but for the simple download now you can get it for free.

[For testing apps on the iPhone device or submitting to the AppStore you need an official iOS developer account, but I want to talk about it in a following part.]

What you have to is going through one of the aforementioned docs (preferably each) and trying out each language features in Xcode. You can even start with a simple console application. NSLog(@"I'm here!") can give you all the feedback you need for the first times.

Some really good sources to have a better insight:

---

In the next part:

iOS basic concept and planning of the application.

Night,

Peter

My First iPhone App is Available: HexGuess

2011-02-18T07:46:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

Finally after days of torture my app is in iTunes store: HexGuess v1.0.

It's a color guessing game by the color's hexadecimal code. Very basic and simple. Soon I'll make a blogpost about what I've learnt during the development and some source code.

Download the app if you like, it's free.

Bye,
Peter

Top 10 iOS libraries

2011-02-17T13:10:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

As always, I realized I can't implement everything in iOS, and also shouldn't reinvent wheels. So I started using libraries for iOS development. Here you are my dump (order doesn't count):

1: Wordpress iPhone app is open source. You can use it's XML-RPC library.

2: Three20 iOS library has tons of goodies. You better to check them all. Also don't forget about it's extensions.

3: Urban Airship library is about in-app purchase, push, rich push and subscriptions. They have their code for Android and Blackberry too. How awesome is that?

4: ShareKit is the sharing kit for your iOS application.

5: PayPal's mobile payment library is a must have api for applications where you can pay. (iPhone and Android lib.)

6: The Tapku library has several cool features, like cover-flow, calendar grid and chart view and other smaller parts.

7: Probably it's for a smaller target, but if you want to integrate your app with the Buto video service, you also has something to integrate.

8: For parsing KML files you have the Simple-KML library.

9: The HubKit library provides you easy access to the GitHub api.

10: ZXing is a very good extension for barcode recognition. It also has lots of other implementations for other languages than Objective C.

(10 + 1): And Cisco's tools are probably pretty useful, but honestly I haven't checked out them yet. Is there anybody out there tried their stuffs? What are they good for?

Do you know about other good iOS libraries? Please, let me know so I can add them too.

Bye,

Peter

Update:
For XML-RPC communication you should try this XML-RPC library from eczarny.

A lightweight XML library can be found here by TouchCode.

I guess it's not necessary to introduce Unity, one of the most awesome graphical library.

A small but really nice library that does pull-to-refresh on tables from Leah Culver.

ZBar has an awesome minimal but perfect barcode scanner library - and it's open source.

RedLaser's barcode scanner is also very good, but you have to pay a little for it.

JSONKit is a well performed JSON parser library.

Passing Through Unknown Number of Parameters in Actionscript

2011-02-13T05:00:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

It's probably a noob problem but for me it took some time to solve. Actionscript can handle unknown number of arguments in the function definition:

public function foo(...args):void {
}

In this case ...args is an Array. You can call this function with any amount of arguments, like:

foo(); // args = []
foo('bar'); // args = ['bar']
foo('bar', 1, new Object()); // args = ['bar', 1, -object instance-]

It's very handy a lot of times. But the problem is if you want to pass those arguments through more than one functions. Here you are a minimalist example:

package {
import flash.display.Sprite;
public class ArgSample extends Sprite {

public function ArgSample() {
this.bar(1, 2, 3);
}

public function bar(...args):void {
this.foo(args);
}

public function foo(...args):void {
trace('Number of parameters: ' + args.length);
}
}
}

You want to guess the results of foo? It's: "Number of parameters: 1". Why? Because in function bar() you pass variable args, which is an Array. And foo() will receive an Array with 1 element: [[1, 2, 3]] instead of [1, 2, 3].

So how we gonna solve this? Let's use the dynamic behavior of Actionsctipt. Functions has a well known method: apply. It can do a function call on an object with an array of parameters. See the changes:

package {
import flash.display.Sprite;
public class ArgSample extends Sprite {

public function ArgSample() {
this.bar(1, 2, 3);
}

public function bar(...args):void {
(this.foo as Function).apply(this, args);
}

public function foo(...args):void {
trace('Number of parameters: ' + args.length);
}
}
}

And now magically the result is: "Number of parameters: 3". In real life I'm using it when I create a NetConnection object for making remote function calls and I have to provide arguments.

Bests,

Peter

Kitten - The Actionsript Based Drupal Communication Library

2011-02-12T09:17:00.001-08:00

Hi Readers,

I opened a new repository on Github for my Drupal communication library written in Actionscript 3. The main purpose with it is figuring out how could I make the network layer completely separate and full fledged.

Goals in a nutshell:

can connect to Drupal sites (to Services gateway)
can use AMFPHP
can work without authentication
can work with Session authentication
can work with API key authentication
can have more than one connection
can set error handlers
can do logging (somehow)
can set default handlers for RPC methods
most importantly can be used in any kind of Flash project without hassel (not Hoff)

Do you miss any feature?

Github source: https://github.com/itarato/Kitten

The idea came from the DPDK guys and this post. I've met them at the Drupal Developer Days Brussel conference. Their library is obviously professional. I'm not planning to beat them.

Bye,

Peter

Update:
Download the latest version of the compiled library: KittenFlexLib (SWC file)

Drupal Troubleshooting Presentation

2011-02-07T22:48:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

I've beet at Drupal Developer Days Brussels this weekend. I was talking about the practices for solving bugs and problems during a Drupal development. Here you are my slides:

Drupal troubleshooting

View more presentations from Peter Arato.

Take care,

Peter

The Good Business Model

2011-02-03T13:00:00.000-08:00

Hi Guys,

I'm not to speak about good and bad business models. I have my own feelings about a project's end. I'm more wondering about what makes an application great. Once on Ted a guy told that he was in a hotel's elevator. There were buttons - you suppose - for the floors - but not. They were tracks. So during the process you could listen to some music. That's brilliant. It's a typical no money creative think that makes your product remarkable. Then I found Tumblr (I know it's soo old, but I found it now). Check this screen:

You have a given set of options to post. Seems obvious, yeah, but what it does in real, it makes your choice a lot easier. You want to post only a video? There you are. Just a link? You're welcome.

So what it does it let's you to do your blogging much more productive.

Instagram. I guess it's one of the greatest apps of 2010. How can a such a simple a photosharing app be so great even without a public feed? Because it's simple, it's well done and it has a well defined purpose: doing nice effects. Nobody knew it.

The common thing is they have a seemingly small feature that makes the service better. Like a postcard that has a sticker on it. Or you know the dumb free newspaper with Garfield on the last page.

My question? How many existing product can be improved by this kind of speciality? Can I make a pong game more popular than the original? Like ... with cool sound effects?

I have tons of ideas, but first, what do you think?

10 Favorite Productivity Tips

2011-01-29T03:27:00.000-08:00

I'm a productivity freak. I always liked to achieve more and better. It's a long learning process and basically you have to personalize everything. Let me share my favorite productivity tips and tools. (I'm using a mac so more of the tools are OS-X apps.)

- Alfred (http://www.alfredapp.com/)

Alfred provides you a quick interface to search. Either on your machine or on the internet. With a shortcut you have a searchbox and you can start typing. What is really really cool is that you have a lot of predefined services, like "maps Chicago" will open google maps and looks for the location. Almost every major service on the net has a service. Moreover you also can define your own searches. Some examples that I made: "d cck" will look for the cck module on drupal.org. "php strstr" will look for the strstr function on php.net. Now you can imagine how cool is that. With the extended version (called Powerpack) probably you can earn tons of other awesome features.

- Terminal scripts

I'm not a linux haxor nor a hacker. But it's really not necessarry if you want to do some shell script magic. An action you do in your system that contains more than one step, or you have to type a lot worth to replace with a script. If you don't know about the shell, let's just say it can do anything. Some example from my collection:

A script install a Drupal site (downloads the source, extracting, move to the web root, setting the db ... opening in a browser). Multistep DB actions, like: applying a dump, registering users, doing backups, etc. Empty browser cache. Download latest pictures of my favorite comics. I let the rest to your imagination.

Also don't forget about aliases. I have an alias for all the commands that is more than 2 characters.

For learning more I suggest reading the Mac OS X for Unix Geeks book.

- Put your work in front of you

It's not really a tool, but a very efficient techinque to get things done. It's like when you're in the bed and you need a drink but you're just too lazy to get up. (Being lazy is not productive, though.) What does it mean in real life? Put the most used apps onto the tray or desktop. Create shortcuts to start them. Put the mostly visited sites in your bookmark toolbar. (With Chrome app icons it's even more cool in the content area.) Take the important books, letters and papers onto your desk. Put your favorite mobile apps on the first page. The basic principle is when you can do things easier and access them faster you'll probably use them more. And faster.

- Chrome extensions/plugins

Well, there is a simple reason why I'm using Chrome: it's faster. If you haven't checked the extension library, it is the right time. My favorite ones:

Goo.gl url shortener - it helps me quickly shorten urls and copy to pasteboard.

Delicious - my favorite bookmarking service. I hope they will survive.

Live css editor - for development it allows me to live edit the style.

Sent with gmail - helps me to send sites to friends easier.

- Know your limits - or get rid of the scary 1000+

I'm using Google Reader, and to tell the honest, that's the most productivity thing since automobile, but it's just too obvious. And I also like podcasts. But a couple of month ago I realized I was too greedy. My eyes were bigger than my stomach and I ended with the famous 1000+ in reader and >50 unwatched podcasts constantly. If you want to be productive and learn the most you can, you have to know your limits. It's more likely to read 20 articles a day when you have 100 unread and not 1000+. It's just makes me fustrated and frightened. It's still better to unsubscribe some feeds than having and not reading them. Same with podcasts.

- Better touch tool

With BetterTouchTool you can enhance your touch capabilities. You can define extra touch gestures up to 4 fingers. And you can bind them to a lot of actions. Window actions, application actions, spaces and dashboard. It's quite awesome. And interesting extra feature of BTT is that it can resize windows when you drag it. To the edges (full screen, half sreen...). Pretty useful.

- Find best tools

It's again not an application, but a good practice to improve your prodictivity. I'm always trying new techniques when there is something new. I've tried several pomodoro apps, rss reades applications, scripts, etc. Maybe the best example is the todo lists. There are tons of applications with thousands of features to track your todod items. I've tried several. Remember the milk, Things, Freemind, Mindmeister, Epic win and probably the rest is already forgotten. And the interesting thing is I'm using a plain test file for a while and for me it's the best. I can use any format I want (list or large text), I can structure it, remove old items very easily. It sits on my dock so I can access it any time. I know that Cali Lewis uses paper and pen insead of apps. So, what's your way to do todo lists?

- Dropbox

Dropbox can store files remotely and you can access to them on any computer or smartphone. I often want to share things with my friends. Files, music, video or images. It's fast, very easy to use and simply it makes it the best sharing tool. And this week I discovered a new cool feature of Dropbox. I'll let you know in my next blogpost:)

- Kindle

Kindle has a huge bloom recently. I've got mine coupe of weeks ago and I have to say It's way better than I thought. The best thing in it that it's an ebook reader and nothing more. You can't do much else than reading, and it makes you focusing better on what you're reading. The display is gorgeous, sharp and really looks great on sunlight. You can buy books from a lot of services, like Amazon or O'Reilly. And you also can read PDF files. By deafult it's quite ugly (PDF is fixed, so you can't break the lines and it makes the fonts so small), but with Briss you can crop them.

Also another cook service for Kindle is Instapaper. With a bookmarklet you can send sites to the service and it'll collect them to you. Then you can download it (or ask Instapaper to send it directly to your Kindle via email) and read just like a newspaper. Very great service.

- Growl

Growl is a notification tool for your OS. The good thing with Growl is you don't have to check the application every time when something happens. Skype has a new chat message, twitter client has a new tweet or you have a new mail, iTunes plays an unknown track ... lot's of things you usually check and it's a waste of time. With Growl the popup shows you the necessarry information so you don't have to change application, or more importantly, you don't have to break the focus. Even more cool fact about Growl that you can access it in the shell. I added some notification for my scripts, so I always know when they terminated.

I'm really interested, what are your favorite productivity tips or lifehacks? Please, tell me about them.

Bye,

Peter

Updates - your apps of choice:

Long time no see

2010-09-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

Yeah, sorry about that. Probably it's only a heartbeat on the blog. Not likely that I write any new article in the near future. Although I'd like to inform you, what I'm up to so far.

So, I kinda started to learn Objective C. My first goal is to write a decent iPhone application. Just for fun, for learning the language and getting some experience. I have certain plans, but I don't want to speak about it yet. I've found the official Apple documentation good. But - how to say. It's just too much to dive in for beginners like me. I've bought a quite good book: http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Objective-ndash-Mac/dp/1430218150/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283887700&sr=8-1 It describes the fundamentals of the language. For me some part seems really weird, like filters and modifiers. But hey, compiler matters, not the syntax. Unfortunately in the last couple of months I also hung that on, but intent to start working with it again.

I did some major refactoring on my Grpahmind app. It was a good experience for me but still can't feel the good level with design patterns. I have to learn a lot. The trick is that you have to know the future capabilities and the current features. I felt sometimes I did overkill with separation. And misused a lot of patterns. One thing for sure, you have to do it again and again.

I was involved quite a lot of Drupal projects as well. I really like it. I'm getting more experience about the actual site-architect part and also about the Drupal-ways. Thanks to my current company and our lead I can work in Brussel now for a month and a half in a huge company. It's a really good experience just seeing how things are going in a different, enterprise environment. You can feel it, you can see it. It's amazing. It's a completely different workflow.

That's it. I'd like to come back with some beneficial articles later, so see you.

Drupal installer script - version 2

2010-02-26T10:33:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

Last night I felt the need of a new Drupal installer script. My old one (http://itarato.blogspot.com/2009/06/drupal-sandbox-creator-shell-script.html) had some flaws: it used a static preinstalled tarball with a static database dump. My new one use a fresh Drupal 6.15 package and just help to get to the install screen:

echo "> Install Drupal Site - v 0.1"
# Enter the webroot
cd YOURWEBROOT
# Uncompress the latest Drupal tarball
tar -xzf PATHTOTARBALL/drupal-6.15.tar.gz
# Asks for a site name (folder - database in one step)
read -p "> Site name: " site_name
# Rename the web folder
mv drupal-6.15 $site_name
echo "> Site folder is ready"
# Create config files
cd $site_name/sites/default
mkdir files
cp default.settings.php settings.php
# Setting file ownerships
sudo chown WEBSERVERUSER files
sudo chown WEBSERVERUSER settings.php
echo "> Config is ready"
# Creating database
mysql -u root --password=YOURPASSWORD -e "create database $site_name"
# Under OS-X opens a browser with the site's install screen
open http://localhost/$site_name
echo "> Arigato gozai mashi ta!"

Basically you need a Drupal package under: PATHTOTARBALL/drupal-6.15.tar.gz and that's it. Dont't forget to change all the capital letter words to your environment.

Regards,
Peter

Hungarian Drupal Podcast - Episode 8

2010-02-26T10:26:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

Are you interested in Drupal project management? How to do specification, development and maintenance? Check this out:

In the next episode we have our first (human) guest: Kristof Van Tomme (http://twitter.com/kvantomme) and we will speak about our new Knowledge Management System: http://pronovix.com/solution/alpha-1-knowledge-management-open-atrium-test-it-now

Cheers,
Peter

Hungarian Drupal Podcast - Episode 7

2010-02-21T03:19:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

Here you are the seventh podcast:

We are basically in a conceptual crisis. We have to decide what we want to talk about. Drupal, web, code or life. This episode is a mutant episode, but we liked it very much.

Regards,
Peter

Peer to peer video and audio streaming with Flex

2010-01-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

This going to be a quick blogpost about how to build a simple video and audio streaming app in Flex. All the fame is for the Adobe Stratus service, and for Tom Krcha, a very great Adobe tech evangelist: http://www.flashrealtime.com/basics-of-p2p-in-flash/ (this is the original article.) Most of my code is from there! Great thanks for your excellent tutorial.

So, first take a look at the Stratus service: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/ It allows to your Flash app to create P2P connection between clients. Cool, isn't it?

Our app will open the default camera and microphone streams and transfer to any other client we share our peerID with. I succeeded to open 3 additional connection. That's already two more than Skype allows. Of course, it's not that good.

Ok ok, maybe it's better to try it out: Multivideo.swf
- Allow your camera and microphone to connect
- Share your peerID with your partners using the app (your peerID is in the first text box)
- Add new streams by adding other contacts' peerIDs: copy their peerID into the 2nd textbox and click on [Add contact]
(On some systems sometimes firewall blocks the stream.)

Let's do it than. We need some UIComponent. A base video display and some textbox and a button:

<mx:HBox id="video_stack" top="10" left="10">
<mx:VBox>
<mx:VideoDisplay id="my_video_display" width="320" height="240"/>
<mx:HBox>
<mx:TextInput width="320" id="farPeerId_text" text="Your Peer ID is loading..."/>
</mx:HBox>
<mx:HBox id="add_contact_container" visible="false">
<mx:TextInput id="contact_peer_id_text" width="200"/>
<mx:Button label="Add contact" click="{addContact();}"/>
</mx:HBox>
</mx:VBox>
</mx:HBox>

HBox allows us just pushing the new stream UI elements into the horizontal queue.
Using Stratus we have to register for a Stratus API key. We will get an ID and the url:

private var rtmfpServer:String = 'rtmfp://stratus.adobe.com/cbd2224f9a56771b3d4d05c3-bd9b549abca2';

Than make some vars:

private var nc:NetConnection;
private var sendNS:NetStream;
private var neerPeerID:String;

private var cam:Camera;
private var mic:Microphone;

When the application successfully loaded, we can init our camera, microphone and the net connection for outgoing streams:

private function init():void {
initCamera();
initNetConnection();
}

Taking the cam/mic is quite straightforward:

private function initCamera():void {
if (Camera.names.length > 0) {
cam = Camera.getCamera();
my_video_display.attachCamera(cam);
}

if (Microphone.names.length > 0) {
mic = Microphone.getMicrophone();
}
}

I said so. Than the net connection to the stratus server through RTMFP protocol:

private function initNetConnection():void {
nc = new NetConnection();
nc.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, netStatusEvent);
nc.connect(rtmfpServer);
}

When the net connection is ready, we can establish the sending stream:

private function netStatusEvent(event:NetStatusEvent):void {
trace('NetConnection status event (1): ' + event.info.code);
if (event.info.code == 'NetConnection.Connect.Success') {
neerPeerID = nc.nearID;
farPeerId_text.text = neerPeerID;
initSendNetStream();
add_contact_container.visible = true;
}
}

This is the point we've got out peerID we can share. wOOt! On setting the provider stream we can attach out camera to the stream. And we can define a client object accepts the connection (return true;):

private function initSendNetStream():void {
sendNS = new NetStream(nc, NetStream.DIRECT_CONNECTIONS);
sendNS.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, netStatusEvent);

var clientObject:Object = new Object();
clientObject.onPeerConnect = function(ns:NetStream):Boolean {return true;}

sendNS.client = clientObject;
sendNS.attachCamera(cam);
sendNS.attachAudio(mic);
sendNS.publish('video');
}

So far we have a working camera, microphone, and the stream is already on. Now prepare for accepting others stream:

private function addContact():void {
var nc2:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
nc2.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, function (event:NetStatusEvent):void {
trace('NetConnection status event (2): ' + event.info.code);
var receiveNS:NetStream = new NetStream(nc2, contact_peer_id_text.text);
receiveNS.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, netStatusEvent);
receiveNS.play('video');

var video:Video = new Video();
video.attachNetStream(receiveNS);

var uic:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
uic.width = 320;
uic.height = 240;
uic.addChild(video);
video_stack.addChild(uic);

contact_peer_id_text.text = '';
});
nc2.connect(rtmfpServer);
}

When we get a new stream, we create a new video object and add onto the stage.
I know, it's far far basic, but it's good for starting a tool like this.

Download the source code.

Bests,
Peter

Lolcat viewer

2009-12-25T02:56:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

What a peaceful Christmas day, isn't it? In the morning I wrote a small AIR application brings lolcats into your desktop. Basically it's a dummy RSS reader for ICanHasCheezburger shows the latest kittens. Here you are:

Let's take a look at the code:

I used Flex with Flex SDK 3.0.
First we need a couple of display objects:

Image container: the main lolcat image
Secondary image container: the same lolcat image with delay. It makes transitions seamless.
Indicator: an external SWF animation indicates network loading
Control bar: previous / next / refresh buttons

 <mx:Image id="image_backup"/>
<mx:Image id="image" updateComplete="imageUpdateComplete(event);" click="nextImage();"/>

<mx:SWFLoader source="{indicator}" width="40" height="40" id="indicator_swf" alpha="0.6"/>

<mx:Canvas backgroundColor="0x000000" backgroundAlpha="0.5" bottom="0" left="0" right="0" height="40"
 mouseOver="control_bar.alpha = 1"
 mouseOut="control_bar.alpha = 0.3"
 alpha="0.3"
 id="control_bar">
 <mx:LinkButton label="Previous" bottom="10" left="10" color="#CCCCCC" click="{previousImage()}"/>
 <mx:LinkButton bottom="10" right="10" label="Next" color="#CCCCCC" click="{nextImage()}"/>
 <mx:LinkButton label="Refresh" horizontalCenter="0" bottom="10" color="#CCCCCC" click="{refreshLolcatXML()}"/>
</mx:Canvas>

For the SWF animation it's highly suggested to embed the SWF movie itself:

   [Bindable]
  [Embed(source="indicator.swf")]
  public var indicator:Class;

Loading RSS feed is stupid simple. The feed's address:

   public static const LOLCAT_RSS:String = 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/ICanHasCheezburger';

And the upadating function for getting the feed itself:

   public function refreshLolcatXML():void {
   var ur:URLRequest = new URLRequest(LOLCAT_RSS);
   var ul:URLLoader = new URLLoader(ur);
   ul.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, rssReady);
   ul.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, networkError);
   ul.load(ur);
  }

Let's see what we have got when the request comes back (this is the event I registered for Event.COMPLETE):

   public function rssReady(event:Event):void {
   var xml:XML = new XML(event.target.data);
   var items:XMLList = xml.*..item;
   imageList.removeAll();
   currentImageNum = 0;
   for each (var item:XML in xml.*..item) {
    if (item..MEDIA_NS::content[1]) {
     imageList.addItem(item..MEDIA_NS::content[1].@url);
    }
   }
   nextImage();
  }

I really like the ActionScript 3 XML layer. XML is already a native ActionScript 3 item, and the XML and XMLList classes make processing XMLs so easy. Quickly the response string is converted to XML and traversed for the important lolcat URLs. On every RSS reload I save results in the imageList ArrayCollection variable. I used one defined namespace, because the URLs can be found under that namespace:

   public static const MEDIA_NS:Namespace = new Namespace('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/');

Right after getting the response the first image is displayed. These are the stepping functions:

   public function nextImage():void {
   if (image.source != imageList[currentImageNum]) {
    indicator_swf.visible = true;
   }
   image.source = imageList[currentImageNum];
   currentImageNum = (currentImageNum + 1) % imageList.length;
  }
 
  public function previousImage():void {
   currentImageNum = (currentImageNum - 2 + imageList.length) % imageList.length;
   nextImage();
  }

One last small trick. When the image container triggers an updateComplete event, the whole resized for the appropriate image's size:

   public function networkError(event:IOErrorEvent):void {trace('Network error: ' + event);}
 
  public function imageUpdateComplete(event:FlexEvent):void {
   trace('Image update. W: ' + image.measuredWidth + ' H: ' + image.measuredHeight);
   if (image.measuredWidth > 0) {
    var tw:Tween = new Tween(this, Application.application.width,  image.measuredWidth,       400, -1, onResizeWidthUpdate,  onResizeWidthEnd);
    var th:Tween = new Tween(this, Application.application.height, image.measuredHeight + 18, 400, -1, onResizeHeightUpdate, onResizeHeightEnd);
    image_backup.source = image.source;
    indicator_swf.visible = false;
   }
  }

With the Tween class it's also easy. This is the full Flex source, if you are interested in:
Download Lolcat's source.

And one other cool thing. I've seen a lot that awesome AIR installer object on many sites. So, made a bit research and found this tool you can make your own AIR installer:
Adobe AIR intaller badge This is what you see above.

Happy holidays,
Peter

Design Patterns

2009-12-24T13:48:00.000-08:00

for dir in BehavioralPatterns StructuralPatterns CreationalPatterns
do
  for pattern in `ls $dir`
  do
    tar -czf $pattern.tar.gz ./$dir/$pattern
    echo "Download $pattern pattern ($dir)
"
  done
done

6th Hungarian Drupal Podcast

2009-12-19T23:55:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

Our 6th podcast was about Drupal module development. We spoke about the first steps to make a project on http://drupal.org, about maintaining, clean code, sustainability and a lot of other useful stuffs. Check this out:

Magyar Drupal Podcast - 6. rész from Peter Arato on Vimeo.

(Sadly this episode is very silent.)

Regards,
Peter

5th Hungarian Drupal Podcast

2009-12-19T23:48:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

With a bit late let me announce our 5th podcast. It was about Drupal myths. A lot of people who don't know Drupal has bad feelings around it. We wanted to break these walls and collected all the most famous myths. Here we are:

Magyar Drupal Podcast - 5. rész from Peter Arato on Vimeo.

Regards,
Peter

Drupal multisite

2009-11-21T13:47:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

Let me show how I made a Drupal multisite on my localhost. Of course, I did it a bit different way (I'm sure). That's me. By the way, this is the NORMAL description about multisites: http://drupal.org/node/43816

1: Deploy a Drupal site
Download the newest Drupal and install it. I did it into a folder, under my web root folder: /PATHTOYOURWEBROOT/DRUPALMULTISITEDIR/

2: Add your first site name to /etc/hosts

sh# sudo echo "127.0.0.1 FIRSTMULTISITENAME" >> /etc/hosts

3: Also tell to Apache, where is your new domain points
Insert at the end of your httpd.conf this snippet:

<virtualhost>
ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host.example.com
DocumentRoot "/PATHTOYOURWEBROOT/DRUPALMULTISITEDIR"
ServerName FIRSTMULTISITENAME
ServerAlias FIRSTMULTISITENAME
</virtualhost>

4: Rename sites/default to your first multisite's name

sh# cd sites
sh# mv default FIRSTMULTISITENAME

5: Restart apache
After restart check this out: http://FIRSTMULTISITENAME/

Of course, it's just one site. Adding a new site (SECONDMULTISITENAME):

Create subdirectory in sites (SECONDMULTISITENAME)
Copy a brand new settings.php into it, and create a files folder
Add the /etc/hosts entry (2)
Add apache directive (3)

I think, it's not that hard.

Evening,
Peter

Hungarian Drupal Podcast - Episode 4

2009-11-21T07:54:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

We finished recording our 4th podcast. It was a bit calm, a bit non-informative, but still us:) We continued the development environment topic. The video:

Magyar Drupal Podcast - 4. rész from Peter Arato on Vimeo.

Next part will be - I hope so - a quite interesting episode: Drupal myths and legends.
We collect a lot of things ... wait for it ... in Google Wave. Yeah baby, we all have a Wave account. You can ask why I am so happy about it, and it's because a simple fact: concurrent editing. We have a single wave conversation with all the topics we would like to talk about, and we could edit it at the same time. It boosted the planning phase a lot.

Night,
Peter

FMS in OSX

2009-11-14T01:15:00.001-08:00

Hi Readers,

I would like to give you a quick description how to work with FMS (Flash Media Server) under OS-X. Unfortunately FMS server is only available for Windows and Unix. Almost. I tried to fire it up in Ubuntu 9.10, and got a bunch of error messages. I would have killed both of that bastard application. Nevermind. So these were my steps to a working environment:

1 - Install Virtualbox and Windows XP in it
This is an easy step, just make sure you use latest version of VBox.

2 - Run Windows XP, and install FMS
The development version of FMS is free: download Though, you have to have an Adobe account. (1 minutes registration) The installation is straight forward, you can't make a mistake. I suggest you using the built-in Apache if you don't use that guest os for other webserver functions.

3 - Port forward to the guest machine
I'm not a server guy, so maybe it's not the best, but it's working, and that is the point. By default, your guest OS is listening on your localhost (127.0.0.1). But without port forward you can't access to it. We have an Apache (port 80) and the FMS (admin server port: 1111, fms server port: 1935) on our newly installed Windows XP. These 3 ports we have to bind. Open a terminal in OSX, and type these commands:

(change the YOURGUESTMACHINESNAME text to the name of your guest OS - which is the name in the vbox machine list)


VBoxManage setextradata "YOURGUESTMACHINESNAME" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/httpfwd/Protocol" TCP
VBoxManage setextradata "YOURGUESTMACHINESNAME" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/httpfwd/HostPort" 8888
VBoxManage setextradata "YOURGUESTMACHINESNAME" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/httpfwd/GuestPort" 80

VBoxManage setextradata "YOURGUESTMACHINESNAME" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/fmsadmin/Protocol" TCP
VBoxManage setextradata "YOURGUESTMACHINESNAME" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/fmsadmin/HostPort" 8889
VBoxManage setextradata "YOURGUESTMACHINESNAME" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/fmsadmin/GuestPort" 1111

VBoxManage setextradata "YOURGUESTMACHINESNAME" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/fms/Protocol" TCP
VBoxManage setextradata "YOURGUESTMACHINESNAME" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/fms/HostPort" 8890
VBoxManage setextradata "YOURGUESTMACHINESNAME" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/fms/GuestPort" 1935

(more about these settings in the virtualbox's UserManual.pdf)

Now you have to restart your guest OS. Settings above allows you to access to your guest OS, for example for port 80 type http://localhost:8888 into your browser in OS-X. You should see the FMS server start page with a video (train). If you don't see, there is something I missed or is wrong.
And one more step, you have to turn of the firewall in Windows. (Sorry but I haven't found a better way.)

4 - Create a sample Flash / Flex project on the client side (host OS)

It doesn't really matter which one you use. Here you are my working actionscript code:


public var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();

public function connect():void {
   var r:Responder = new Responder(responderResult, responderStatus);

   nc.connect('rtmp://localhost:8890/HelloWorld');
   nc.call('serverHelloMsg', r, "John Doe");
}

public function responderResult(result:Object):void {
   trace('Result came: ' + result.toString());
}

public function responderStatus(status:Object):void {
   trace('Status update');
}

5 - create the server side code (in the guest OS)

The server side parts has to be written in ActionScript 1.0. (Pretty weird.) I just pasted the sample from the tutorial:


application.onConnect = function(client) {

   client.serverHelloMsg = function(text) {
       return "Welcome: " + text;
   }
 
   application.acceptConnection(client);
 
}

Copy it into: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flash Media Server 3.5\applications\HelloWorld\HelloWorld.asc.

6 - Start FMS server in the guest OS
In Start Menu you can find an icon that starts the FMS server.

7 - Test you application
And be patient if it won't work at the first try.

Of course, these stuffs are all available in the documentations.
Flash Media Server: get all the official documentations
Great FMS service tool for your host OS: FMS Feature Explorer

Best wishes,
Peter

Hungarian Drupal Podcast - Episode 3

2009-11-13T12:42:00.001-08:00

Hi Readers,

This week we had out third podcast (about development environments). I have to say, I'm so f**king enthusiast about it. I wouldn't have imagined that kind of greatness of a podcast. It's not about us, it's about a channel to share information. And we have feedback. I wouldn't enjoy 100$ per episode as much a correct negative feedback. It means someone is watching you. Ok, enough hype. Let's see the 3rd part:

Magyar Drupal Podcast - 3. rész from Peter Arato on Vimeo.

I guess I forgot to mention, but check the URL we have: http://www.vimeo.com/podcast That was a huge win for sure.
In the following episode we will continue with the second part of development environments. We left a lot of interesting stuff. On: 19th of November, 18:00. If you follow me on twitter, you will get a notification about the start.

We are waiting for your feedback/questions: podcast {worm} pronovix {point} com

Best wishes,
Peter

Drupal life

2009-11-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

This Friday me and my colleagues took some presentation at the university. I had a pretty cool and easy topic: contribution. For me, it means, how you can be a valuable member of the Drupal community. I always realize the Drupal is such an awesome thing. Of course, it's quite subjective, but have never seen other communities being so viral, enthusiastic. Here you are my slides:

Drupal Contributing

View more documents from Peter Arato.

I don't want to duplicate what is in there. I tried to cover the possibilities you can involve to Drupal. And yeah, it is vast, isn't it?:)

Honestly, there are no better slides the Dries's presentations. Those are absolutely awesome.

Night,
Peter

Drupal FormAPI Examples (with source)

2009-11-09T14:28:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

We at Pronovix used to keep Drupal lessons at Universty of Szeged (SZTE). My last presentation was about Form API. I made an example module with the following parts:

Basic form building - validation - submission
System setting forms
AHAH form elements
Theming form elements
Custom Form API (FAPI) field
Remote form execution
Confirmation form.

You can download the source code from: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2629592/formapi.tar.gz
If you enable the module, you should see these links in the Navigation menu:

My slides was just a shame, sorry about that, but I like more practical explanations.

Night,
Peter

Building a Druplash site - full Flash version

2009-11-08T08:55:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

I've already spoke enough about Druplash, now let's see how to build quickly (~2 hours from scratch) one. Here is a short demo about the stuff have:

There is several ways to leverage Flash-Drupal, and one is when using a full-sized Flash object on the site.
The features we insist everytime:

Deep linking (browser history, bookmarking, ...: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking)
Graceful degradation (disabled browsers - same HTML content)

Good news: for an initial release, we don't need to write any custom Drupal module. Some modules we have to download:

Services
AMFPHP (+ the AMFPHP itself)
SWFAddress (+ SWFObject and SWFAddress libraries)

For the demo we need also:

Views (V2)

Enable: Services, Services - Key Authentication, AMFPHP, Views Service, Node Service, System Service, Views, Views UI.
The downloaded Flash application assume you have a Views list of nodes with the name of: news. It also assumes you have a node with NID=1. (So you should create these two
parts.)

Warning: because of the rush, the site url is hardcoded in the Flash movie. You can recompile the Flex project with the correct path pointing to your site's amfphp gateway, or you put the site under drupal_sx_druplash_full folder (and the site should be there: http://localhost/drupal_sx_druplash_full/).
Update: the compiled SWF is updated in the tar.gz file. Now it should work out of the box on every URL.

The source of the Flex application: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2629592/DruplashFull_091220.tar.gz (updated)
If we installed successfully a base Drupal 6 site and enabled these modules, let's copy the Flash object (DruplashFull.swf) into: sites/default/files/DruplashFull.swf
Visit the SWFAddress settings page at: /admin/settings/swfaddress
The following image shows my settings:

Now you should see the replaced content if you visit the front page:

I think that's it. You have to give permission to non-admin users if you want to the same content with Flash them. This is just a very quick and dirty demo, but in the Flex source code you can check what basic features you can start.

I worked with the latest module version, but some of them (ex: Services) are under heavy development. Just be aware, user experience may be vary:) If you need any other info, let me know, I'd glad to help you.

Flex source: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2629592/DruplashFull_091220.tar.gz
Live demo: http://bison.hu/public/drupal_sx_druplash_full/

Best regards,
Peter

Hungarian Drupal Podcast - Episode 2

2009-11-07T03:03:00.000-08:00

Hi Readers,

Let me announce our new episode of the Hungarian Drupal Podcast. Topics:

Drupal meetings
Open Atrium
Search + Solr

As out listeners suggested, we made a topic list (above). This way you know what you can expect to. We set the lights a bit better, sat closer to the camera and tried to speak louder than in the first part. The first episode is watched by more than 170 people. I think it's a good start.
Here you are the video:

Pronovix podcast, episode 2 from Peter Arato on Vimeo.

Next time we will speak about how to build an efficient development environment. I think this is kinda topic can fill not just one full podcast. We'll see.
If you have any question, claim, or advice, please leave me a comment. Thanks in advance.

Best wishes,
Peter

Drupalcamp Prague (CZ)

2009-11-07T02:47:00.000-08:00

I had the privilege to participate on Drupalcamp CZ Prague: http://drupalcamp.cz/. It was an awesome Drupal meeting. I liked the city, I liked the people there. We arrived at the bus station, Prague just before midnight. We lost a bit, but the found the hostel. Both the 2 days there were plenty of good presentation. I also took one about Druplash, here you are my slides:

How to build a Druplash site?

View more documents from Peter Arato.

Although my English still horrible, it wasn't so bad. (I hope.) Though, I realized, when I take presentation, I'm half as smart as other times, at least. Maybe because of you don't want to waste the time with thinking of your words, just pushing the slides. There were some developer interested in the Flash - Drupal way of site building. I'm glad to it.
I really enjoyed the other presentations. Check the program: http://drupalcamp.cz/schedule/
At the nights we could taste some delicious Czech beers.
Yup, and the best non-drupal part: I were in KFC. OMG, I love that place. I ordered a big bucket (Kyblik) of chicken with fries and the mandatory unlimited drink.
Lot of good memories, thanks Prague. See you next time.

Best wishes,
Peter

Hungarian Drupal Podcast

2009-11-07T02:36:00.001-08:00

Hi Readers,

I always had the passion to help and share things I know (or not know). In Hungary, there are so few podcast about technology. That was the moment I realized, let's do it. This is our very first, very low cost podcast:

Pronovix podcast, episode 1 from Peter Arato on Vimeo.

We were so lame, but it seemed we had an audience. Let's see, why it's so cool, even if you have so much to learn? Because it's free knowledge. We bought some beer, heated up the room, sat down the coach and just spoke what we are enthusiast about. We stream every our podcast at the time of recording on UStream, this makes listeners possible to take real-time questions. Later then we realized it's not the best practice to talk about everything. On the other side we got several advice and critics. Let's me say a big THANK YOU for all your help in improving the podcast. Second episode is coming soon. [It's already happened, but you know, I'm a big blog-procrastinator.]

Best Regards,
Peter

Mindmap tool for Drupal

2009-09-12T00:17:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

As always, long time no see. I intend to write a small wrap-up about my new development, GraphMind: http://drupal.org/project/graphmind - Flex source
Origin of the project is Kristof Van Tomme's, our CEO idea. If you know FreeMind, you have to admit how useful organizing your ideas, tasks and everything in a mindmap. A whole theory is built around that (ex: GTD).
This a quick demo about how the code worked a week ago:

If you check the project page on drupal.org you'll get an overview about the features. You can try it also.
For me, the most interesting part was the inner structure of the code. I like to work with actionscript, especially in Flex Builder. Hardest challenge is to handle interaction in a way that doesn't require too much public variables and static classes. First I found a really useful approach: manager classes. For this project we need a small amount of managers for handling events between the different tiers. These magagers, of course, are singleton entities. There is one for the stage logic, one for the connection logic ...etc. Another new (for me) way to handle event driven flows are (as I called them) temporary transfer objects. For instance you need to load data through a connection, you work with the data itself, some state object (reflect the state of the flow) and some others. In an event driven flow you should pass all these items through numerous functions. That is where temporary transfer objects help a lot. When a new data load starts, a temporary object instantiated. During the connection stages (ex: connect, authentication, data load, data receive) the temporary object populates with new properties. At the end of the process you get the temp object with all the required data.
Other thing I'm not sure, if you have a display object represents data what classes you should use. For now I have a display class (subclass of UIComponent) with a property that a data-object class. It works fine, but it's possible there is a better way.
In flex you have a cool feature: view states. You can bind transition effect for state changes. One flaw this feature has is the lack of mixed states. But - now I realized you can do something similar if you group stage elements and use view states on groups (MXML components). Anyway:)
Ok, let's ruin that pink cloud, what about the annoying habits of flash?
I found key events and focus handling a bit messy. Why? Triggering key events you need a display object can receive focus (as far as I know). I use canvas for mindmap which seems incapable of receiving key events. You have to click on another element (textbox, datagrid..) if you want use keys. Ridiculous. Anybody has an idea how to solve it?
Next is onblur events for textinput fields. Onblur event triggered when it lose the focus. But if you click on a canvas element, onblur event on textfield don't triggered. WTF? And these things are quite important.
A small bug from yesterday was save() function for FileReference. It is in the reference but Flex Builder can't find it and so, can't compile. I updated to flex sdk 3.4 and still nothing. Any idea?
I have an education-version key for Flex Builder and it gave me right to get a Gumbo beta extension key (Flash Builder). I was really happy. Yesterday I downloaded and played with it. Importing my old project was seamless, however, Application.application is now deprecated, but the suggested class is not working for me. Needs searching. There is a bunch of new improvements I really want to try. First let's mention themes. And service builder. So cool stuffs. But still in beta. I'll try to upgrade GraphMind to the 4th version of the sdk.

Regards,
Peter

Augment reality sample

2009-08-16T02:12:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

I am quite busy as always and have no idea what to post. Recently we've been working on an awesome project involves Flash and Drupal. I can speak about this a lot, but that needs a bit more preparing. Till then I show you something I made in the past. When this awesome flash-3d-augmented reality technology came into the IT world I wanted to try and created a small sample.
That is it:

Really simple. By the way this is my first hackish screencast (because of typing instead of speaking). This English is so hard. Houhh.

Bye,
Peter

Switch

2009-07-27T10:12:00.001-07:00

Hi Readers,

Today I found a bit unusual usage of switch. What if you have different N options and you have to invoke M common commands and N different commands? How you can save some extra typing job for yourself? (Or how to avoid code repetition.)


switch (var) {
case n1:
...
case nN:
  common1();
  ...
  commonM();
case n1:
  special1();
  break;
...
case nN:
  specialN();
  break;
}

Got it? The trick is using the same case terms multiple times. If you like it check the DRY approach. And of course don't forget about KISS.

Good day,
Peter

Drupal Flash interaction example

2009-07-24T00:15:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

I had to make a presentation about a theoretical workaround describes an approach Drupal and Flash can work together. Basically there are two concepts. One Flash for all - means one big flash object is the whole site, and the other one, lots of flash objects in html. In the first concept the flash object handles everything. In the Drupal era it requires the Services and AMFPHP module. I would say it is rather a communicaton heavy way. On the other side the lots-of-flash way needs large numbers of interactions between the underground html layer. Lets see this approach in the slides:

Flash And Drupal

View more documents from Peter Arato.

Flex/AIR PHP evaluator

2009-07-19T08:55:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

OS X hasn't got [readline] for PHP. That is why you can't use [php -a] in command line for testing PHP codes. Sad. If you want one, you can get a similar from: http://www.fischerlaender.net/php/phpa-norl by Stefan Fischerländer and David Phillips. It's an easy replacement, however, I wanted to use one that can keep my command history. If you use macports, you maybe win but I don't want to use that. (I heard it is kinda evil sometimes.) Recently I have found a bestof documentation of Flex at http://bit.ly/1auMV8. (Have I mentioned it is free? :) Oh yeah.) So I made a really simple AIR php -a replacement.

Concept is stupid easy. An AIR app sends a POST request for a PHP script lies on my localhost. This script evaluate the text I want to check and sends back. See? K, check the code:
The AIR part:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">

 <mx:Script>
  <![CDATA[
   public function eval():void {
    var url:String = "http://localhost/flex_eval.php";
    var ur:URLRequest = new URLRequest(url);
    var ul:URLLoader = new URLLoader(ur);
    var uv:URLVariables = new URLVariables();
    
    uv.phpsnippet = php_snippet.text;
    ur.data = uv;
    
    ur.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
    
    ul.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, evalComplete);
    ul.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, ioError);
    
    ul.load(ur);
   }
   
   public function ioError(event:IOErrorEvent):void {
    trace(event);
    php_result.text = "Missing PHP file from:\n" + 
      "http://localhost/flex_eval.php\n\n" + 
      "Create one with the following code:\n\n" + 
      "<?php\n" + 
      "echo 'Flex PHP Snippet results ('.date('H:i.s').')'.\"\\n\\n\";\n" + 
      "eval($_POST['phpsnippet']);";
   }
   
   public function evalComplete(event:Event):void {
    trace(event);
    php_result.htmlText = event.target.data;
   }
  ]]>
 </mx:Script>

 <mx:TextArea left="10" right="279" top="10" bottom="40" id="php_snippet" backgroundColor="#2E2E2E" fontFamily="Courier New" color="#FFFFFF" fontWeight="normal" fontSize="12"/>
 <mx:TextArea width="261" right="10" top="10" bottom="10" id="php_result"/>
 <mx:Button label="Eval" bottom="10" left="10" right="279" click="eval();"/>
</mx:WindowedApplication>

And the PHP part:

<?php
echo 'Flex PHP Snippet results ('.date('H:i.s').')'."\n\n";
eval($_POST['phpsnippet']);

You can compile the mxml stuff in Flex Builder 3.0 (and I guess also with the free Flex sdk). And here you are a quick downloadable version:
http://bison.hu/public/PHPSnippet.air

Guddai readers,
Peter

Twistable Flash object with ActionScript3

2009-06-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

It came to my mind I've never made a twistable element in Flash. So I wrote one. The basics:
It needs an item (descendant of the DisplayObject class) to twist. Don't forget to position this element to the point you want to twist around. (Most cases it is the center point.) My idea is when you click on the object, you store the current angle relative to center of ui element and store the current angle of the object. Then if you move your cursor, you will know the difference between the initial angle and the current angle. And you add this difference to the stored angle of the object. [It is easy, however, my english makes it hard to understand.] The interesting thing is to get the angle from a cursor position. I thought that the good old trigonometrics functions give the shade between 0 and 360 but, it came to light, I was wrong. Some recall:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine#Sine]
A triangle with a 90 degree angle has 3 side: adjacent, opposite, hypotenuse. You can calculate the tangent alpha by division of the oposite with adjacent. Arctangent gives the reverse of tangent, so atan(tan(alpha)) = aplha. But if you make some test you realize its not the whole 360 degree (or 2PI in rad) but 2 peaces of 180. Strange, but I have never been a math guy.

Anyway, here you are my quick source. Just paste to a Flash IDE as it is and run it.

var angle_onDown:Number;
var angle_potmeter:Number;
var is_turn:Boolean = false;

var potmeter = new Sprite();
potmeter.graphics.beginFill(0xAA4422);
potmeter.graphics.drawRoundRect(-100, -100, 200, 200, 20, 20);
potmeter.graphics.endFill();
potmeter.x = potmeter.y = 200;
addChild(potmeter);

potmeter.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, onDown);
potmeter.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, onMove);
potmeter.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, onUp);

function onDown(event:MouseEvent):void {
 is_turn = true;
 angle_onDown = getCurrentAngle(event.stageX - potmeter.x, event.stageY - potmeter.y);
 angle_potmeter = potmeter.rotation;
}

function onMove(event:MouseEvent):void {
 if (is_turn) {
  potmeter.rotation = angle_potmeter - (angle_onDown - getCurrentAngle(event.stageX - potmeter.x, event.stageY - potmeter.y));
 }
}

function onUp(event:MouseEvent):void {
 is_turn = false;
}

function getCurrentAngle(relX:Number, relY:Number):Number {
 var relDegree:Number = Math.atan(relY / relX) / Math.PI * 180;
 return relX < 0 ? 180.0 + relDegree : relDegree;
}

You can grab the rectangle and twist.

I would be happy if anyone can explain why the formula in the getCurrentAngle() function gives 2 peaces of 180 interval? (That is why I added the ternary operator for the return command.)

Night,
Peter

PHP Beauty

2009-06-24T15:15:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

Google announced this article collection recently: http://code.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-php.html I thought 'What the heck, let's bechmark something.', and took a small experiment:

<div style="display:none;">
<?php

$sum = 0;

$count = 10000;
$iteration = 100;

for ($j = 0; $j < $iteration; $j++) {
 $t1 = microtime(TRUE);
 for ($i = 0; $i < $count; $i ++) {
  //print "aaa"."bbb"."ccc"."ddd"."eee"."fff"."ggg"."hhh";
  echo  'aaa','bbb','ccc','ddd','eee','fff','ggg','hhh';
 }
 $t2 = microtime(TRUE);
 $sum += $t2 - $t1;
}
?>
</div>
<?php

var_dump($sum / $iteration);

And the results were quite nice: 0.026 against 0.017. So that is why echo still rocks, because with echo you can use comma instead of period. Never heard of commas for echo before. This is a PHP magic:)

Night,
Peter

OS X + PHP Part 2

2009-06-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

As I promised, this my second explanation about how to build a PHP web development environment in OS X (10.5).
As I mentioned a very basic configuration ships with the distro by default. But for me it was not enough. Going further from my last setup (http://itarato.blogspot.com/2009/06/first-macbook-webdeveloper-enviroment.html) I noticed there isn't APC for PHP. No GD2 support (neither GD1). I depressed till found this miracle: http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/
Marc Liyanage compiled a very good PHP 5.2.9 with a lot of modules. If you step through his description you can install it quite easily. At the end you get a new php.ini. You need to add your previous xdebug settings to it. For APC see this article: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1578979. As it turned out, the pecl related APC is wrong on OS X, but the original APC compilation will work.
Lately my favorite high end IDE is the stable NetBeans (6.7 RC3 has a StackOverflow for me). For PHP it works out of the box but for any Java related project I had to change the default java classpath: http://statistics.netbeans.org/analytics/detail.do?id=150231

In a nutshell thats all about it. The MySQL and Apache server works as I wrote before. By the way just for play I tried the free MAMP application, but I found it a little bit old for my claims. It has a pretty cool minimalistoc control interface, works fine but doesn't contain some imprtant module. To be honest I was't bother with it so much. (My bad.)

One thing. Last week I began to use NetBeans for debugging PHP projects. The reason I didn't use it for debug I didn't know how I can examine pages other than index.php. But as a matter of fact if it starts and finish it's first debug run you can enter any subpage into the browser (the same has the xdebug session) and the debug cycle will start again. So its really cool. There is a big advantage against ViM+XDebug, I like more NetBeans's variable browser. In ViM you are restricted to the php xdebug config (ex maximum variable nested level) and the limited height of the editor. But sake of NB's tree visualizaton you can traverse arrays and objects quite convenient.
(Other tiny minus sign for osx - the default key bindings messes the F2..F6 key usages in vim.)

Thats it. Any webdev environment related question would be welcomed:)

Bye,
Peter

SQL dump with each database separately

2009-06-14T00:44:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

This morning I missed my old MySQL tables from Windows XP, but for some reason I needed separate database dumps for each db. As far as I know I've 2 options to do that, dump each db in command line or to write a script in command line. No way. So I made a quick & dirty PHP script to generate the dump commands:

<?php

$usr = 'YOURUSER';
$pwd = 'YOURPASS';
$date = date('Ymd');

$conn = mysql_connect('localhost', $usr, $pwd);
$resource = mysql_list_dbs();

while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($resource)) {
  echo 'mysqldump -u '.$usr.' --password='.$pwd.' '.$row->Database.' > mysqldump_'.$date.'_'.$row->Database.'.sql'."\n";
}

And then:

c:\php dumpscript.php > dumpcmd.bat
c:\dumpcmd.bat

Thats it.

Gbai!

First Macbook - webdeveloper enviroment

2009-06-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

This week I've got my first Macbook. I don't want to say any advertisement for the machine. Apple already has a very ugly campaign, just check www.apple.com and watch some commercial. Anyway. I love it even if it's so hard to setup.
Some quick steps, how you can setup a minimal web developer environment if you've never seen OS X.

OS - by default
Apache (2.2) - Enable it in System preferences / Sharing (Web) [http://www.procata.com/blog/archives/2007/10/28/working-with-php-5-in-mac-os-x-105/]
Apache rewrite - overwrite appropriate line in httpd.conf to: AllowOverride All
PHP - by default
MySQL - download the official 5.06 version package (install both two dmg-s), and link the /tmp/mysql.sock to /var/mysql/mysql.sock
MySQL - if mysql doesn't allow to get in, you have to hack an account [http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Security/MySQL_root_password_recovey]
XDebug : download macvim, xdebug plugin for vim and compile the xdebug extension [http://www.chrissearle.org/blog/technical/running_xdebug_204_osx_leopard_apachephp]

Important paths / files:

/etc/php.ini
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
/etc/apache2/users/youruser.conf
/private/etc/... [almost the same as in /etc]
apachectl restart/start/stop
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql
/Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM start/stop/restart

It just an overview, it's highly suggested to read some external materials. My intention was giving a small insight what you should expect. For me (as a first-time macer) was kinda hard to setup the basic stuffs. Of course there are easier ways. If you want to find some seamless solution, just check out these projects: MAMP, Fink.

I want to write about my other experiences about the mac, but for now there are tons of works to do, so back to mac.

Night!

Tiny Hanoi solver C in a tweet

2009-06-01T13:00:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

Recently I've started to re-learn C. (You know, always fun:) Unfortunately I've never know the language well. So, that is my smallest code that can resolve the so-called Tower of Hanoi problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi

Actually the code could fit in a tweet:) Check this out:

#include
main(){h(1,4,3);}h(int f,int t,int c){if(c==1)printf("%d>%d\n",f,t);else{int b=7^(f|t);h(f,b,c-1);h(f,t,1);h(b,t,c-1);}}

Night,
Peter

Pattern recognision based Drupal trigger

2009-06-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

Last week I contribute my second module on drupal.org:
webcam_trigger

I used the so popular technology came up recently: augmented reality with a small difference, not there isn't any 3D magic. (But I'm thinking on it.) You can find a detailed description on the link above.

Night,
Peter

Drupal sandbox creator shell script

2009-06-01T01:53:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

I'm a really bad blogger. First, I never write. Secondly, I never write about new stuffs. I have my reason and to be honest, I've seen too many very good article so I had to realise, it's not going to be a tech blog. I'm really curious about how my coming MacBook affects to my reading habit. I've got a lot of hope in it. And another big news for me. I'll be a proud cat holder? Call me crazy but she will be my first child. (Besides that if her teacher says she is the smartest in the class - I won't believe it:) Anyway. To restart this stuff I intend to share a small Drupal site generator script with you.

What is the problem?
I'm a Drupal developer. I need to test modules before using it on production sites. I need to try out a lot of things. And the best for doing that is a Drupal sandbox. But it takes 1 or 2 minutes to create one. (At least for me.) ((It should be a Drupal install contest - yeah:))

Solution?
Create a sandbox once and pre-populate it when needs a new one.

Prepaire:

Download the latest Drupal install: http://drupal.org/
Install it in a directory called: drupal_sandbox
Install all the modules you want by default (contrib ones as well)
Use the database name of: drupal_sandbox in the settings.php
Tar the drupal_sandbox directory: tar -cvzf drupal_sandbox.tar.gz drupal_sandbox
Create an sql dump: mysqldump -u YOURUSER --password=YOURPASS drupal_sandbox > drupal_sandbox.sql

The script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Directory where the tar.gz and sql file lies
package_dir=~/download
# Base file name for the tar.gz and sql files
package_name=drupal_sandbox
# Your web root
www_dir=~/www
# Your MySQL user
mysql_pwd=YOURMYSQLUSER
mysql_user=YOURMYSQLPASSWORD

cd $www_dir
tar -xvzf $package_dir/$package_name.tar.gz
mv $package_name $1
cd $1/sites/default
mv settings.php settings.php.bckup
sed "s/$package_name/$1/g" settings.php.bckup > settings.php

mysql -u $mysql_user --password=$mysql_pwd -e "create database $1"
mysql -u $mysql_user --password=$mysql_pwd $1 < $package_dir/$package_name.sql

Usage:
Call the script with a parameter (the name of the new drupal site (directory & sql))

sh ./drupal_creator.sh drupal_site_for_testing

Thats it. I hope it works for you. On my environment its fine.

Good luck,
Peter

HTML element related data storage

2009-03-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks,

I'm working on a voting widget generator Drupal module. Arbitrary voting widgets can be defined through a hook, and my module renders them to the node page. At the final phase the forms are converted to an ajaxian style and this needs a lot of information related to elements. The good old (quick and dirty) way to do this is the custom attributes. For example:

<img src="http://www.blogger.com/..." class="..." weight="..." type="..." key="..." nid="..." />

As far as I know, it works in most browser, however, I bet it fails on any xhtml validation. (And so ugly.) My idea is a common data storage. You create a new element with a unique ID that can be a key as well in a javascript object, which would contain data. Let's see an example:

<script type="text/javascript>
var data = {};
$('div.class').append('<img id="i1" src="pic1.png" />');
// save data
data['i1'] = {weight:__, type:__, key:__, nid:__, names:[__, __, __]};
// retrieve data
var necessary_name = data['i1'].names[2];
</script>

That's all. This example is just a schema. It can help if you generate lots of elements or you want to attach data elements in runtime.

Cheers,
Peter

Drupal module finder Flex - AIR application

2009-03-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

Hi,

Recently I began learning Flex. The idea was from my boss and a girl who linked an adobe site with a LOT flex video on it. (Thanks @SquirrelMaster) http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/ - check it

In the Drupal world there are two important buzzwords related to Flash: Druplash and Druplex. In a nutshell, these words cover the intelligent way that a Drupal application and a Flash application can communicate between each other. The basic idea behind this is the usage of Drupal as a back-end (information source) and the Flash as a better way to visualize the datas. To embed a flash game, video or a file/image uploader is not communication at all. As far as I know, it is very new field, however, there are quite a lot interesting idea there isn't any world changing way to implement it. If you interested in it, here you are some links to dig:

SWFObject provide a better way to add flash content to your HTML. It checks the client's flash player and browser capabilities. And if the environment unable to render your SWF appropriately, it displays an alternative content -> in the SEO side, makes your page readable for robots.
http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

With SWFAddress your flash object can communicate with the JavaScript on the same page. Thus JavaScript can send a state (like the url) about the site (and from the url the flash can restore some action or timeline state - for example if the url is www.mywebshop.com/#shoes, it loads the shoes page). And of course vica-versa. Flash can send it's state to javascript and with that the javascript can modify the url for example. If its seems useless just think about sending a url for your friend. If the flash site can't handle the url, it always shows the home page.
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/

Drupal has a module called Services. It defines a bunch of services (user services, node services, ...etc) and supports several layers to communicate (HTTP, RPC, XML-RPC, SOAP). The work-flow abstraction is quite simple. You send a request to the Drupal site, it does something (get data) and send back to the caller. The real power that you can create any custom services easily and with it you can retrieve any the information you want from Drupal.
http://drupal.org/project/services

AMF is a message format Flash use in transactions. It's binary, so mush more smaller than an XML message format. AMFPHP is a converter from AMF to PHP native format.
http://www.amfphp.org/

AMFPHP porting to Drupal.
http://drupal.org/project/amfphp

There are some slides about Druplash and Druplex:

Drupal & Flash

View more presentations from Peter Arato.

Anyway. I fell in love with Flex. The reason I'm writing this post I developed a small application that helps searching Drupal modules on your desktop. How? With AIR. Unfortunately you have to install the desktop flash interpreter tool: called AIR player. It's more or less the same as Flash Player with a minor difference, it have the flash ran on desktop. Another interesting development: http://www.openscreenproject.org/ Adobe put the SWF and FLV/F4L technology to free license and strives to ease running flash applications on different devices. You know, now it's not the best on a unix based distro. But, ... at least you have the option for it.

So, back to my Flex app. If you want to try, you can download from here:
http://www.bison.hu/public/drupal_module_search_v01.air

Adobe AIR player is available at here:
http://get.adobe.com/air/

I can imagine a lot Flex application which can help the Drupal development. Making this was't more than 2 hours. Well, I know, it doesn't do too much as well.

If you have a creative idea that would be great to implement with Flex, please tell me. I'd be pleased to hear any feedback.

Thanks,
Peter

Drupal Timetracker Screencast

2009-02-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

This week I made my first screencast. It's about my new Drupal module called Timetracker. I have never ever thought how hard to make a video introduction. As my colleagues said, I speak in Hunglish, some kind of mixing with English and Hungarian. I sware I'm working on to imporve it. But you know. I'm not a rocket scientist. Anyway. That video took me 2 days and a lot of struggling. The module the video about is a tool for tracking your personal activities in the Drupal sphere. You can find several similar pages on the net, like www.bubbletimer.com. Actually it's a pretty useful application.
My module is still under developing, although it's working fine. But it has some performance and usability issue I want to make better. I sent my application for a CVS account to drupal.org, I hope they'll answer me soon.
So, here is the brief introduction about Timetracker:

I used Camtasia Studio to record that stuff and to be honest, I amazed how cool is this tool. Unfortunately the free version is time limited but I suggest everybody to try it if thinking about screencasting.

Cheers,

10 practice how to improve your productivity

2009-02-15T00:07:00.000-08:00

I keep myself as a workaholic guy. In the last few years I strove to be more and more productive. There are a couple of practices which save time for you a day. I want to share some of them with you. (DANGER! If you do exactly what is written, you can easily become to antisocial.:)

1 - do your household works rarely
When you washing dishes or clean your room there is a huge overhead to prepare for the process and after that it takes time to work again. If you buy 7 dinner sets or 40 pair of socks your costs are cleared in a few weeks. Do you know the activity scattering theory? If you have N jobs and the i. job takes Ti time than:
T1 + T2 + ... + TN = SUM(Ti)i=1..N * SQRT(N) * 1.2
So it takes more than the total time because you can't change tasks in a moment.
win ~ 3.5 hours a week

2 - walk fast
Be quick whatever you have to do if its not your work. Walk fast to your work and home. An average human walks with 3-5 km/h. When you fast you reach even 10-13 km/h. Anyway, you don't have do window shopping or sightseeing. Products are expensive and the city is boring.
win ~ 2 hours a week

3 - use a mindmap
Thinking on things you don't remember eats time. Nobody can hold everything in his or her head. With a mindmap you can maintain all the things you are going to do. There are bunch of free mindmap applications on the internet. Freemind, MindMeister, MindOMO... If you don't know the GTD methodology, I suggest you to read about it.
win ~ 2.5 hours a week

4 - create the best desktop environment
You can save a lot of time with a well configured desktop. There are some of the best practices:

fast dial icons everywhere (frequently visited bookmarks, most used program icons...)
scripts for frequent processes (remote connection, generate things, version tracking practices...)
use online tools: email, rss reader, mindmap, storage, server works (thus you can work everywhere)
make a unix setup script with your custom configuration files, commands and installation profiles (reduce os installation time)
use 2 monitors instead of 1 large

win ~ 3 hours a week

5 - listen power metal a lot
If you are listening dynamic music (power metal, speed metal) you feel yourself to be forced to work faster. And it gives you energy as well.
win ~ 1 hour a week

6 - you have to deal with tiredness
Mature human needs about 6 hours of sleeping a day. But even if you sleep 6 hours, you could be tired. I know coffee is popular, but fruits and vegetables are important as well. And also you can organize your works. For example if you are tired, let's do some boring administration stuff. And thus you can do the hard work when you can concentrate.
win ~ 2 hours a week

7 - buy books instead of reading PDFs (but keep those too)
Books are cheap if you think how they can help your job. And you can read faster real pages than the screen. You can add comments and highlight parts easily as well. But PDF documents are really useful when you want to search on a certain keywords.
win ~ 1.5 hours a week

8 - don't have lunch at home
Making your own food takes a lot of time. Buying ingredients. Preparing. Cooking. Eating. Cleaning. And in this case you have to find out what do you want to eat. And to get healthy ingredients cost a lot. Restaurants are cheaper and more efficient.
win ~ 3 hours a week

9 - buy more RAM and use faster internet connection
Everybody hates waiting for programs to start or give feedbacks. Even if it takes a few minutes it happens a hundred or thousand times a day during your work, so let's multiply it: few seconds x 1000 = few 1000 seconds ~ 1 hour . Don't forget a major rule! If you can get things faster, you get things faster, thus you do get more of them. More = better.
win ~ 1 hour a week

10 - never try to guess how many tips you've got before you write a 'TOP X' article
I wasted about an hour with thinking about the 10th practice. But I haven't got any other really efficient idea. Don't waste your own time with useless things.
win ~ 1 hour

Total - you win ~20.5 hours a week! Not bad. If you get 40$ for an hour it is 820$ a week. So a new MacBook is 1299$ and you can buy one in 12 days:) OMG that's beautiful:)

Be agile, be enthusiastic, be efficient. That's it. Thanks for reading it.
Cheers,

I'm back to sum up the last three weeks

2009-02-13T09:49:00.000-08:00

Hi,

Long time no see. First, I'm happy that now I'm working on Pronovix. My new colleagues are awesome. They are really lifehackers:) This company works with Drupal and made several cool stuffs. Until a month ago I'd never participated in any Drupal project. When I began learning from Pro Drupal Development I felt myself strong and energetic and agile. But when I got my first mission, it changed a little bit:) Thinking in a Drupal way is REALLY hard at the first time. You know. Everybody can make a full fledged Ajax site with a strong PHP back-end. But when your hands are tight, it could be a huge pain. And the point. In English. Yeah. That's cool. But I love challenges. Learning is fun. Drupal fun. English fun. Working fun. Thats I guess equal to FUN^4. Not bad.
The other interesting happenings was the installing war. God knows how many times I sad malicious words. Anyway. Its all because my old Asus laptop. There are 4 types of Linux distributions:
1 - not well supported, pain (60%)
2 - deprecated kernel, softwares (10%)
3 - cant detect properly my SiS videocard (10%)
4 - cant detect my Broadcom wifi card (20%)
I know. Every geek is saying that you can always configure your unix based distro. Yes. But I can't. My favorite screenplay:
1 - I need network access
2 - To enable the network I had to fire up my wifi
3 - To fire up my wifi i had to download the firmwares and stuffs from the network
Yes, thats recursive. Maybe some parts of my brain still on running. That cause me a big headache. But I couldn't have a rest because on windows the web development really slow. I tried the follow distros:
Ubuntu (4 version), Mint, SuSE, Debian, Arch, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Slackware, FreeBSD, PcBSD.
But 2 days ago miracle happened. Just browsed www.distrowatch.com and stumbled upon of Mepis Linux. I've never heard about it. But found quite a lot update, so thought it worth a try. And then ... First it asked me what resolution I want during installation. WOW! Kick ass. Next, it discovered my wifi card and made enable networking. Crazy. Then it can connected to the Debian Lenny repository, so really up to date. Thanks God it uses KDE 3.5.10. Only one defect it has, cant render monochrome fonts. But the default way isn't so bad. I can handle it.
So, I suggest you trying it. At least once. Oh, I forgot the candy:) My webcam is working under Mepis. (Even XP is incapable to do this.) Run and download - http://www.mepis.org/
Last I want to share with you, I found a very delicious gummy candy:) And If I mentioned delicious, I registered on http://delicious.com/. I don't know why I did't take that before. To be honest, I feel shame. You know my bookmarking site idea in my former post. You can follow me there: http://delicious.com/itarato
And one thing at the end. I watched anime. This is a huge step to me. And I get used to drinking coffee in the weekends. Maybe once I'll become to a real geek:)
So. I'm hungry thus this post is over. I hope I could give you at least a small information (use Mepis).
Tomorrow I plan writing a blogpost about 'Top 10 thing which makes you more productive'. Because I'm always striving to be the most productive I can. Now is really bad.
And I wrote a small article about unit/functional testing (Selenium, PHPUnit...), but I need a little time to correct it. Maybe on Sunday.

Cheers,

Doctrine or own database layer

2009-01-26T11:56:00.000-08:00

Good Evening fellows,

Last night I commit some changes to github (see at last post). To test that code works properly, I checked out it. (Or checkouted? Sorry for that.) And I realized, I had to modify an accessibility modifier in Doctrine's code. (One variable from private to public.) I had to take this change, because Doctrine has it's own autoloader support. But at the beginning of my development, I decided to use as well. And as we know, two autoloader don't work at the same code. So I built in Doctrine's autoloader in my one, but to work fine, I had to access to $_loadedModelFiles. That's the story. However, I'm wondering, which way I should continue my development. What do you think? The options:

1 - I keep Doctrine, because it is awesome, and create a subclass of Doctrine to populate it with an accessor
2 - Drop this idea and write a thin database layer/connector with a medium level of security features

To make a good decision, I list some pros and cons:

Why I should keep Doctrine?
- it's fully tested
- secure
- OO based
- use the hydrated technology
- use cache
- you can describe relationships between tables, and Doctrine will find out when you try to use something like this: $user->boss->company->ceo->hometown->postcode
- its done
- universal (mysql, postrgesql, oracle, sqlite...)

Why not?
- its huge, probably you don't need it in small sites (and with large sites you chose another framework:)
- its not mine
- you have to download separately
- mess up my autoloader
- not the best for optimizing database queries (I think so, but it could be a very stupid thought)
- its huge (again)

I guess, Doctrine should have to go. But I will break my head on it this week.
Anyway, If you could suggest me anything... please, I would be glad about it.

Cheers!

PHP development

2009-01-24T12:13:00.000-08:00

Hi,

In this post I'm gonna write, what environment I'm working in. I'm always hesitating about what os should be used:
- linux (debian, ubuntu, slackware)
- solaris
- windows (xp, vista)
Making easy the choice, I'm usually forced using windows xp. (It must be some 'LOL' in your head.) I tell why. At first, Adobe Flash/Photoshop runs only under WinXP (and OS-X, but unfortunately I don't have enough money to buy a Mac, and iDeneb (http://ideneb.ihackintosh.net/) doesn't support audio). Next, in my humble opinion, that on TFT display only the plain old monochrome font rendering the best method to display texts. I hate when I can see the red and green/blue offset near the fonts face. And to be honest, some unix distributions have some problems in this field. Even if you managed to setup monochrome fonts in the base system, qt3 and qt4 applications, there are several place where ugly fonts left (eg. in browser). I think if you are a web developer, it matters. Anyway, from my side the main reason the adobe products. I hate to reboot systems every hour. That's, why I use XP. But, as you read before in my blog, I use VirtualBox as well (with Ubuntu on it):)
To code I usually use Eclipse PDT (now version 2.0, hurray!) or GVim. This morning I found a very exciting tool which for debugging PHP: http://tech.blog.box.net/2007/06/20/how-to-debug-php-with-vim-and-xdebug-on-linux/
It wasted half of the day to setup, but totally worth it. To raise your curiosity, I tell only a little about it (more on the page I linked):
With this Vim + remote XDebug you can follow the code running at runtime, line by line, function by function. You can see the function stack, breakpoints ... kicking awesome. (and a cool magic for those you want to enchant)
For tracking my code I get used to using GIT. I'm glad to know GIT. If you know too, you know what I mean, If not, just visit http://git-scm.com/ and discover it. Unfortunately msysGit got across my system (some memory dump, even I uninstalled CygWin completely), so I use Git on CygWin. It's convenient, and can run gitk with graphical interface. I had a small pain pushing my repo to github (because of ssh keys), but at the and it succeeded. If you are enough brave, visit my github repo at: http://github.com/itarato/easy-php-framework/tree/master
I decided to maintain this framework more frequent. Working with Drupal gives me a lot idea how a good framework has to be work. But of course, I don't want to steel:) [Think about it, for a minute! What is stealing? Especially in the development world. Not an easy topic. It needs bears to discuss. A lot!] Anyway its free as Drupal. So, nothing to worry about.
To finish my dev. environment, its important to tell some about the background:
- MySQL 5.06
- Apache 2.2
- PHP 5.2.7 (with APC, PDO, XDebug...)

Thats all folks, If I forgot something, I strive to recover that.
Cheers!

JQuery minimal validation plugin

2009-01-23T13:39:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

Tonight I am gonna spread a dummy JQuery plugin:) At first I want to fix that I love jQuery. It's logical, well structured and awesome (like Barney Stinson). One boring night I wanted to create a jquery plugin, just for fun and see how it works. I decided to write a validation plugin. The topmost features of a validation plugins are the follows:
- disable submission until all the fields are fill the requirements
- display some information about the error's cause
- sign somehow the parts of the form are false
- if an item became valid, warning message will disappear (toggling)
And of course, there are several criteria related to different kinds of form elements:
- not empty (required)
- only digits
- email
- min/max value/length
- ... etc

I made the basic features with checking 'required' criteria. This sample for those guys (ladies) who recently started to work with jquery or javascript. I tested it on newest browsers (FF3, O9, IE7, C1), and worked fine on each of them. If you curious about some other criteria implementation or anything, I will happy to help you.

And the stuff... oh yes. It needs a form, like:

<form action="" method="post" id="form1">
 <label for="name">Name</label>
 <br />
 <input type="text" name="name" class="required"/>
 <br />
 <label for="email">Email</label>
 <br />
 <input type="text" name="email" class="required" />
 <br />
 <label for="description">Description</label>
 <br />
 <textarea class="required" name="description"></textarea>
 <br />
 <br />
 <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

and needs a style:

.validation {
 background: #f55;
 padding: 4px;
 border: 2px solid #fff;
 color: #fdd;
 font-size: 10px;
 float: right;
}

and finally needs to bind to a form via jquery:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $("form#form1").validate();
</script>

That's it. If you want this working sample:
View it - http://www.bison.hu/public/sandbox4/
Download it - http://www.bison.hu/public/sandbox4/jquery_minimal_validation.zip
[after download - don't forget to get jquery####.js and link in the html]

Sleep well

Firefox bookmark export

2009-01-20T09:16:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone,

Once happened this situation. I wanted to export my bookmarks from Firefox (3.0.5), but no one *.html files were created. Ok, I thought, JSON format is still appropriate, but an error message occured, and the exportation was failed.
I find this bug report about it:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Unable_to_export_bookmarks_to_HTML_file_-_Firefox
So maybe Avast antivirus and PC-Tools Spyaware Doctor was guilty for that matter. But I didn't tend to close those applications, so, here is a tricky way to solve the problem:
Open Google Chrome -> Import Bookmarks and Settings -> Select Firefox and the bookmarks checkbox -> Import ... and now you are able to export the same from Google Chrome.

Sometimes I'm thinking about a site I should develop for saving personal bookmarks online. I can imagine some enchanted feature in it, for example, at first, it could load a speed dial page (like Opera). Or there would be a scored list. So, if you visit a page more times than others, it would be on a better place in the ordered list. I think its sounds logical, because some pages are used more frequent, so its likely to search these links more times.
On the other hand, its on the web. Pretend you need an important website you save before, but you saved it at home, and you are somewhere in the world (or at work). So annoying. Maybe, at default all the links could be private, but you can share any of them (like Google Reader feeds). But now, it is just an idea. And as always, probably there are several sites exists already in the internet ... please inform us if you know a good one:) Thanks!

Cheers!

Save Skype chat history

2009-01-16T11:58:00.000-08:00

Hi,

Tonight I want to present my first VBScript. Before having lunch, I had some free time, so I surfed the net, when bumped into the developer section at Skype.com. I remembered, my every OS-reinstall destroyed Skype chat history. But to be honest, the default format of the history filer is very messy, so it is difficult to read. I decided to delve into the SkypeAPI technology and it turned out that making simple scripts is so easy. You can use PHP, JavaSctipt, JScript, Java and VBScript. I choose the last one, because it seemed to be the most easy to run in Windows. You just put in a file with vbs extension, and run. So here is the code I wrote, I'll tell how it works soon:

' Define global variables
Dim oFSO, chat_file, folder_to_save
' Directory where You want to save history (you can modify it)
' Now it is relative, so it will be created where Your *.vbs script runs
folder_to_save = "SkypeChatHistory"
line_count = 0

' Create FSO
Set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set_next_free_dir()

' Connect to Skype API via COM
Set oSkype = WScript.CreateObject("Skype4COM.Skype", "Skype_")
' Open skype, if it is not running
If Not oSkype.Client.IsRunning Then
oSkype.Client.Start()
End If

WScript.Echo "Skype history will be saved. Found " & oSkype.Chats.Count & " chat group."

' Iterate chats
For Each oChat In oSkype.Chats
names = ""
' First name is You, so it is unnecessary to keep
no_1st_flag = TRUE
For Each oUser In oChat.Members
If no_1st_flag Then
no_1st_flag = FALSE
Else
   names = names & "_" & oUser.FullName
End If
Next
get_file("chat" & names & ".txt")
chat_file.WriteLine(vbNewLine & "==== CHAT HISTORY (" & Replace(names, "_", "") & ") ====" & vbNewLine)
line_count = line_count + oChat.Messages.Count
' Fix by an anonymous commenter
If oChat.Messages.Count > 0 Then
For Each oMsg In oChat.Messages
' Fix by Vadim Kravchenko
On Error Resume Next
chat_file.WriteLine(oMsg.FromDisplayName & " (" & oMsg.Timestamp & "): " & oMsg.Body)
Next
End If
chat_file.Close
Next

WScript.Echo "Backup was finished (" & line_count & " line saved). You can find your chats in: ./" & folder_to_save

' Garbage collection
SET chat_file = NOTHING
SET folder_to_save = NOTHING
SET oFSO = NOTHING
SET oSkype = NOTHING

' Access to a file given by name
Sub get_file(file_name)
' Parameter fix by: rommeech
Set chat_file = oFSO.OpenTextFile(folder_to_save & "/" & file_name, 8, True, -1)
End Sub

' Find an appropriate directory the logs to save, however, to avoid collision with former dirs
Sub set_next_free_dir()
If oFSO.FolderExists(folder_to_save) Then
ext = 1
While oFSO.FolderExists(folder_to_save & "_" & ext) And ext < 100
  ext = ext + 1
Wend
folder_to_save = folder_to_save & "_" & ext
End If
oFSO.CreateFolder(folder_to_save)
End Sub

Save it to your Desktop (*.vbs), and double click on it. At the first time, Skype will ask you, whether you are aware of the security issues, and really want to add permission to connect the SkypeAPI ... if you trust me, just click OK. It will creates a folder called SkypeChatHistory and some files in it. Every filename consists the other member of the chat sessions, so, if you talked 3 times with your friend, John Doe, there will be a 'chat_John Doe.txt' in SkypeChatHistory with 3 conversation in it. If you are keen-eyed, you will notice conversation lines are in reversed order. --homework-- :)
Now, I think, this code is quiet enough to save messages, and learn from it the way it works. If you can write a really small function to invert the collection (oChat.Messages), please comment it, and I will extend the code. Perhaps I make a gui for it with Visual Studio, I don't know. It must be dozen of good Skype backup applications already.

Update: eigenein did a fantastic job making a Windows application for the same purposes: http://eigenein.github.com/skype-historian-website/

Sleep well!

Books from Amazon

2009-01-14T09:41:00.000-08:00

Today finally I've got my books:

Code Complete (2nd edition)
Programming Ruby (2nd edition)
Pro Drupal Development (2nd edition)

Now I see, each one is second edition. Nice. I'd read before this books in pdf, but both of them consist over 700 pages ... and my eyes burn down if I read it on the screen.
I started to work with Drupal a month ago. It's really interesting, and a little complex at first sight. This book is the best I've heard. But I found some mistake in the sample code in the book:

page 23: the 'variable_del(...' line is unnecessary, the page wasn't load with it for me.
page 151: need an extra line: in 'function joke_load($node) {
drupal_add_js('misc/collapse.js');
return db_fetch_object(...
page 216: after '} else if ($delta == 1 && user_access('administer nodes')) {' need an array definition:
$items = array();

I suggest you to download the original source code from http://drupalbook.com, it has the correct code.
If anybody found some typo, please report me and I will put that in the post. Or if I wrong, tell that as well:)

Bye

P.s.: And one thing for beginners like me with Drupal! My first Drupal sandbox was in WinXP with normal php module collection + APC. (PHP 5.2.8, MySQL 5.06, Apache 2.2) But when I called the modules page in the admin section, it took 17 seconds. Very long time. But I guessed its normal, because when Drupal loads admin module page, it reconfigures all of them, and crawl some new one, if it finds. But last night (just for fun) I tried it in Ubuntu (in VM), page loaded in 1-2 seconds. I was amazed. Even I didn't install apc in the unix environment. So, just count with it.
Anyway, there is a very good article, how to get Drupal to run faster:
http://www.pronovix.com/blog/my-favorite-drupal-performance-hacks

Search PHP function from terminal

2009-01-13T14:17:00.000-08:00

Hi,

Last week I bought some unix books, beacuse I almost blowed up with the new Slackware. It is happened, that it didn't recognized my wifi network ... I am not aware of unix network layer. So I thought it is the right time to digg in the topic. By the way, my first issue is a shell script, which can find a php function with its phpdoc and exact location.
How it works?

# Usage: ./pfs <your dev. dir> <function name>, eg.:
./pfs ./project1 user_get

And the code itself (pfs):

#!/bin/bash
# Check params
if [ $# -lt 2 ]
then
  echo "Missing parameters.\nUsage: php_function_search [path] [function name]\n"
  exit 1
fi

echo

for extension in php inc php3 html htpl
do
  for file in `find $1 -type f -name "*$extension"`
  do
    if [ -f $file ]
    then
      # Find function line
      function_line_array=`cat $file -n | grep "function $2" | awk '{print $1}'`
      for function_line in $function_line_array
      do
        comment_end=`expr $function_line - 1`
        # Find the 1st comment line
        comment_start=`cat $file -n | sed -n "1,$function_line p" | sed -n '/\/\*\*/ p' | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $1}'`
        non_comment_start=`cat $file -n | sed -n "1,$comment_end p" | grep "^[^*]*$" | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $1}'`
        if [ $comment_start ]
        then
          # Print doc
          echo -ne "\033[00;32;40m"
          echo "Found in <$file> on line ($function_line)."
          if [ $comment_start -gt $non_comment_start ]
          then
            echo -ne "\033[00;36;40m"
            sed -n "$comment_start,$comment_end p" $file
          fi
          echo -ne "\033[00;33;40m"
          sed -n "$function_line p" $file
          echo -e "\033[00;37;40m"
        fi
      done
    fi
  done
done

Some aspects. Function name covers the first part of the function name. For example 'pfs ./ user_get' will match to user_get, user_get_name, user_get_all ...etc. First, the directory given is walked recursively to find all files. Search in each file the function pattern. It gives the line numbers those are in. Then until! that line the script searches the last line starts with '/**' (phpdoc block start). And there is another barbarian hack. It searches the last noncomment line, because if the last noncomment line num is bigger than the last comment line till the function, that means the comment don't relate to the function. So we shouldn't list it. After all, all block displayed width different colors: echo -ne "\033[00;36;40m". Sometimes when you need to know, what parameters a specific function requires, or what is the functions exact name, or whether exists any alternative copies of the function... it seems useful.
Just try it, and if you find a bug, please report it, a fixed it immediately.

Cheers

Ubuntu terminal monochrome font

2009-01-12T15:38:00.000-08:00

In Ubuntu (>= 8.07) sometimes you have to do trick to disable font hinting in terminal. (Because in tft I prefer monochrome fonts without hints and antialias.) The process works me everytime is the follows:

sudo -i
<type your password>
tar -cvvf font_links.tar /etc/fonts/conf.d/
rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-no-sub-pixel.conf
rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-antialias.conf
rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-medium.conf
rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting.conf

And restart all terminals. The more elegant way might be dpkg reconfigure, but i like the barbarian way sometimes.

Love and Hate = Passion

2009-01-12T14:44:00.000-08:00

OMG!

Today I planned to play with git, but as every time I plan something, something other ruins the whole day. It happened on an Ubuntu (8.10) guest (in Sun's VirtualBox 2.10), which is worked fine until now, but suddenly AltGr stoped working. There is no worse when you have to deal with such an annoying thing. I made some investigation about it, and try all the solutions, but nothing worked. Last, I reinstall it:(
By the way, if you are in the same situation, you should visit these sites:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ComposeKey
http://blog.andrewbeacock.com/2007/06/getting-right-alt-key-alt-gr-to-work-in.html

Day 2:
Right now I noticed, all the trouble occured after installing guest additions in VirtualBox. Oh mom!
And that is what I expected:
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=12488&sid=dd3403d3d4ca6f14cbf2917d10bc1e89
The culprit was VBoxGuestAdditions version 2.10!!!. So, if you are in the same shoes, use VBoxGuestAdditions 2.06. Here is the solution:

# switch to super user mode
sudo -i
# install Dynamic Kernel Module Support
apt-get install dkms
# download the previous version of vbox guest addons
wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.0.6/VBoxGuestAdditions_2.0.6.iso
# mount it
umount /media/cdrom
mount -o loop ./VBoxGuestAdditions_2.0.6.iso /media/cdrom
cd /media/cdrom
# install
# ideally it will reconfigure your current vbox driver set you installed before
./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run

It worked for me:) I hope, Sun provides us a new fixed version in a short time. But I suggest you to take a snapshot sometimes in your VM.

Have a nice day!

Update:
Welcome again,

This morning a read my feeds and saw that a new VirtualBox version (2.1.2, bundled with a new VBoxGuestAdditions.iso) came to light:) [run and get it - http://www.virtualbox.org/] At that moment I downloaded and installed it. And of course setup the new VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run. Miracle happens:) Desktop integration works. Mouse integration works. AltGr works. Folder sharing works. SSH remote connection works. Thanks guys from Sun! Very great job!

Introduction

2009-01-12T10:48:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone,

My name is Peter. Once before, I had made a blog, but I thought, It was not gonna worth it. Now, ... I give it a shot. My goal is to practicing my English. On the other hand, sometimes I found myself in a situation, where there would be great to own a blog, where I could take my ideas. Nowadays, I've felt bored myself. I bought some Unix book, and there are another three under shipping from Amazon. I hardly can wait that. Maybe I make a post about books I keep very useful in IT. Oh yes. I did not mentioned. I am some kind of an IT guy. Not the smart one, but the enthusiastic one. I don't know, what blog I really want. I would be happy to receive your responses. If you want, ask anything about programming or web development. I want help. My knowledge is various. I know PHP, (of course html, css), JavaScript (and some JS framework), a little Java. Flash with ActionScript 3. Some Ruby stuff. And a bunch of common things as every normal human.
My original homesite: http://itarato.uw.hu/index.php
And my framework site: http://www.bison.hu

Cheers