pifantastic

Drupal and Memoization

Aaron — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 06:11:21 +0000

Memoization is a way to cache the results of calling a function with a specific set of parameters. This can be very useful in Drupal if you need to call a function that does some kind of complex computation or database queries, but is in a part of the code you don’t want to modify. Here is a function I wrote for a recent project that allows you to utilize this technique:

And here are some examples of how you might use it:

Be warned, however. You only want to do this if you know for sure that you are going to call a function more than once. Otherwise it’s just added overhead with no benefit.

Adobe AIR 2 and jQueryUI Datepicker

Aaron — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:42:56 +0000

As of version 1.8.1, the jQueryUI Datepicker does not work in Adobe AIR. The issue and more details can be found here: http://dev.jqueryui.com/ticket/3945.

The problem is that Adobe AIR does not support dynamically loading strings as code after the load event. Version 1.8.1 of the jQueryUI Datepicker uses this method to add onclick handlers to the various Datepicker controls. The patch to fix the problem can be found here: http://github.com/csnover/jquery-ui/blob/b8d8e1e4a6e405c62ded6dd5ab4065ad10cd1225/ui/jquery.ui.datepicker.js

Jsonify

Aaron — Tue, 11 May 2010 17:40:56 +0000

On one of my current Drupal projects I found I needed to load nodes via javascript. To make the whole thing easy peasy I created Jsonify, a dead simple Drupal module that provides you with javascript methods for loading nodes and comments.

Creating .dmg Files with Adobe AIR 2 and OSX

Aaron — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:50:39 +0000

Recently I needed to develop a method for creating password protected backups of my application’s data. The original idea was to create a password protected zip file which I could just do using /usr/bin/zip. Unfortunately, the OSX archiver utility cannot open password protected zip files, making it very difficult for users to actually open the zip files.

So after a bit of research I came across http://github.com/andreyvit/yoursway-create-dmg. This guy has created an awesome little shell script that allows you to create .dmg files with pretty backgrounds and all sorts of other things. I forked it here so that I could add the ability to set a password. And then I just execute the shell file using the NativeProcess API built in to Adobe AIR 2. Here is the javascript:

Kodak W820 Media RSS Feed

Aaron — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:08:24 +0000

I recently bought my dear mother a Kodak W820 digital photo frame. It’s wireless and supports several ways of reading media from the web, one being RSS. I don’t have much experience with RSS so when I wanted to create my own RSS feed for the frame, I had a little trouble. Here is the markup for the feed that ended up working for me:

Anatomy of an AIR Build Script (Windows)

Aaron — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:58:35 +0000

Building AIR applications isn’t particularly difficult, but I thought someone may benefit from seeing the super simple python script I use to build the AIR app I am currently working on.

It allows you to do three things: run your app in the debugger, create a new self signed certificate, and build the final .air application file. It assumes the following directory structure (but you can easily edit the script to customize this):

root/
	index.html
	application-descriptor.xml
	/js
	/css
	/locale
	/icons

When finished building it places your .air file into a subdirectory called “build”.

seltzer, A Simple Javascript Interface for SQLite in Adobe AIR

Aaron — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:12:30 +0000

I’ve recently started my first project using Adobe AIR. When it came out a few years ago I did what most people did and said, “Oh, cool”, and then immediately forgot about it. But after reviewing several ways of solving this latest project, we realized that AIR was perfect.

AIR lets you choose what you develop with: Flex, Flash or Javascript+HTML+CSS. I chose Javascript because lately I’ve seen how powerful of a language it can be. Also I don’t know Flash or Flex :)

The AIR javascript API has support for SQLite databases which is totally awesome. My project has a fairly simple database and I wanted an easy way to interact with it. Thus, I created seltzer. I don’t really know why I called it that, I guess AIR reminds me of airy things. Like alka-seltzer?

You can download/fork/ignore completely the project on github. I’ve written some unit tests with QUnit but it still needs a lot of work. Hopefully by the end of my current project it will be breathing fire and lazer-blasting planets. In a good way.

Here is an example of how the API works. Like I said, it’s dead simple.

And here is a screenshot of the QUnit badassery:

Unzipping .svgz files in PHP

Aaron — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:05:31 +0000

I recently needed to take user uploaded .svgz files, decompress them (a .svgz file is simply a gzipped .svg file) and read some of the meta data. The operation is fairly straight forward in PHP but I couldn’t really find a comprehensive example online. So here is the solution I came up with and it seems to be working quite well: