(hey I haven’t posted in forever, but since I actually had something to share…)
I was looking for any information about getting BlazeDS running locally on my Mac to take a stab at learning Flex remoting, and I found this nice tutorial over at Coding Cowboys, but got disappointed when I realized that while the author was working on Leopard, he was actually setting up BlazeDS on a linux server.
But in my normal “oh this should be pretty easy” fashion which has on other occasions brought down the boot sectors of powerful hard drives, I decided that following the instructions on the page would just work on a mac too.
And it did!
It should be pretty clear why I’m just not sending you on to the aforementioned post if you go look at it - he’s also setting up Amazon EC2 webservices, which I’m not as interested in at the moment. Also, I’d like to just play with Flex remoting for a minute at home, so I don’t need to get a server involved. Especially since I have this handy unix workstation right here on my desk.
Ok, no more silly patter. Here’s how to set up BlazeDS on your intel-based mac running Leopard. I should also mention that I have the developer tools installed, but I don’t know that that makes a difference.
Getting BlazeDS running on Leopard
- Download the turn-key package
- unzip it to a directory — /blaze is good. You now have a folder at the Root lavel of Macintosh HD called blaze.
If that “unzip it to a directory” direction is alienating to you, just double click on the zip, let Mac OS unzip it for you, and rename the directory to blaze and move it to the top of the Macintosh HD. Pretty much the same thing.
- In terminal, go to that dir - ls /blaze (just for fun maybe - I’m terrible at doing commands like sudo ./blaze/tomcat/bin/startup.sh … I usually just cd to the directory and do ./startup.sh)
- You need to issue two commands in terminal:
./blaze/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
and
./blaze/sampledb/startdb.sh
Note - when executing these commands either from the root (/) which is the command above, or from the directory they’re in, you still need the leading ./ — so if you’re in the /blaze/tomcat/bin directory, the command to start tomcat is ./startup.sh, not startup.sh which will give you an error.
Note #2 - You can close the terminal window. It says “hey, closing this will end processes running blah blah blah” but BlazeDS still works after you close the window. If you’re just playing around, it might be worth leaving it open since it tells you in the console output how to shut the server down.
- open http://127.0.0.1:8400/ in a web browser.
- Play with the pretty flex remoting demos.
- Learn everything else. =)
I’ve been getting a lot more into — I don’t know how to put it — doing things? So I’ve started spending more time learning stuff, making things — mostly web pages and crap. But it’s toward building more interesting web applications, and I’m looking at and working through a lot of different stuff — CSS, javascript & DOM, ruby/rails, java & jsp (that’s for work, really) and even some computational graphics type stuff.
So to sort of glaze over my experiences, I spend a lot of time reading words written by people who are totally in the mix, right? I mean I basically at this point am the creepy paparazzi skulking in the alley out side of Web 2.0, Inc. picking up every little scrap those fat-cat bastards throw away.
So it’s kind of funny to eavesdrop on another group’s conversation and hear something that is so outside of the above referenced mix that the people having the conversation seem to be well, mentally impaired.
(more…)
DreamHost Flash Tools
What I really care a bit about I think is…
Flash Image Rotator
The Flash Image Rotator enables you to show several photos in sequence with fluid transitions between them. It supports rotation of an RSS/XSPF playlist with JPG/GIF/PNG images, a wide range of flashvars (settings) for tweaking both behavior and appearance and an extensive, documented javascript/actionscript API.
You’ll need to create a XML playlist (here’s the one for our slideshow above) for any images that you wish to use, but it’s really not that hard and the comprehensive documentation in our wiki will have you up and running in no time!
NASA - NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows in Brief Spurts on Mars
NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.”These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Washington.
Is all you need to know. For example, if you need to refresh on how position: whatever works, just go to http://cssdocs.org/position.
cssdocs.org — thanks and a tip of the hat to Pete Freitag.
PERL One Liners
Just enough PERL to do almost anything. Except help me debug this script:
$random_file =
"random_image.dat";
# contains a list of image urls, just a plain text file
open (FILE, $random_file);
@LINES=; close(FILE);
srand;
print "Location: [int rand(@LINES)]";
I thought I understood this to be opening the file of image urls, and then [int rand(@LINES)] picked one line to print out as a Location http header. Well, I found this page while I was googling my problem, and thought it looked like it was worth saving, since PERL is an eternal mystery to me.
OS X Daily » Ten OS X Command Line Utilities you might not know about
8. screencapture
screencapture offers a more advanced way (over command-shift-3) to take screen captures. To use it, open up your Terminal.app and try typing screencapture -iW ~/Desktop/screen.jpg. It will bring up a camera icon that is waiting to be clicked on a window. Once clicked, a file on your desktop called “screen.jpg” will be created that will contain a snapshot of whatever window you clicked on. You can of course, also take a snapshot of your entire screen by typing screencapture -S ~/Desktop/screen.jpg.
TemplateWorld has a page of free website wemplates that are very nice, and have “Valid XHTML And CSS.” I put that in scare quotes since I haven’t really checked myself, but the templates do seem pretty well made. It’s a teaser to get you to buy a subscription to their premium template downloading service but in all honesty, at US$50 for six-months of access, it’s actually not such a bad deal since they have literally tons of templates in their members only area.
Oman3D:
In this tutorial you will learn how to create a reusable flash that can be configured through the HTML of the page displaying the SWF file. Using the technique you will be able to use one single SWF file for all your buttons in a single page.
This is one of those things that I’ve tried to do a couple times, but it never worked out…and truth be told, after reading the tutorial I’m not sure what I was doing wrong (maybe I wasn’t passing the variable to the swf the right way).
Anyway, it’s cool to see it work. Now I need to figure out how to force justify the single word in the button, and actually get the text how I want.
inkBlots
Google Reader FeedBurner: Create The Ultimate Reading List
I was having trouble with my two-column fixed layout, until I read How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup over at position is everything.
I found some helpful advice on how to make a submit button into CSS styled text.
Even though I still don’t feel like I totally get descendant selectors, I appreciated the article at maxdesign all the same.
Let me give a quick shout out to the date entry from the PHP manual.
I’m going to point out that I also really appreciated ma ’s pages Listamatic and Floatuorial.
It was east to get distracted by tangents on the Sitepoint CSS Forum.
I was looking for some information on how to style lists and blockquotes (I’m getting a little annoyed with them — I can’t figure out how to change their default indentations, and browsers give them way to much vertical space.
I found this nice site (or 5 sites) by maxdesign that look pretty helpful. At least they should help me figure out my list problems, if nothing else. And the Floatutorial: Step by step CSS float tutorial looks like required reading since I just got a headache from trying to figure out how to clear the floats in the new layout I’m working on.
Nice CSS tutorial, aimed at designers. Mostly nice because it gives tips on how to translate page layout concepts to CSS.
CSS From the Ground Up
Can you tell I’m working on a website?
I finally found out how to center divs on a page. I feel so stupid for not finding it earlier:
Max Design - CSS Centering - fun for all!
Theoretically, you should be able to apply auto margins to the left and right of the containing block and it should center on the page.
The W3C Visual formatting model states: “If both ‘margin-left’ and ‘margin-right’ are ‘auto’, their used values are equal. This horizontally centers the element with respect to the edges of the containing block.”
So, a containing block should be able to be centered using the following rules:
div#container
{
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
width: 50em;
}
BibliOdyssey: Pantagruel I
Pantagruel is a great collection of crazy creatures. Just looking a it I thought it beat the clap-trap in most of the Fantasy RPGs I’ve played. Some game company should give this stuff serious attention.
I knew if I googled this enough times I’d eventually find the rigth answer. This is totally the right answer.
Fixing the MT bookmarklet for Safari :: The Daily Journey :: JayAllen.org
Change:
t=d.selection?d.selection.
createRange().text:d.getSelection();
To:
t=getSelection();
Dofus Arena looks to be Final Fantasy Tactics remade as a multiplayer internet game.
Uh-oh. I hear my productivity dropping through the floor now.
Some cool games in flash:
Final Fantasy in Flash
Xiao Xiao Shooter
Not a game, but I love this animation: Door Steps by Lodger.
An article reviewing the majority of current mac backup software reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: (Most)Mac Backup Software [is] Harmful
The surprising conclusion is that almost all Macintosh backup or cloning programs do not fulfill their primary purpose, i.e., they are not able to restore files with all associated metadata. This is despite the fact that many of the tools are advertised as safe, accurate, bug-free, etc. The tools that fail are harmful because they generate a false sense of security. Even more exasperating is that many of these tools cost (significant amounts of) money. The only laudable exception is the great SuperDuper application, which performs flawlessly.
Funnily enough, as is sadly too often the case, SuperDuper is free (with added features for money), whereas many of the other applications reviewed are not.
I had some problems with tcsh on my Mac, and I got sick of it. I read Using the shell Terminal in Mac OS X by A.P. Lawrence, and switched my shell to be /bin/bash. And now all that ruby and rails stuff works, and I don’t even have to ~/.bash_login first!
I bet you were terribly worried.
A classmate just tipped me off to a decent looking free code editor context. Sometimes there’s not much more to say.
OGLE: OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam R&D is a cool 3d capture app “that allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows.”
Basically, that means you can run this software while running say a video game, and it will capture the 3d models that are displayed.
Weird! (some cleanup required, apparently).
There’s a nice collection of ruby on rails resources over at eDevil’s blog. Path: eDevil%u2019s weblog Blog Archive Ruby on Rails resources
Oh, ruby!
