Solving technology problems, one at a time
A rare pygmy hippo has reached the ripe old age of three weeks and is thriving at the Taronga zoo in Sydney, Australia. Monifa, (which means “I am lucky”) was very weak when she was born, and could not stand or walk immediately, so she could not be fed by her mother. She has been painstakingly hand-raised by the keepers.
Continue readingAndrzej Bartke, a researcher in geriatrics, and his colleagues at Southern Illinois University in Springfield, are closing in on the genetic basis for and biochemical/endocrine prevention of aging in mammals .
For years it has been observed that calorie restriction could enhance longevity in rats and other animals (research history) but the mechanisms behind this effect were unknown.
In a 2006 article in the Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences , they write
Continue reading“there is considerable evidence that reduced secretion of insulin-like growth factor I and insulin are among the mechanisms that mediate the effects of Calorie Restriction (CR) on aging and longevity in mammals.”
I’ve been having a lot of authorization issues with iTunes since a recent upgrade, so when this morning, iTunes started garbling playback on ALL my music, I panicked thinking it was another bug. It sounded
Continue readingAfter a recent upgrade to Movable Type, I found that attempting to comment using the comment forms on each entry page generated the error: invalid Request: Corrupt Character Data For Character Set The fix is
Continue readingI had a particularly sticky flash problem where a MovieClip worked perfectly when run on its own, but when loaded into a container clip using a loader, would give:
Error #1056: Cannot create property someProperty on loaded clip myLoadedClip
At first I thought it was some kind of timing problem or failure to declare the items in the clip, but it turned out, simply adding the word dynamic to the class definition fixed the problem. Dynamic classes can have properties added at runtime. The MovieClip class is already dynamic, but apparently, the dynamic property is removed in some other part of my code.
In Actionscript 3, you may find yourself wondering why when you use “useHandCursor” on a MovieClip, the cursor remains an arrow on mouse_down.
In AS3, useHandCursor is a property of the SimpleButton class. if an object has “buttonMode” set to true, by default “useHandCursor” will also be true. If is is not set to buttonMode, setting “useHandCursor” to true will do nothing.
On objects that are set to buttonMode, setting “useHandCursor to false will prevent the cursor from changing to a hand on MOUSE_DOWN.
Continue readingI am working on a Flash project where a MovieClip that is contained within another clip needs to get a property from the main timeline of the container clip. trace(this.parent.someProperty) But this generated an error:
Continue readingI’ve come across several PC’s that will play Flash videos, but with no audio. There appear to be a couple of possible fixes to try, thanks to Selder and others in the Weyland.be blog. Go
Continue readingIf you are trying to edit .htaccess files or other invisible files through the GUI, or using Fetch’s automatic linkage with BBedit, you will need to show hidden files. Open the terminal and type: defaults
Continue readingWhile stem cell research funding remains bogged down and encumbered in the United States, other countries, most notably China, have forged ahead. Patients are travelling to foreign stem cell clinics, to try treatments not available in this country, whether they follow standard testing and clinical protocols or not.
Lab research with stem cells has been extremely exciting and suggestive of great potential, but the current artificially embargoed situation in the US and several other countries provides ground for less than scrupulous treatment centers.
Beike Biotech, in Shenzen and other cities in China, is one bio-technology company which offers stem cell treatments for diseases that are usually considered untreatable. Their site offers many testimonials from people who have been treated for conditions like Spinal Cord Injury, Autism, ALS, and brain injury, but little in the way of systematic followups. Reading their patient blogs, although very interesting, it is difficult to tell for any given patient exactly what was done beyond “injections of stem cells” and exactly what their outcome was after they left the clinic. Most of the blogs end one or two entries after leaving. Beike’s treatment philosophy is summed up in this paragraph from their website:
Continue reading