Month: December 2009

ActionScript 2: Nested button events

Posted on December 30, 2009 by ellen

Sometimes it’s helpful to have a quick reminder of how button events work within nested clips in ActionScript 2.

A button nested inside another button OR inside a MovieClip that has buttonEvents assigned to it will not work. (Button events include: onRollOver, onRollOut, onDragOver, onDragOut, onPress, onRelease and onReleaseOutside).

This is due to the way Flash captures events: the first parent instance with a button event handler assigned to it is the one that is listened to. None of its child objects will be listened for unless you use a workaround.

Confluence: create structure to help new wiki users get started

Posted on December 27, 2009 by ellen

Once you’ve created a shared online space for your coworkers, you may discover with some frustration that it doesn’t receive the level of interest you are hoping for. One reason for this reluctance to contribute may be lack of structure. Wikis don’t make a lot of assumptions about how you want to structure or navigate through your data, and this lack of structure can be confusing and somewhat intimidating to users, particularly if they aren’t sure where to put their information. This confusion is not limited to non-technical people: I’ve seen IT community sites and wikis lose members largely because of poor planning and navigational cues.

Although theoretically, the ability to add labels or tags to wiki pages eliminates the need to put them in any particular location within the site structure, people still like to know “where they are” within a site because the relationships between documents carries a lot of information about the significance of the document itself. Users need clues as to what else might be there and what to expect when they click to other pages.

Copying text from a password protected PDF

Posted on December 25, 2009 by ellen

I was recently sent a document in PDF format for editing and revision. Unfortunately the author had protected the document from copying, pasting, annotation, page extraction – in short everything necessary to be able to

JW FLV player with Javascript playlist

Posted on December 15, 2009 by ellen

This is an example of how to create a javascript-based Playlist selector for a JW FLV player. The playlist selector menu has 3 sections that toggle open and closed when you click on them. This allows the user to switch playlists, choosing from various topics.

The source code has not been cleaned up, but you should be able to get an idea of how to set this up from it.

Kindle DX review

Posted on December 12, 2009 by ellen

For several days I’ve already been enjoying a great pre-Christmas present: a new Kindle DX! Despite being early, it didn’t come a moment too soon. For quite a while, I’ve been hoping for a better way to read to cope with my aging eyesight and tired eyes and the ever-increasing amount of reading on my desk. Most of my work-related reading in PDF format, and up until now, no device displayed PDF’s well except a computer or laptop.

jQuery UI Accordion does not function in IE7/WinXP

Posted on December 9, 2009 by ellen

The Accordion is one of the handy interface widgets that can be generated using jQuery UI. There are several optional settings you can add into the function call, including animation, auto-height, etc. If you find it is not working on IE7try adding “animated:false” as one of the options.

If you are running a debugger on IE, and see the error “invalid option on line 486” this is definitely the problem.

Screen shot 2009-12-10 at 12.37.41 PM.jpg

Folic acid supplements in late pregnancy increase risk of asthma

Posted on December 1, 2009 by ellen

According to CDC statistics, U.S. childhood asthma prevalence more than doubled between 1980 to the mid-1990s and has since plateaued at those historically high levels. Although many triggers and risk factors for asthma have been identified, the reasons behind this increase are not yet understood.

A recent study by University of Adelaide researchers Whitrow, Moore, Rumbold, and Davies may shed some light on the rise in asthma in young children. The study appears to show that the use of folic acid supplements in late pregnancy can lead to increased allergic asthma in children of 3.5 years of age. This human study corroborates earlier studies in mice which indicated that supplementation with folate in pregnancy leads to an allergic asthma phenotype in mice via epigenetic mechanisms (changes in gene expression).