Hello internet.

I don’t know if I ever bothered the About me section of this blog but here’s a few tidbits. I live in Vancouver and am a web/software developer. I’m originally from Thunder Bay, Ontario as is my girlfriend Brianna. She moved to Vancouver with me but has had a hard time finding a good job. She’s never had trouble with this before. From talking to people I get the sense that the job market isn’t so hot in Vancouver if you’re not part of certain in-demand professions. There are, however, jobs out there but it seems you just might need to be as loud as possible to stand out from the crowd.

In an attempt to help I did the only thing I know how to do: make a website. I enjoyed designing this as I haven’t done much design lately. Hopefully he helps!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXqmRAUsn9U

Problem:

You have a javascript array that likely has some duplicate values and you would like a count of those values.

Solution:

Try this schnippet out.

 
function compressArray(original) {
 
	var compressed = [];
	// make a copy of the input array
	var copy = original.slice(0);
 
	// first loop goes over every element
	for (var i = 0; i < original.length; i++) {
 
		var myCount = 0;	
		// loop over every element in the copy and see if it's the same
		for (var w = 0; w < copy.length; w++) {
			if (original[i] == copy[w]) {
				// increase amount of times duplicate is found
				myCount++;
				// sets item to undefined
				delete copy[w];
			}
		}
 
		if (myCount > 0) {
			var a = new Object();
			a.value = original[i];
			a.count = myCount;
			compressed.push(a);
		}
	}
 
	return compressed;
};

It should go something like this:

var testArray = new Array("dog", "dog", "cat", "buffalo", "wolf", "cat", "tiger", "cat");
var newArray = compressArray(testArray);
 
/*
console: [
	Object { value="dog", count=2}, 
	Object { value="cat", count=3}, 
	Object { value="buffalo", count=1}, 
	Object { value="wolf", count=1}, 
	Object { value="tiger", count=1}
]
*/

I hope that’s useful to somebody.

This is pissing me off. I have some Javascript that looks like this:

var boz = {
      thing: function(val) { alert(val); }
}

I want to call it from Flash using ExternalInterface like this:

ExternalInterface.call("boz.thing", "what the shit!?");

…but that doesn’t work.

Somebody asked about this on StackOverflow (here) and in the accepted answer the guy says the code is basically just eval’d so it’ll work just fine. He has an example like this:

ExternalInterface.call("function (foo) { alert(foo); return true; }","test");

That doesn’t work either. I can only seem to get it to work with global function calls. Am I missing something? There certainly doesn’t seem to any examples of calling namespaced Javascript from Flash out there.

I’ll post back if I find out what’s going on.

#container
{
    width: 960px;
    height: auto;
    font-size: 14px;
}

I find this way takes a lot of space and that stylesheets get long quickly making the file hard to navigate. With widescreen monitors I think this makes more sense:

#container { width: 960px;  height: auto;  font-size: 14px; }

However, often times I’m working on an inherited project or using a snippet I found and the CSS isn’t laid out the way I like. I found a site that helped me out with this. The design is wacky but it did the trick. There is a fair amount you can customize so you should be able to mass convert any CSS to the way you like it. On a downside, I think it strips out all comments…

Check out “Format CSS Online“.

I have a button that calls this function, grabs what’s in the clipboard and sticks it in a label. Currently it just works for text. The hard part for me was figuring out how to make an instance of the clipboard object. I thought I’d post it quickly here.

protected virtual void click (object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
	Clipboard clippy = GetClipboard(Gdk.Atom.Intern("CLIPBOARD", false));
	label1.Text = clippy.WaitForText();
}

I’ve been working on this site, thirtydogs.com, for some time now. Thirtydogs is basically a place where you can find and share ideas for somewhat unconventional things to do with your time.

Ideas on thirtydogs.com can range from Start an ant farm to Roast wieners or marshmallows over the stovetop element.

I built Thirtydogs using the PHP framework Codeigniter. It’s a great, lightweight framework. It had what I needed without a bunch of extra crap.

Anyways, go check it out and make sure to check back often. There’s a lot of features sitting at the 90% mark that I should be rolling out over the next couple of months. We’re also planning on tightening up the design. I think the most interesting thing will be to see what this site evolves into as a community develops around it. Hopefully some creative people dig the site and we can build a nice big database of ridiculous ideas.

Remember, waste your time creatively.

I just found this in my drafts. I have no idea what I was doing. Drunk most likely.