Solar Flare

I wasn’t having much luck finding an easy way to encode videos for viewing on my phone, so I cooked one up. I followed the instructions for ffmpeg as listed here, and wrote a Ruby wrapper that detects the dimensions of the video and scales them down to the right size for you...

There’s a little trick if you’re trying to use a Text component as part of a custom itemRenderer for a List. The Text component will automatically wrap the text and set its correct height. However, when it’s in a list, you may find it gets cut off anyway. You have to set the variableRowHeight attribute of the List to true.

Really that should be “Bi-directional self-referential relationships in ActiveRecord models”, but that’s just too much to say!

A common example for this would be if you had a Person model and a Friendship model, and you wish the friendship between two people to be a two-way road, like on Facebook. The project I’m working on is a genealogy application that...

If you’re using Flex on the command line without Flex Builder, the documentation for getting up and running with OSMF is pretty slim. Here’s what has worked for me. (I upgraded to Flex 4 to get access to all of the OSMF features, but you should be able to do this with Flex 3...

With Flex 4 comes “Spark”: a much more “flexible” (haha), and in my opinion much less beautiful theme than the one in Flex 3. Of course, you can use Spark to create all sorts of beautiful things, but if you’re looking for something pretty out of the box, it’s not that.

The Flex 3 theme is called “Halo”, and as...

The world is in a storm this week over the leaks of more sensitive government documents on WikiLeaks, and the arrest of its founder Julien Assange.

Personally, I think Assange may be tapping from the dark side of the force… he doesn’t feel right to me. I’m all for press freedom, but I’m not sure he’s doing good when he...

I was faced with the task of ripping a few box sets of DVDs and CDs today, and after a quick and fruitless “topeka” search for a way to automate this, I wantonly decided to write my own.

A short time later I had a nice Ruby script capable of ripping discs to images without any user input, except sticking...

Woohoo this is my first post! Ever since I worked at OnForce with my friend Greg Whitescarver, who regularly admonished me to get off my lazy 455 and write down all of the useful things I figured out relating to code, Linux, regular expressions and other such things as might benefit the toiling masses on the internet, I’ve been meaning...