blog-o-fobik

Just a little facelift … Don’t you just love css … well.. apart from the footer that does not show right in IE

Finally, i have some minor updates to the AS2docGenerator:
- added suport for the @interface tag,
- you can now add as a parameter a directory containing .as class files (or other directories with .as class files) and it will generate a _docs directory with all the html outputs

example usage:
1) single .as file:
C:\> [path to]AS2docGenerator.exe [path to]AS2class.as
this generates a AS2class_doc.html file in the same directory AS2class.as is in.

2) a directory with .as files and/or other directories:
C:\> [path to]AS2docGenerator.exe [path to]AS2classDirectory
this generates a _docs directory in the same directory where the AS2docGenerator.exe was called from. All the asClass_doc.html files are in the _docs directory.

download it from here.

The project is still in beta so bugs and other naughty insects are possible

It’s been a long time since my last post and to put some “life” back to this blog, i thought i’d post one of those “ported from java” experiments.
Very little work on my part, actually.. thanks to syntax similarities between AS2 and java.

This one is from the book The Art of Java, Chapter 2: A Recursive-Descent Expression Parser.

Test it here.
Download source here

There are some python utilities that use Movable Type’s XML-RPC interface and thus allow you to view, post, delete and edit weblog entries, and more…
PyMT
mtsend.py

.. and of course, i just got a really cool idea (to me at least ;))
what if i make a flash interface for such a tool? We know how to embed flash into python, don’t we? right, .. all i need is some free time ….

This is something i didn’t know it exsisted until just recently: Flash MX2004 Livedocs at MM site.
All the documentation from the Help panel is now online, but you can also add your own comments or code samples and read others. It is something that’s got potential if flash users (we) will start “using” it

Been reading Test driven Development at the moment (toghether with other 10 or so books, heh) and today i came accross this sentence that really got me.
It’s one of those things you want to write on a piece of paper and stick it on your monitor so you never forget.
Kent Beck says:
“How do you leave a programming session when you’re programming alone? Leave the last test broken.”

Basically he is saying that one should never leave the code for the next session in a perfectly working state. Before leaving, one should always make one last thing and make sure that that last thing does not work. …so that when you come back to the code, you then have an obvious place to start - “an obvious, concrete bookmark to help you remember what you were thinking”. This will also keep you away from just staring at the code and marvelling at how everything works, trying to think of what to work on next but not really starting it yet cos you don’t want to break anything so soon .. or just trying to remember the mental state you were in and thus wasting a lot of time before finally getting back to typing.
(happens to me a lot of times!)

This does not work out well if you’re working with a team, though

I woke up today just to find out that Macromedia Flash MX 2004 updater is here! And if your trial has already expired, no worries. The updater will extend it for another 30 days. That’s really cool of Macromedia.

Go get it here.

Burak KALAYCI , the guy behind Actionscript Viewer has started his own blog. Go bookmark it now!
via MediaSparkles.

Mike Chambers released FlashCommand (a commandline compiler for Flash 2004).
read more about it here.

In order to learn AS2 i’ve started to study java more intensely and translate various code snippets to AS2 and to great suprise, some of them can be just copy/pasted (syntactically speaking).
Here’s an example. I came across this link with some usefull java code to learn from. If you take a look at this PermuteString java class and the AS2 version below, you can see that i merely copied the code meat into an AS2 class (yeah, shame on me!).


class StringPermutator
{
private var __word:String;
private var __index:Number;
private var __substring:StringPermutator;

function StringPermutator(s:String)
{
__word = s;
__index = 0;
if(s.length > 1) __substring = new StringPermutator(s.substring(1));
}

public function hasMorePermutations():Boolean
{
return __index

and you can test it here.