Author Archive
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
TextField rotation
Whist creating my first animation - I was trying to place vertical label text on the sliders. The text was not appearing - there are numerous forumn posts on this subject. This was because I was not using embedded fonts I managed to get embedded fonts working as follows
[Embed(systemFont=’Arial’, fontName=’spArial’, mimeType=’application/x-font’)]
public static var ArialFont:Class;
var […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Actionscript Animation
You can try out my with my first animation here
Several months ago I bought Actionscript 3.0 Animation - Over Christmas I have had some time to play with some ideas. I am interested in visualisation tools - especially things that help technical people understand better what is happening in a complex environment. eg. […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
Getting up to speed with Java
If you havent worked with java in a while - I think you will find the following process interesting on catching up on where things have moved.
Changes in Java
1) First there is a list of all the enhancements to java over time
Ant and Maven
2) Ant is still great for building a one off custom java […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Monday, September 28th, 2009
IT Due Diligence
I completed some IT due diligence inspection of a company for a VC.
Decided to write this post to remind myself about what it important in the process.
choose a code name for the project
sign the NDA and ensure that you have professional indemnity insurance
obtain all technical documentation in electronic form asap
obtain company org chart and a […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Monday, September 14th, 2009
Intellij and Flex
I previously blogged about Intellij and how to use it to remote debug flex applications.
Not I am changing some of the IDEs settings
Setting utf-8 encoding of files
Now I need to be able to add some other swc files to the path
File->Project Structure
select your Flex module
select the Dependencies tab (A) and click “Add” - then navigate […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Saturday, September 12th, 2009
IntelliJ 9.0 Maya Rocks
I have to say - I have never really liked Eclipse. Its slow, hard to find the setting you want to change and very painful to configure things like debug. When I was working as a java EJB developer, I used to use Intellij - I loved it. So easy and quick to work with […]
1 Comment » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
Mysql grep - understanding a system
When working with a new system - There are various techniques I like to use to understand how it works
firebug net tab
schemaspy
any technique that allows me to print the sql fired on each page request
The following is also useful - A simple mysql dump of the database schema with the database insert statements listed as […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, September 6th, 2009
Kaltura CE schema
I used schemaspy and its meta data feature to create the following ER diagram for Kaltura CE database schema
You can see the full schema spy output here
This is the command line I used
sudo java -jar schemaSpy_4.1.1.jar -t mysql -u root -db master_kaltura -dp ./mysql-connector-java-5.0.8/mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar -host localhost -hq -o /var/www/kaltura_schema_dump -meta kaltura_schema_meta.xml
here is the kaltura_schema_meta.xml file […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Monday, August 10th, 2009
text search - scaling in terms of volume and traffic and index upgrades
only things you can do with data are:
* make more copies of it (eg. master slave replication)
* process data to make more data / summary (eg. monthly weekly rollup tables)
* create different indexes that allow rapid access (eg. index on a, b, c columns, reverse index on all words in a document for free text […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
cost of streaming video on the web
I am still trying to work out how companies manage to stream video economically. This trace route mashup up that I found on programmableweb.com is great though
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
3 types of people doing developing open source
3 types of people doing developing open source
young techi who works for a company - he doesnt have to worry about how to make money from open source - He is kewl ‘cos he is doing open source
hardcore techi who in his spare time contributes to a open source project - he does it because […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
Cloud computing gaming conference by skillsmatter.com
I went to the cloud computing / gaming conference yesterday
1) the organisers where shocked by the turn out - 150 attendees - they where only expecting 50
2) lots of gambling / spreadbetting people there
3) Most / all products talked about where focused to the high throughput requirements of gaming platforms. Most of them are […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
Preparing for OSCON
7 days to go until I fly to California for OSCON. Apart for learning lots, I hope to make some good business contacts there.
I have printed 3 tshirts - I have the slogan “VideoAds open sourced…” printed high on the back of the tshirt - I used this service - I really like the […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
google wave - tsunami?
OMG - I am still in shock trying to work out what google wave means. Is it the end of facebook, twitter, wikipedia and webpages - or are these sites just skins for the content - like email client wars that happened many years ago
How will sites keep control of content generated on their network? […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Fraud detection state machine built into OpenX cookie counters
OpenX ad platform supports ad ops staff configuring limitations in the number of times a user sees an ad in a defined session duration.
I used firebug to inspect the cookies passed on each page request and xdebug on the server. As far I can tell the impression counters use two http requests […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Facet search - using facete query for lucene OR generating dynamic sql for mysql
I found a new favorite search engine for travel - http://www.kayak.co.uk/ - its yet another flight / car / hotel search engine - but its interface is clean and fast - very good UX.
One of the things I like about it is its faceted search - ie. On the left pannel there is a slider […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
ide’s moving inside the browser
Seems more and more dev tools are appearing inside the browser (and more specially inside firebug as extensions)
Yslow is one good piece of technoloy to come out of Yahoo! I like the idea of tools that capture a lot of knowledge (rules) - in this case on making the web page appear fast to […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Still learning to use OSX
I have been using my mac full time for the last 6 months - and there are still some basic things I have to learn
I was trying to install a flash debugger - called demonsterdebugger
I needed to install adobe air and for some reason google found this url for me - http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air.html which […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Open source projects and software escrow
I was thinking about whether it makes sense to store our open source projects source code on our own server - The advantage of this would be easier integration with bug tracking tools like trac.
I realised the advantage of leaving the code on google code is that it gives people a comfortable feeling that […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
avoid drupal wysiwyg api module - getting FCK editor + IMCE + GeSHi all working together
After 6 hours of messing around - I finally have a wysiwyg editor working on the the new drupal site
What a nightmare to get this working - I tried so many permulations
I wanted to use tinymce - but that drupal module has been deprecated - with a large red message telling me I must […]
