So I started going through my daily dose of information this morning. Found a link to this very interesting music player that describes itself as "desktop web player". It is called Songbird. Downloaded and started playing with it. Very impressive. Plays music stored locally and on the web with equal ease. Has a very nice feel to it -- and it is still being developed! But looking at it I couldn't help but thinking how easy it would be to write something like this in Apollo.

Part of rebuilding my laptop was to get Subversion going. Installed Subversion server 1.4. As I like to access it over http using Apache, I installed latest build of Apache 2.2. But after making changes to http.conf to get Apache to work with Subversion, Apache server refused to start up. The Apache logs didn't contain anything descriptive on why the server was not starting up.

I rely heavily on flashlog.txt for tracing Flex code. But I just couldn't get the flashlog.txt to go today -- I am rebuilding my box. So I started looking at the Adobe technote on this matter "Debugging Client-Side Code in Flex Applications". However, the Flash movie on this technote was not giving accurate information about my Flash player.

I use TinyMCE as the HTML editor for one of the projects I work on. While using the TinyMCE editor today I found that the stylesheet drop-down did not list any styles in Firefox. The styles were showing up correctly in IE. Whenever I face such a situation (where tested Javascript code works in IE and not in Firefox), my first reaction is to disable all Firefox plugins and test again. I disabled all the plugins. And TinyMCE styles worked as expected!

I rely heavily on flashlog.txt for tracing Flex code. But I just couldn't get the flashlog.txt to go today -- I am rebuilding my box. So I started looking at the Adobe technote on this matter "Debugging Client-Side Code in Flex Applications". However, the Flash movie on this technote was not giving accurate information about my Flash player.

I use MySQL 5 as the default database for the work that I usually do. Today I came across a situation where I needed to test some MySQL 4 functionality. An option was to install MySQL 4 on another port (not the standard 3306). However, an easier option is to simply switch the MySQL mode. /* show the current sql mode */ SELECT @@GLOBAL.

Today I had an interesting conversation with colleagues and friends about Vista and who all amongst us wanted to upgrade our home computers to Vista. All of them said they were going to hold off upgrading their home machines.

Loose typing of ColdFusion variables is arguably one of the key factors that contribute to rapid application development. However, the lack of any standard in which variables are named causes considerable grief, especially when working on large-ish ColdFusion application, in a medium to moderate sized team, over a period of time. Different developers start using different "conventions" for variable names and those "conventions" become more like fashions that come and go with each season.

Apologies for the repeat posting, but the earlier link to the syntax file was not working. The webserver was not liking sending back .ini files (which is the extension of the syntax file). I've uploaded the syntax file again with the original entry. This time it is a zipped file. You'd need to unzip this into the {PSPad install path}/syntax directory. Thanks to Ken Auenson for pointing this out.

I use PSPad as the default reader/editor for text files of all kinds. Of late, I've been using it for working with ColdFusionMX files as well. It works very nicely! However, the syntax definition file for ColdFusionMX available on the PSPad site was missing some tags and functions. I've updated the syntax definitions and attached the file here.