Solving Rubik's Cube

http://www.metacafe.com/w/296901

Animator vs. Animation II

This is hilarious, some passionate Flash animator has too much time, and too much fun:

http://msnsa.net/tools/animator_v_animation2.swf

Grid in 3D

A genius combination of fish-eye effects and 3D

http://www.reflektions.com/miniml/template_permalink.asp?id=283

XML Auto Completion for SciTE / Scintilla

Scite / Scintilla has always been my choice of text editor, it is light-weight, fast, and open-sourced. In fact, Flash Develop, my choice of ActionScript editor is based on Scintilla. One feature SciTE is lacking would be XML auto completion, which can be easily accomplished by the instruction provided below:

http://lua-users.org/wiki/SciteXmlAutocompletion

Strange Flex List Bug

Over the past few weeks I have been working on some AS3 controls, the controls contain a list box whose sizes are defined in pixels instead of rowCount.

Occassionally, I would run into error such as "TypeError: Error #1010: A term is undefined and has no properties." At the first glimpse, I thought it was my code's problem, but after pulling my hair for numerous hours, I found that the problem came from the dimension of the list box, that is if the list box is set at certain dimension, the error would occur. Given the limited time I have, I have found the following height ranges would prevent error:

113 - 122px
135 - 142px
157 - 162px
179 - 189px

I have yet to get to the bottom of this bug, but for now, I think the above might offer a little clue and save a little cursing.

Making Windows Boot Faster

There is a great resource on making the ever-slowing Windows XP boot up go faster next time. Noteworthy is the Prefetch option which allows you to control how XP prefetch an application.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]

Under this key you should see a value named: EnablePrefetcher

It has 4 possible values:

0 - Disabled : The prefetch system is turned off.

1 - Application : The prefetch only caches applications.

2 - Boot : The prefetch only caches boot system files.

3 - All : The prefetch caches boot, and application files.


More on:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/09/why-windows-takes-so-long-to-start-up.html

Desaturation Popup

http://pixelfumes.blogspot.com/2006/09/flash-8-version-of-modal-pop-up.html

This could be repurposed for other popup techniques

Flash Filter Lab

http://www.flashfilterlab.com/

Pretty nice filter effects.

Live Data Filtering UI

Ted Patrick has collected a handful of nifty live data filtering UI examples. Live data filtering provides search results on the fly as you alter search parameters. The search parameters could be either search text, price, criteria and such. If the result set is generally small and fast, it eliminates the need of clicking the search button.

Ted's samples are all Flex based. For archival purpose, I replicate his collections here, as well as a few non-Flex ones.

Flex
HomeLocator by ASFusion
Flex Store(view Products)

YouTube.com Live Search by Kirk Ballou
FlexJax Search (php/mysql) $$
Search Grid Component by Uday M. Shankar
Apollo Tunes by Mike Chambers


JavaScript
Google Finance (Type in the symbol name in the search box)
Yahoo AutoComplete JSON Widget

Regenerate SQL Database by Scripts

At work we used to follow the workflow of creating database by scripts, the major advantage of it is that every developer can experiment on their own database, and if they screw the table or database up, it is just one click from Visual Studio to regenerate the database and data.

Scripting the data objects are easy, you can either type in the scripts yourself, or just right click the object at Query Analyzer or SQL Enterprise Manager to create the object. Yet scripting the data could become challenge. My team used to use a lot of insert statements, and became painful to write and slow.

Finally I stumbled upon bcp, a command-line utility that allows you to dump data off a table, or bulk copy a big chunck of data to SQL server without the penalty of logging, which fits perfectly for development purpose. The question comes to, in what order should the data be bulk-copied to tables. Because there are foreign-key constraints, thou shall not populate the child table before the parent table.

After using Enterprise Manager in conjunction with SQL Profiler to find out how dependencies are calculated in SQL Server, I found that sp_MSDependencies is a nifty stored procedure that would list all of the SQL server objects and the sequence. So the top level tables which don't depend on any other tables would have the sequence of 1.

With that information being available, I was able to write a tool to extract data of an existing SQL Server database, and create a batch file that would bulk copy the data to any other SQL Server database with the same schema.

Grand Opening

I finally have decided to start my own blog. It is not diary of my daily life, but rather interest of technology particularly in the area of UI design and development, environmental concerns and generally programming stuff. On a selfish purpose, I would also utilize this as my online bookmarks of useful links, which could be of some values to readers other than myself.