Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Customer Satisfaction Solutions: Car Repair & Tux Rental

    I’ve been told that a child coming from a family where they are the only offspring are all about themselves since they tend to have lavished attention upon them.

    The same reason I love sociology is the same reason I hate it. I dig the groupings to help understand where people are coming from, but I don’t dig the stereotypes.

    At any rate, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I just spent part of my morning running errands, all of which are complicated by the slow motion of business satisfying me, their potential customer.

    I figure if these companies do x, then this will help them gain customer satisfaction, and thus improve their business. If that is not something they need to improve their margin, well fugg’em.

    Kaufman Tire & Other Car Repair Shops (non-body work)

    Take my cell# as well as my IM/ICQ/MSN screen name, and page me when my car:
    – is being serviced
    – is done being serviced
    – if you have a question
    – your closing, and where the keys are

    I understand you can’t drop everything and serve me. The last you can do, however, is give a time estimate, otherwise, keep me informed. I plan my day around you.

    After Hours Tux Rental

    Either give me the tracking # so I can utilize the existing plethora of web services from FedEx/UPS out there to track it myself, or do the above informing me:

    – when the truck has left the warehouse
    – when the tux has arrived and at what store location
    – when store hours are changing
    – when there is a problem, inform me with contact information to resolve

    *******

    Please note none of the above solutions require anything beyond a human pressing a button for each event; even a monkey could operate the solutions. If either of you companies need help implementing such technology solutions, let me know; here’s a royal coupon for free consulting. I don’t have time for this bs, I and I know your other customers don’t either.

  • Where in the world is UIComponentExtensions.as?

    I just had to blog this insanity. It’s about a week old, so time for some reflection.

    Intro

    It started off with our Human Factor’s guy going, “Can we edit this text’s font at a later date?”. I’m like, “Sure.” knowing that I can wire my component’s properties of text to the global styles that the new framework uses. I needed an excuse to learn them, and since I’ve got skinning mostly down, I figured, what the heck, how hard can it be?

    I then ran into a snag; my component (SWC) didn’t have it’s text change to bold when I did a setStyle. I received no compile errors, and all other functions of my component worked. Oddly, when I dragged a Button (mx.controls.Button) component onto the stage and then did a test movie again, both it and my component had it’s text turn bold when I did a setStyle. “Uh… hey thanks Button. Can I have what you have?”

    Digging in the SWC of Button, he had a crud load more classes than I did. So, I started digging into the base classes to see who instantiates setStyle. Well… no one. It’s defined as a function in UIObject.as, but it’s merely a dim/definition of a variable. Pretty goob-a-rific with the comment, too.

    Style Class Found – The Plot Thickens

    Turns out, CSSSetStyle.as (mx.styles.CSSSetStyle) is the homeskillet responsible for the method of style-powah. But, no one instantiates him. Frustrated, I called in the artillery. I had a co-worker use Visual Studio .NET to find in files (since SciteFlash wasn’t installed), and turns out some obscure class, UIComponentExtensions.as is the ONLY ONE who instantiates it. And get this, the method it calls, enableRunTimeCSS, is a static function that does Jack and shiot. It’s merely there, I think, to ensure CSSSetStyle actually gets exported with the framework upon making an SWC. :: takes a hit from the bong :: Ooook… makes sense.

    The Horrible Climax

    Next, the search was on for who instantiates UIComponentExtensions.as (mx.core.ext.UIComponentExtensions). I think it was only found in the comments of some class. I was flabbergasted. If no class instantiates it, how in the hell can it exist? I just assumed it was called via some function that only your mother can call, similiar to how the CSSSetStyle worked… but that wasn’t the case.

    At the end of my rope, I ventured a gander over to Flashcoders, and said a prayer my email wouldn’t get lost in the flood, and sent her off. I actually got an answer, and quickly too.

    The Aftermath

    At that point, Peter Hall’s response confirmed my anger as of this morning. What crackhead thought it was a good idea to revert to Flash MX tactics to create a coding framework should have his/her head examined. It’s already been established in Flash 5 that anything beyond a stop on the timeline is an unacceptable coding practice, and in MX, you merely dropped your assets to fit into the #initclip order sequence.

    Now, however, that’s taken care of for us. That is NOT an excuse, though, to utilize the timeline as a constructor call, thus instantiating an entire style setting system for components. Frankly, it’s bullshit.

    What’s worse is I don’t think it can be changed/modified without affecting backwards compatibility. The workaround is fine; I can definately live with dropping a component or 2 of a base class inside my SWC, no worries there. The methodology, however, in what I am doing is archaic.

    Techniques like this deplete my prozac supply in which I use to placate frustrated Java programmers. Help.

  • I spent $4 Bucks on iTunes

    I spent about $4 this week on iTunes; purchased my first song Monday (whoo… loud noises… cheers… bleh). So far, it’s a pretty neat little app. I dig the 1 click buying; easy as nuts to spend money, but also to get at my product too. I really really dig the sharing of music on a local network; that’s just phat at work.

    The only negative I have is the style of music I like, dance/electronic, is usually under smaller name labels, as my manager says. Therefore, it’ll be awhile as they are acrued in since the targets have been the big guys. Granted, there’s still some good stuff, but nothing like Kazaa has.

    I think I’ll ensure my new CD head unit for my car (or her majesty’s if I inherit it) has auxillery units so I can hook my new (not purchased yet) iPod into it to play my beats. We’ll see how it evolves over the course of the year.

  • LoadVars RAM Saver Trick

    To those of you that think memory management is old hat, more power to you. However, there are those of us who have never had the opportunity to worry about such things in the past. Who knows what is really happening behind the scenes, but I was trying to load 26 XML files. The process goes:

    – get xml filename
    – attach to existing LoadVars variable (not local)
    – do a POST to PHP script
    – PHP script uses the passed in filename, loads the gZipped XML file, and returns to the LoadVars callback as a variable “theXML”
    – LoadVars’ callback then throws that string to the xml object via owner.my_xml.parseXML(theXML)

    Now, each XML file, around 300k, was making the memory jump 20 megs every load. So, the 9th load would usually crash Flash. I thought it was the XML object, but turns out, it is the LoadVars object. Even though his “theXML” variable is reset each time, the string data in memory isn’t.

    To solve it, I added a “delete this.theXML;” after I passed the string data to the XML object to parse. This doesn’t entirely solve the problem, though. Even though I can see the RAM drop about 20 megs, she still climbs to a whopping 80megs when finished. I really don’t think my nested array/objects are what is causing the significant increase, and there aren’t many components on stage nor in use. At any rate, at least it doesn’t crash now!