joshbuhler.com

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

If you use SC Plugin to work with Subversion, you may have noticed that the icons used by SC Plugin to mark the status of a file aren’t always up to date. Apparently, this has something to do with how the Finder handles notifications that something has happened to the items in a particular folder.

This issue has been disscussed a few times on the SC Plugin mailing lists, and the author has posted a link to a free utility called Nudge, that can be used until SC Plugin can handle the updating of the icons correctly.

Installing Nudge adds an item to the contextual menu of Finder that allows you to “nudge”, or refresh the contents of a folder, and causes the icons in your SVN working copy to reflect their true status. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and it seems to work pretty good. If you use SVN on a Mac, you may want to check it out.

Link: http://www.brockerhoff.net/nudge/

Last night I was working on a side project some of us at mediaRAIN have been working on, and I came across the snippet of code below. It’s from the NuSoap php libraries, in nusoap.php, around line 4423.

Looks like Donny & Marie have found a new line of work.

Now, I’m guilty of using iterators & other throwaway variables like bob and randy, so I can’t really point any fingers. I guess next time I’ll just have to start using more famous pairs though: $batman & $robin, $starsky & $hutch, etc. I mean, everyone uses bob, or foo.

I really found this more amusing than anything, so it’s not a complete wtf?!. Just something to wake you up and make you laugh when you’re just about to fall asleep at the keyboard again.

How to Report Bugs Effectively - Simon Tatham

It’ll be a beautiful day when users, clients, & other developers on your team actually read & apply the information presented in this essay.

I’m finding that a lot of Mac using web developers I’ve met either haven’t found the Activity panel in Safari, or haven’t played with it enough to see how useful it really can be.

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As a followup to my post the other day about some loading issues I was having, here’s some more of the story:

After we got the crossdomain.xml file fixed things started working great. Or so we thought. It worked in everything BUT Internet Explorer on Windows (XP, ME, 2000). Obviously, as much as we can’t stand IE at work, we still have to support it. I’d spent the last two days searching every forum and site I could find looking for an answer, but all I found were more people asking the same question I was. Finally today we found the problem. The JSP code running on the content server that was serving the mp3 files for us was not explicity setting the Content-Length header when it returned the mp3’s. Apparently, Safari, FireFox, and IE on Mac don’t care about this, but as soon as the content server guys added that header to the JSP, it worked beautifully in IE in Windows.

I don’t really understand too much the details of exactly why this happens with the combo of IE on Windows and the Flash player, but I’m sure that someone out there might. If you know, I’d like to know as well. Drop me line either through a comment, or using the contact form to the right.

Update: (April 12, 2007) - More up-to-date instructions and corrections as a result of the release of Flash Player 9.0.28 are found on DigitalFlipbook

How many times have you built something in Flash, tested it a million times or more, have it work great, and then fail as soon as you put it online, or outside the Flash IDE? You then go back to your local version, test some more, and begin throwing trace("something here"); and trace("whyIsntThisWorking"); everywhere. It all works great, and then you put it online again, and it doesn’t work. Personally, this seems to happen to me quite often on certain projects. I’ve often wished that there was some way to trace out what’s going on in my .swf files online, so I can figure out what’s happening.
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