Author Archive
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
Learning Flex
I have spent the past month working with flex - and thought I would blog all the things I have learnt
I am used to object orientated languages such as java (and nowdays even php). All languages have started to look very similar with object orientated dot notation etc. Actionscript (as3) also falls into this category.
I […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Thursday, November 4th, 2010
Getting QTP automated tests and Flex working
Found this great set of blog entries on how to get QTP and flex atomated testing to work
http://www.benlondon.co.uk/search/label/QTP
In summary some things to watch out for
Repeat/Summary of the obstacles encountered are:
must have ‘-includes=RandomWalkDelegate’
you have to make certain you run the Adobe Flex 4 Plugin for HP QuickTest Pro\Install_QTP_Plugin.bat to install the each time you change […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
Troubles with Flex automation, RandomWalk and Flex SDK 4.1
Spent quite a lot of time getting Flex automation working with the RandomWalk example - there where several obstacles to recording but now playback is failing.
This is with the latest version of the flex SDK (flex sdk 4.1 – build 16076)
it gives the following error:
AutomationManager:pushMouseSimulator() – In Air we are not allowed to do this on the […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, June 6th, 2010
SD card full on Android phone
I have only had my HTC desire for over 1 month and managed to full my SD card. (I previously have also run out of onboard memory for apps - but that issue should be resolved by the Froyo release of android - where I will be able to store applications on the SD card).
The […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, May 16th, 2010
snow leopard - printing in black and white
insane complexity in finding the black and white option - does apple get a kickback from HP on the number of color print cartridges used!?
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, May 16th, 2010
Snow leopard and HP 4380 - problems with hp device manager
I spent an hour messing around trying to get HP device manager to communicate with my HP C4380 all in one printer/scanner
It was working before I upgraded to Snow Leopard - I found several articles stating that you can just download the latest drivers and recreate the printer - this did not work for me. […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Navigating company orgcharts
( “photo by Jeff Kubina”)
London startup - I think these guys are will do well - great for navigating orgcharts and finding ’stakeholders’ and experts
Their website
crunchbase data …
a video
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
2 days of solid playing with HTC Desire
(photo credit to flickr:louisvolant)
Just spent the last 2 days solid playing with my new HTC desire from 3
I was previously on 02 for 10 years but their network is overloaded due to the number of iphones on their network (this is largely due to the now expired iphone-02 exclusive deal in UK).
I must have installed […]
1 Comment » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
notes to myself on flying
These are some of the tips I have come up with when I fly longhall:
for longhall flights prebook seats away from toilet doors - either on isle or window
check-in as early as possible
pack one set wax earplugs
one set sleeping pills
wear lightweight trousers - no jeans as its hard to sleep […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
Photo printing and sharing from flickr to facebook
Flickr has built in photo printing - but they charge 9p per print. http://www.photobox.co.uk charge only 5p per print. I used the flickr organiser to create a new flickr set called ‘to print’, then logged into photobox, chose ‘from flickr’ and the ’sets’ tab’ and then simply pressed the ‘add all’ link. [at the end […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, March 28th, 2010
Persistent XSS crawler
Photo by Scragz
The browser security model
Tarantula Crawler
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, March 28th, 2010
Protecting yourself from sql injection
use bind variables
restrict the rights of your web apps database user - no more rights than necessary (ie. no drop/create)
in production mode, when a sql error occurs, only show a message such as “an error occured” - not the full sql that was executed
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
should the job title ‘Sofware Architect’ exist
In this podcast ‘Joel Spolsky’ makes the point that the title ‘Software Architect’ shouldn’t really exist and that designing high level software interaction is just part of a good developers job.
…are unsure that the title “Software Architect” is a good one. We’re leaning towards it being almost.. a net negative. “It’s almost disrespectful of the […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
Configuration management and Chef
This Puppet vs Chef article is a great example of a how a well seo-ed blog can affect the opinions of many. If you look at the initial article in a quick ’skim read’ to choose a technology - you would conclude that Puppet is the best option. However there are plenty of comments below […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Saturday, March 20th, 2010
Small project work + living in London = free fall
I can really sympathise with this graphic designer - the media industry is full of people asking freelancers for things as cheap as possible.
Promising things like ‘do this one cheap and there will be lots of future work’ - which either doesn’t materialise or is also at the same price.
I think it may also be […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Saturday, March 20th, 2010
correlated subqueries
I guess its time to refresh my sql - moving into finance means I could be running a lot of adhoc sql queries.
I am convinced I have used correlated subqueries before but had never heard of the term.
A correlated subquery is a query where the subquery uses values from the outer queries where clause.
SELECT empnum, […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
Disambiguation using siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com- Finding examples fo flare.prefuse usage
The problem with the flare prefuse library is that flare is a commonly used word - so searching for examples on google results in a lot of matches other uses of the word flare. A simple solution is to use site explorer to find links to the flare prefuse website - this naturally disambiguates the […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
Data visualisation classification
I found this classification of different types of visualisations
data visualisation - numbers in a graph, pie chart, barchart, scatterplot (quantitative data)
information visualisation - interactive visual reprentation of information in order to improve cognition
concept visualisation - mindmaps and other representations of concepts (qualitative data)
strategy visualisation - company strategy - (I dont understand how this in […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
Data visualisation continued
I decided to clean up the first animation that I had learned from the actionscript animation book. It can also be viewed here.
In the process I made some mistakes and learned a few things:
I extended the object model to be more a mathematical graph based model - with Nodes and Edges - […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
large graphs of internet connectivity
Came across Barrett Lyon and the opte project - seems kind of interesting
especially the techniques of creating large graphs of the webs connectivity
“Lyon’s work tracking Russian Denial of service attack extortion groups has been featured around the globe[4]. He provided details and helped coordinate with multinational law enforcement groups which resulted in the capture […]
