Category: Computing

So I am working with Flash 8 at present. I am billable and that counts.
The project involves embedding video and audio clips in the Flash movies we are creating. Once published (compiled, for those who feel bette about that term) – the movies that just had an audio soundtrack exhibited a weird behavior: when you preview the movie in Flash player, the audio would sync just fine with the animation, but when viewing the movies in a browser, the synchronization would be off by seconds, even in 10 second-long movies.
The solution appears in this post on the Macromedia Flash forums.
The audio track must be on its own layer (duh) and the layer should be selected. Open the properties area (if you do not have it showing by default) and in the area where it says ‘Sound’, select the audio you just laid inside of the movie. Then, select ‘Stream’ from the Sync choices, and voila, it’ll sync just fine.

Another Internet Explorer bug for the books:
Create a <div> element and give it a border, something like:

div.product_intro
{
border-width: 0.1em 0.1em 0em 0em;
border-style: solid;
border-color: #ccc;
padding-top: 0.7em;
padding-right: 0.7em;
padding-bottom: 1em;
}


You would expect it to look something like this.

Now scroll down the page so that the div is obscured and outside your viewport (the broswer no longer shows it).

Scroll back up.

This is what I got. Where did they border go?

The fix (so far): Set the width for the div explicitly. That also cures another outrageous bug where IE pushes divs around the aforementioned div with irrational spacing.

PHP sucks ass in a tremendous way.

So I am parsing an XML file with PHP.
The xml file has an element like:
<element>this-is-the-data</element>

Any language worth two cents would return the CDATA of this element as:
this-is-the-data

But PHP – no.

Its native parser – a really fast SAX parser – calls the CDATA handler multiple times, but not in a consistent fashion (for real) – so you cannot just use a call like
$x = $data;
where $x is some variable and $data is the character data the event returned. This will occasionally overwrite $x with the current partial data returned from the parser.
You must use
$x .= $data
which means – “append to $x”.

How f-n stupid is that?! And is this documented ANYWHERE?!!!!!
No.
PHP is enterprise ready like Clay Aiken is straight.