Yesterday wasn’t exactly the greatest day of my life. My family had to make one of the hardest decisions anyone with a pet will ever make, and we put Boomer, our St. Bernard to sleep yesterday morning. He had been having some pretty serious health issues, and ever since our other dog “Allie” passed away a few years ago, he’s always seemed a bit lonely without her.

Taking care of a task like this can never be easy, but at least we were able to make it a little bit nicer for Boomer. My cousin is an animal control officer, and so rather than take care of things in a cold, empty vet’s office, we did it in the backyard, in the shade where Boomer liked to hang out. Once Boomer had passed, we buried him below the Maple tree in the back where he used to spend a lot of time napping, and rolling around in the mud.

Since my sister said it better, I’ll simply point you to read what she had to say, since it pretty much sums up everything I wanted to, but better.

Boomer Norman Buhler

This is one of those things I’m blogging about mostly so that I always know where I can find it.

If you ever find yourself working on a Mac, but without a Mac keyboard with an Eject button on it, you can still open the keyboard with a mouse click by installing the Eject Menu Extra. You’ll find it in the following folder:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Eject.menu

Just double-click it and it’ll install to your menubar like so:

This comes in really handy at times. Recently, I was using an old PowerMac that we have here in the office for some stuff, and rather than clutter up my desk more with the extra mouse & keyboard, I was using Teleport to control the machine. While using this setup, Teleport wasn’t sending the “eject” command from the Mac keyboard I was using, so I installed this Menu Extra, and was able to control the drive, regardless of the keyboard I was using.

Try to keep all of your fingers attached this weekend.

I saw this effect a long time ago, and wanted to use it in a project, but after about ten minutes of searching for the original, I gave up and just decided to make my own.

Click on the image above to view it in action.

This is just a basic bitmap effect that uses BitmapData to draw an image, with the pixels spilling down from the top in a waterfall-type effect. The fun thing about this is that since the source of the effect needs to implement IBitmapDrawable, you can supply just about anything as the source. In the example below, select “This Panel” to watch the options panel be redrawn. The end effect is that each individual piece of the panel is “beamed down” on it’s own. The “Flow” image is another favorite of mine.

The ’speed’ option is simply the number of milliseconds used in the Timer to execute the effect.

Source is also provided, just right-click on the example to get it.

If you’re working on a project that’s prone to timing out on you, and throwing those “A script has executed for longer than the default timeout period of 15 seconds” errors, here’s a quick tip for you until fix the bugs causing the timeout.

Just set the scriptTimeLimit attribute of your <mx:Application> tag to a smaller value, like 3 seconds. That way you won’t need to wait around for a while waiting for your app to crash so you can get back to debugging the problem. It’ll crash in about 3 seconds instead of 15, or even a full minute later.

Obviously, the ideal solution is to fix the bug causing the timeout, but while you’re debugging, this should help to ease the pain a little bit.

LiveDocs: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/mx/core/Application.html#scriptTimeLimit