I recently ran into this crazy ActionScript scoping issue, that drove me so crazy I decided it needed a post. ActionScript is an ECMAScript language so learning it has been very fun. I’m able to use all my JS knowledge and then extend it to a much richer language.
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I’ve spent more time with OpenSP/OpenJade trying to get everything working under Cygwin, and I think I’ve finally got it.

Here’s what I had to change:

• OpenSP 1.5.1
  1. Edit config.h.in, and comment out #define SP_HAVE_LOCALE OpenSP will work with this turned on, but OpenJade will break. Better to just disable locale support in OpenSP and let OpenJade figure it out later.
  2. Run configure --with-included-gettext Cygwin’s gettext support is lacking bindtextdomain or something.
  3. Ditch the #pragmas Cygwin doesn’t support #pragma interface and #pragma implementation, and it results in undefined symbols during linking. This is in a lot of the source files, you’ll probably want to write a perl or awk script to take care of it.
• OpenJade 1.3.2
  1. Edit grove/Node.h, and change the #ifdef SP_WCHAR_T_USHORT to #ifdef SP_WCHAR_T_USHORT_ OpenJade defines it’s Char type as a Unsigned32. This is apparently incompatible with grove’s definition of GroveChar as a wchar_t. Cant’ we all just get along?
  2. Edit msggen.pl, and add a second chop; – gotta love window’s CRLF linefeed sequence, and the way it confuses perl.

At this point, I know I can run the openjade.exe binary. I haven’t really fiddled with it any more, but I have an article I want to format as HTML.. so that’s next.

I’ve been working at Macromedia for a month or two now, and I’ve learned to appreciate the coolness of Flash and ActionScript. People may whine and complain that its not open, that its proprietary, that it duplicates some web functionality, but when it comes down to it, its just damn fun. I’m hoping to put together some interacitve flash tutorials on Mozilla architecture, but that’s a subject for another day.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is the way that Macromedia has put together this slick authoring environment to allow people to develop for Flash. The latest version, “Flash MX 2004″ is an IDE that combines UI/animation design (similar to the old Visual Basic tool) with a programming environment. What’s especially interesting is that they’ve integrated the compiler, the editor, and the help system all into one space.
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oh yeah, I forgot that I had also added another thing for gallery integration.

I found this neat hack which includes a php file that outputs javascript to display a link. I tweaked the script to look like this:

..
echo "document.write('<a href="" . 
    makeAlbumUrl($gallery->album->fields["name"]) . "">" . 
    $gallery->album->getThumbnailTag($gallery->album->getHighlight() ) . 
    "</a>');";
..

getThumbnailTag is cool because it its the complete <img> tag to display the particular thumbnail. It wouldn’t be hard to make that a random number to display a random thumbnail.

so now I can also say thumbnail=yes and it will display a thumbnail from the gallery specified by the gallery keyword.

For another secret website I’m making for a certain future trip, I needed a way to easily link to a photo gallery (created with the awesome Gallery Project software) in a blog post.

That was pretty easy. I just added
<MTKeyValues source="[MTEntryKeywords]"> <MTIfKeyExists key="gallery"> <div class="blog-entry-gallery"> <a href="/gallery/<$MTKeyValue key="gallery"$>">gallery</a> </div> </MTIfKeyExists> </MTKeyValues>

And now in my keywords field, I can just say “gallery=foo” and it will automatically add a link in the blog entry.

Today I hacked on MovableType to accomplish two things:

• A private category that I could post without worrying that my stuff goes public
• Sane URLs instead of those annoying date fields

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