Time Capsule with Shared Network External Hard Drive

I have Time Capsule installed on my home network. My HP Pavilion has a direct cable connection into the back of the Time Capsule (no wireless network board since the machine is very old). My mac book pro connects to the Time capsule using wireless. I wanted to set up a local network drive to share photos and music files with my family.

I purchased a Western Digital Elements 2 TB hard drive to use as my local network hard drive. The hard drive comes preformatted for windows. My pre reading indicated I would need to format the hard drive for apple in HFS+ format to work with all machines via Time Capsule. The Time capsule provides AFP protocols to apple based machines and SMB protocols to windows based machines to interface with the hard drive. This was based on the apple site reference page about USB storage device supported formats and protocols USB storage device supported formats and protocols.

The instructions that came with the hard drive pointed Macintosh users to support.wdc.com and to look up knowledge based question id#287. Doing a knowledge based search on the id brought up this link:
How to partition and format a WD drive on Windows(7,Vista,XP) and Mac OSX.
I then selected my OS which was MAC OSX 10.5 or 10.6. This brought up a step by step instruction on how to format the external hard drive in the MAC OS EXtended (Journaled) format. The only deviation from the directions was in step 4 where I selected GUID Partition table partition scheme rather than the Apple Partition Map choice. These directions were also presented at this site Things You Must Know When Connecting a USB Hard Drive to Airport Extreme.

After reformatting the hard drive, I plugged it into my Time Capsule. I then used my Airport Utility which I have installed on my windows machine to configure the Time Capsule per the instructions on How to Add An External Hard Drive To Time Capsule. The fact that I had the Airport Utility installed on my windows machine may be why I had no trouble seeing the hard drive on my windows HP machine.

Ironically, on my apple mac pro laptop the network drive was visible but when I clicked on the drive I got the following error message:
“The operation cannot be completed because the original item for “drive” (the name of my drive) cannot be found”

I did some googling but thought I would try an old Windows trick and just rebooted my laptop. That did the trick and the laptop recognized the hard drive on the Time Capsule and allowed me to view the test photos I had placed there. I think the reboot forced the time capsule settings to be refreshed on the laptop which is rather windowy behavior.

Flash CS5 Dynamic Text Formatting – Part 5

Embedding Font Class in a Flash CS5 Component Class

I created a document class for a fla file which has

• font embedded
• traces the font info when the class is instantiated
• creates a text field to display embedded font

Here is the document class EmbedFontTest.as which is in the same directory as the Font Classes which it references(ArialEmbedder and MsRefEmbedder):

Flash CS5 Dynamic Text Formatting – Part 4

Embedding font in a Class file

My next approach was to read up on embedding fonts programmatically. So I broke out my Essential Actionscript 3.0 book and on page 740 read up on embedding fonts and going through the exercises in that chapter.

The following is an example of embedding font in a class which can then be used in a class to control the rendering of text in a TextField.

package {
	
	//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
	// Class
	//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
	/**
	 *
	 * Class used to embed Arial Regular font 
     * ONLY in a font library
	 * for use by Flash 5 Pro generated swc libraries
	 *
	 **/ 
	public class ArialEmbedder {
		
		public static const FONT_NAME:String = "_arial";
		
		//these are the elements of the font family 
		//we want to embed using direct path location 
        //to Font directory on Windows XP
		[Embed(source='C:/Windows/Fonts/ARIAL.TTF', 
			   fontFamily='_arial',
			   fontWeight='regular',
			   fontStyle='regular',
			   embedAsCFF='false')]
		public static var _arial:Class;
		
	}
}

Flash CS5 Dynamic Text Formatting – Part 3

Creating Flex Component View using Flash CS5 – FONT Conflicts

We created some Flex based component views using Flash CS5 by following the instructions in the Adobe Article Combining animation and ActionScript using Flash Professional CS5 and Flash Builder 4 which we used inside our course player. These View components had text fields which would dynamically resize when the player was resized on the fly(Only for firefox and safari, IE and chrome do not allow resizing). These views also had images which would scale appropriately as well.

Flash CS5 Dynamic Text Formatting – Part 2

Mixing TextFormats within a TextField
We would like to highlight text within a paragraph. I would follow the instructions in Part 1 of this series, then follow these instructions to modify the text format within a paragraph:

• create a new TextField with the desired font to be used
• embed the font in the TextField
• Set the font to be exported for actionscript*

* see the instructions at this site: AS3: Text Fields and Formats to set the linkage properties for the font in the IDE.

Flash CS5 Dynamic Text Formatting – Part 1

Retrieving TextFormat from TextField with Embedded Font
Creating notes for myself to reference when creating flash pages using the Flash CS5 IDE.

This post is going to cover how to retrieve TextFormat settings when I would like to change the text in dynamic text fields on the fly. I typically layout flash pages with TextFields placed in the desired location on the stage. When an interaction has been setup and the values of the text fields needs to change dynamically, I always struggle to remember exactly what I did each time.

Simple approach Part 1:

• Embed the font in the dynamic TextField with desired attributes set in property tab
• TextField paragraph setting set to Justify*
• Programmatically retrieve the TextFields text format properties to be used later

* – this seems to prevent cropping of characters in the text field when values are changed. When I tried to set this attribute programmatically, the text characters would get cropped when I mixed font attributes within a text field vs setting the whole TextField from the stage (so just set this item globally on the stage properties tab view for the designated TextField).

Spelling Fix Directive on Modwest Hosting Provider

Caveat: Modwest is a really dependable hosting service but it is sometimes hard to locate info from Knowledge base support.

While uploading our new course player which loaded swf files that had corresponding audio files to be played (audio files which had been named but not created yet), I noticed that random audio files were being played with each page. Rather a disconnect between what was being visually seen and what you were hearing from some random audio file. This was unexpected since it was not happening on my local testbed server.

I then noticed in my error_log on Modwest that when a file could not be found that a message in the following basic format was output:

“Spelling fix: /”missing filename here ” [info] Audio file requested but does not exist 20 candidates from http://mysite/callingPage.swf

and then some random file would be selected that was considered a best match.

I had a difficult time trying to find out how to turn off this feature but finally my googling skills found this information about the Apache http server having a mod_speling extension:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_speling.html

I really like how it is spelled mod_speling with a single L in spelling:)

I then was able to find the appropriate link on Modwest by searching for checkspelling(which is the apache directive to enable/disable the spelling module) at the support site(support.modwest.com) to find this link:
http://support.modwest.com/content/1/176/en/how-do-i-stop-the-server-from-automatically-correcting-spelling-mistakes-in-urls-or-offering-multiple-choices-for-documents.html?highlight=checkspelling

So I created an .htaccess file in my www directory which had the following in it:
CheckSpelling Off

This directive then holds for all subdirectories as well. Random files were no longer being selected. Done.

Renew/Reinstall Adobe Air Code Signing Certificate (GlobalSign)

After renewing my code signing certificate with GlobalSign, I performed the following steps to install my certificate to be used by Flex when creating Air applications.

1. Installed the certificate in my browser following the directions from GlobalSign
2. Saved the certificate to a backup file(used for backup and also for Air Application release builds)
3. Tested the certificate file by creating a release build of an Air Application

Flex Formatter Plugin for eclipse and Flex Builder

To install the flex formatter plugin, download the zip from this site:
Flex Formatter download site

The installation directions can be found on the forums here:
Flex Formatter forums

The specific installation query on forum is here:
Installing flex formatter

In essence, unzip the zip file. Locate the plugins folder under your eclipse or flex builder installation. Copy or drag and drop the jar files into the plugins folder. Start/Restart your eclipse/flex builder program. the icons should be displayed in the upper left hand side of the top icon toolbar.

Installation instructions from grant skinner can be found here

Some more documentation can be found on the wiki here as well:
Flex Formatter Docs

Configuring the attribute order can be found here:
Configuring mxml attribute order

The settings can be accessed from here as well:
Windows>Preferences > General> Keys> MXML
and
Windows > Preferences > Flex Formatting

phpMyAdmin – Installing LAMP/MAMP on Snow Leopard/Mac Pro Part II

The only missing piece from the LAMP configuration was the phpMyAdmin package. So I did the following:

1. Downloaded the zip file for phpMyAdmin from www.phpmyadmin.net
2. unzip the downloaded fie
3. rename phpMyAdmin…3.2.5 to phpMyAdmin
4. copy the directory to the apache server location(/Library/Webserver/Documents)
5. FAQS stated – you need to create your own config.inc.php. I started from config.sample.inc.php
6. Go to http://localhost/phpMyAdmin which should show you the login view

My config.inc.php is displayed below