Emak Mafu Labs Blog

A big thakyou to everyone involved in the meeting at Poke last week. We have had some really good feedback over the last few days. We’ll get some photos up soon, you can read a review here from Marc Hibbins.

I wrote a stupid post here about my opinions of a LFPUG talk. Since then i have taken it down - you can get the jist of of here

This is the content of a reply that i wrote on Tinks website - i thought i would put it here to help spread the word:

” Hello everybody - tis the, err ‘Jerk off’ as one guy rightly describes on Tinks blog, and quite rightly so. I hope everyone can except a humble apology for this ‘rant’ that i wrote. I have learnt from this stupid mistake to only write posts when I’m in the mood to write constructively and not to just have a moan. In future i will bring out the good and bad points an weight them out in a conclusion. - I have taken this post down due to how inappropriate it is.

Just for the record, I have huge admiration for this guy who is able do his job as a developer/company founder (which we all know takes up a lifetime), have a life of normality and give a huge amount of time to organizing a monthly event that enriches and inspires people. without stuff like this - we wouldn’t be left with much would we - people like me should just learn to keep their mouths clothes and think before speaking.

Sorry guys - especially to Stephen Downs and Jolyon Russ. I’m feeling very much like you do when you wake up in the morning and cringe at what you did the night before. “

Yesterday 1 October, adobe has released the new version of Flex Builder. I’ve download the last version from the website of adobe, and what a surprise, it’s impossible to me to set up correctly the Weborb. In theory, when you create a project you need to select Live DataServices, but I cannot select it in the new version if it’s not under J2EE Data Services, and I “suppose” Weborb it’s php. In fact, I have tried all the possible configurations in Flex Builder 3.

Anyone knows something about this stuff?

UPDATED:

HELP 1 (by Jurgen):

You’ll have to set it up as a PHP project and then manually add the -services “//weborb/Weborb/WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml” to the compiler arguments. Works like a charm.

HELP 2 (by Soknet):

http://www.websector.de/blog/2007/08/08/weborb-for-php-login-example-using-flex-3-and-caingorm-221/

Thanks everybody.

I’m not sure if this is a bug due to word press, or if one of our team sneaked into the database and did something ugly becasue one day both (designspam) of our blogs started playing up giving this error:

INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value) VALUES (’59′,’_utw_tags_0′,’a:0:{}’)

after a while scratching my head and looking for answers - i wasnt really coming up with much, all the other blogs were saying that the tables might be currupt or the word press want upgraded propery, but none of these were relevant, so i decided to get knee deep in the database myself.

After creating many test blogs and databases, and updating them with our blog content - i noticed that the error only happens when an entry with the ID of 0 exists in either the wp_posts table or the wp_postmeta table. getting rid of this entry seemed to stabilize the system when creating a new blog…. until you added another one, and it tries adding it as zero again. So the whole problem rests on the fact that as soon as an entry exists in the database with ID 0, then things start going a bit wrong.

I solved the problem by changing the ID structure to auto_incremement, and zero dosnt get a looking, but fear this is a hack that might come back to hurt me later on.

I posted this article for two reasons:
1. To help some poor soul like me speed their day up a bit
2. Maybe get some feedback if this method has been tried and tested before

either way, would love to hear something on this matter

Check this link out to see some of our work, this will become soo full now that ive got this working, so check back often!

As you can tell from the lack of blogging recently we have been a bit snowed under the last few weeks.

We have a new member of the team, Javier, who has been working hard on our Version 4 of Mafunet (yes, we really have built it 4 times now) our Flex based Content Management System. The project is still under wraps, but we will be releasing a beta soon. If you would like to sign up to our Beta testing please email us at beta@mafunet.com.

You can find our MafuNet site here.

I came across this little info nugget, and thought it was quite a cool way of loading images - we’re are currently building a site with a huge amount of images, so very interested in this method - not sure what happens if the users browser cache is disabled tho?? Check it out here

I have just been searching on how to link a class to a movieClip created with ‘createEmptyMovieCLip’ - which at first, seems like there is no answer, but i stumble accross this little nugget which is perfect for OOP component development which you dont want to rely on any assets what so ever.

Hers a little snippet taken from swfoo.com
A more detailed explanation can be found at peterjoel.com

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Actor.as:

class Actor extends MovieClip {
static var id = (id=”__Packages.Actor”)+
(Object.registerClass(id,Actor)?”":”");

public function Actor() {
trace(”Action!”);
}
}

To test:

import Actor;
attachMovie(Actor.id, “_mc”, 1);

works like a charm!

I’ll keep it short, we are after a junior Flex Developer.
I know you’re out there.
Somewhere.
Perhaps your a Java guy looking to get into Flex.
Don’t worry.
We’ll train you.
And feed you.
Please email us at jobs (at) emakmafu.com

Its the day after the night before… we’ve had 11 emails each, totaling a massive 55 - constantly informing us of this amazing event to grace the Imperial College Union in South Ken, so we thought we’d check out the hype. I’ll leave my video to explain why we ended up 3 pints down with a fish ‘n chips chaser in the local boozer….

In the video you see two queues funneling into a bottle neck entrance - these people have supposedly registered to, ’skip the queues!’, as one of the many emails cheerfully proposed. Upon asking a fellow queue buddy how long he had been wasting his life here for - he replied, we a monotone drone, “1 hour”, and he wasn’t even at the front!

for this, Emak Mafu left for a better life in the pub

(Apologies for the ’special’ guy staring at the camera at the beginning - we hope it didn’t scare anyones children )