MOOPA - Web Development and Design Blog

This weekend, I suggested to my four year old that we should make a film. I gave him the role of Director and (with the smallest amount of direction from me) Smash TV was the result.

Enjoy! x 

After a fair while developing soley in C#.net, I decided it was time for a change. CakePHP looks like a very solid framework and I decided to give it a whirl with MAMP. Everything was going fine, but I could not get Cake to connect to the MAMP installed instance of MySql. After a bit of googling, I found this helpful post that resolved the problem.

To summarize, MAMP installs mysqld with the following option: --socket=/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock but everything else on the system looks for /tmp/mysql.sock.

The soloution is to make a symbolic link to the latter via the terminal with the command: sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

Thanks to Stefan Fischerländer for his post.

Parallels has an annoying habit (ok bug), of not releasing certain keys at times. Start to type and hit "r" and the run prompt will appear. Type "e" and explorer will spawn another window *grrr*.

The remedy? Press cmd-option-enter. Parallels will ask you if you wish to enter full screen mode. Say no and you will magically have fixed the stuck windows key. Rubbish that this has to happen, but at least it fixes it until the Parallels team do ;)

If you are devving in the Flash IDE, sometimes you may need to use local variables that are different from the live version. A good example would be with paths to images or other swfs. You can use the flash.system.Capabilities.playerType for this very thing:-

// DETERMINE IF IN DEV MODE
if(flash.system.Capabilities.playerType == "External")
{
 _IsDebug = true;
}

In this instance, I am using the _IsDebug var throughout the document class to set local or live paths. 

I recently read an interesting article posted by Jeff Lamarche regarding Microsofts new advert. For those who haven't seen it, it is a retort to the I'm a Mac, I'm a PC ads from Apple. To summarize, Macs are portrayed as asthetically "sexy" but lacking in computing power.

There is no doubt that Mac's are pricey, but there is more to a purchase than the product.

My Macbook Pro started to exhibit faults about a month ago. When it got hot the keyboard and trackpad would cease to function. At that time we had a huge amount of work on, and I couldn't jusitify a week without my machine. I simply plugged in an external keyboard and mouse. Finally work died down and I looked up my warranty info on Apples site. My warranty had expired by 26 days BUT the fault had appeared only 2 days after the warranty had ran out!

I was slightly put out by this as I think most people would be. I rang Apple and explained the issue. The guy from technical support said he could do very little but appreciated my frustration and transfered me to customer relations. The lady was amazing. Very helpful, friendly and communicative. Within 3 minutes, she had offered to replace the parts and have the repair done for nothing. One week later, i have a 100 percent working machine and a warm feeling that in this age of faceless corporations, at least one of them cares about its customers.

I already know which machine I will be purchasing next time. It is sexy, asthetically pleasing and the manufacturer will do its best to fix it should it go wrong...

You have found our new blog! For those of you new to blogging wikipedia describes a blog as the following:-

"A blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog."

We intend to use this blog to share anything exciting that we find on the net and to keep you updated with things we may be doing that may be of interest to you.

So, for now we will bid you fairwell. Watch this space for updates soon!