My Milieu of Musings

Here is a great little script I found for detecting the OS. import flash.system.Capabilities; var flashPlayerVersion:String = Capabilities.version; var osArray:Array = flashPlayerVersion.split(' '); var osType:String = osArray[0]; //The operating system: WIN, MAC, LNX var versionArray:Array = osArray[1].split(',');//The player versions. 10,0,22,87 var majorVersion:Number = parseInt(versionArray[0]); var majorRevision:Number = parseInt(versionArray[1]); var minorVersion:Number = parseInt(versionArray[2]); var minorRevision:Number = parseInt(versionArray[3]);

I've been fighting GC in flash for the last two weeks. The standard answers (no timers, intervals, enterFrame listeners, strong references) do not apply. (And we also tried FP11, which theoretically gets rid of all of this for you anyway.) But I did run across a few nice event listener manger classes. Grant Skinner has his Janitor class (which I found attached to an online presentation). But even more impressive was Danny Miller's EventManager class (http://k2xl.com/wordpress/2008/07/02/as3-eventmanager-class-removealllisteners/) which is available on google code. Unfortunately, neither of these helped my situation; we were using a standard button component on the stage in a nested MC. If we didn't need it, we pitched it via removeChild() and nulled out the reference to it. Unfortunately, that was not sufficient, preventing the swf from unloading. So we are now building our own button class. grrrrr

The Atlanta ColdFusion User Group (www.acfug.org) has just announced their June Meeting: Ben Forta will be discussing new features of the impending release of ColdFusion and Flex.

The meeting will be held in the echoEleven facilities in Buckhead. Rumor has it that there will be an after-party for those interested, complete with Wii, Karaoke and adult beverages.

 

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Usually, eLearning courses are deployed in SCORM 1.2 format.  One of the features of this format is that it can easily determine which files are necessary to run the course.  Often, I see this data placed into the manifest in an incomplete format.  For example, only the .htm file will be listed in this section, but not the supporting files (.css, .js, etc.).

In searching for a way of quickly knowing which files are used, I have come across the following shell command (sorry PC users) which will read out the entire directory contents and format it correctly for SCORM 1.2:

 find ./html -type f -exec echo "<file href=\""{}"\" />"  \;

This simply lists out all the files in the directory tree, and surrounds them w/the appropriate XML so that they can be dropped into the manifest.  (It also assumes that all your files in are the "html" subdirectory, relative to your manifest.  Adjust accordingly for your setup.)

What this will not do is provide you with knowledge of which assets really are used; if you have extra files inside the course directories that are not used (e.g. storyboards, thumbs.db, .DS_Store), they will also be listed.  Best to purge those before running the script, unless you really intent to package them with your corse.  (Listing them in the manifest, but not packaging them results in an invalid SCORM package.)

 

Often when developing, I want to see exactly what Coldfusion is doing in real time w/o having to trace this out to the command line.  This is particularly usefull when developing Flex apps, where you cannot see what the server is doing.

Unfornutately, I keep losing the instructions on how to start up CF in OS X.  There are a lot of other postings out there, but many of them are using the multiserver installation of CF.

So here it is (more for my reference, but perhaps someone else will find it useful:

sudo /Applications/ColdFusion8/runtime/bin/jrun -start coldfusion