30 minutes after the project was launched, it was discovered the flash is not submitting the data properly. It was critical and the team informed me of the problem. Immediately, I tried debugging the problem using my Firebug plugin. I noticed that the page is calling a crossdomain.xml file on our amfPHP server and returns a 404 error (obviously because there is no such thing as a crossdomain.xml file in our server). So it came to me that I didn’t implement any call to a crossdomain.xml file inside my action script when I did the form. Then I decided to google ‘crossdomain.xml’. I found out that the furniture Elhovoflash player recently introduced a policyкомпютри on implementing flash on a cross domain setup. Without spending another minute, I created the file and uploaded it on our server. Whew! Thank God it worked already! Another lesson I learned with Flash and action scripting.

1. Dowload prototype
2. Download scriptaculous (you will only need the scriptaculous.js and the effects.js files)
3. Download lightview from Nick Stackenburg’s site
4. Download the modified FlickrRSS plugin here. All credits still with Dave Kellam who originally created the plugin. I just did some tweakings. Upload this file to your wordpress’ ‘plugins’ folder.
5. Create a folder under your theme directory and name it ‘lightview’ . Under it, create a ‘js’ folder and upload all your js files in it (prototype.js, scriptaculous.js, and lightview.js). Next, create a ‘img’ folder and upload all the images from the lightview package. Lastly, a ‘css’ folder to hold the lightview.css file. (yes, i always practice folder organization and I want things to be neat on my projects =p )
6. Put this snippet on the header.php file of your template:

<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('template_url');?>/lightview/js/prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('template_url');?>/lightview/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('template_url');?>/lightview/js/lightview.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url');?>/lightview/css/lightview.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
7. Lastly, activate the plugin and configure the options.
8. Enjoy your flickr stream on lightview effect!

and that’s it! Enjoy listening to your MP3s on your amarok player.

i thought everything is falling into its proper place. i thought it is the opportunity of a lifetime. i thought i can grow and share myself to the world. and now everything is…

… gone.

( so much for happiness and celebration. lesson learned: don’t expect too much). I don’t feel like coding for the next few days. *sigh*

In my desperate attempt to view my son’s webcam in the Philippines on my Ubuntu machine, I googled the internet regarding the problem displaying webcam from my contacts. Apparently, the libjasper-runtime library was not installed by default on my Ubuntu machine. The solution, on your terminal:

sudo apt-get install libjasper-runtime


Enter your password and let the magic begins. Your Kopete will now have a webcam support. Grab some beers and rejoice!

Among the core features that I would like to integrate with the Glued! project is the dynamic profile fields for the users where users can selectively choose and edit fields in their profile. They will have the option to add fields, define field visibility (whether to display it publicly or only to selected user or group of users), and an in-place edit of the values of the fields.

With this in mind, I was faced with the problem on how I will design the database such that it will handle the dynamic profile fields of the user. I cannot predefine the fields and put them as a field(or column) on a single table. Then, I came up with the solution:

I created 3 tables. Let’s name them ‘users’, ‘profile_options’ and ‘profile_values’. To give you a short description on each of the tables and how they work:

• users - Your list of users. A user is identified by the unique auto-increment id generated by MySQL
• profile_options - Holds all available options that the users can choose from. This also defines the option type.
• profile_values - Defines the relationship of the user to the profile_options plus the values the users put into them

The ‘profile_values’ table holds all the profile fields of a user. Let’s say a user has a ‘name’, ‘birthdate’, ‘occupation’, ‘gender’ on his profile. This means that in the ‘profile_values’ table, selecting all the records for that user will return 4 rows (name,birthdate,occupation, and gender). Take note that the ‘profile_values’ will only contain the user id, the option id (the auto-increment id from ‘profile_options’), the value submitted by the user, and an optional column such as ‘display’. The column ‘display’ will define the visibility of the field (either public or only for a specific group of users).

With this database design, add a little fancy drag and drop, sortable, and in-place editing feature on the UI and you will have a kick-ass Web 2.0 application.

I was looking around the possibility of using MooTools for my development with cakePHP but unfortunately wasn’t able to find a decent cakePHP “helper” available online. I’ve heard the library is the most lightweight one.

Accidentally, i bumped into this cool snippet by Greg Houston named MooTools Mocha UI. What’s great about this user interface class is that it is made with canvas tag graphics. This means that you can achieve the submodal effect without using any images at all.

I like the overall “apple”-ish look of the UI and might integrate it on one of my projects. I foresee that this will be useful in observing accessibility and usability in my applications.

Router::connect('/users/user-([0-9].*).html’, array(’controller’ => ‘users’, ‘action’ => ‘view’));

This of course assumes you have an action ‘view’ in your ‘users controller’. Something like:

function view($id){
// your code here
}