daniel's blog

The Flash security sandbox has been around for a while so you'd think we'd seen all the errors. When firefox started reporting an "error calling method on NPObject," I was surprised to find Google didn't drop the answer at my feet. No, this took a bit more exploring to figure out.

In my last post I talked about using Excel to visualize debug output. As another example, here's a short program for tracking the distance that the mouse has traveled.

In programming projects you sometimes need a quick line graph to see what's going with, say, a physics simulation. Instead of implementing the chart in your app, here's a quick way to view it using Excel.

Choosing a domain name is important but it's also pretty difficult since so many of them are registered already. I'm surprised there aren't more tools to help companies come up with the name they're gonna be stuck with for years to come.

Brain crack. According to video-blogging comedian Ze Frank, we get addicted to brain crack when we hoard a brilliant idea that's going to change everybody's lives and make us rich and famous. At least, that's how we see it in our minds.

Another graph visualization using Facebook data. This time you can explore your friends' musical tastes.

If you miss the eval method from AS2, the AS3 Eval library from Hurlant is what you're looking for. I found there were extras I needed so I created a wrapper class which you might find useful.

Finally found a tough spot where regular expressions don't perform. If you're trying to capture a list of values with unknown length, you could be up for some extra work!

Nathan Chase just posted an article about the market for online visualizations and featured Constellation Roamer as one of the available "premium visualization" products. It's an interesting comparison of the online visualization tools that are out there from a business perspective. He's already got quite a discussion going in the comments so go have look.

The ProgressBar component in Flash and Flex can easily be used to indicate the progress of a file download. Here, we'll use a simple method to display the progress of some other server-side action, such as parsing a large file.