Care Managers: help for your aging parents
If you have every tried to help out with finding care for someone who is just returning home from a hospital stay, or for someone who has need of long term care within their home,
Continue readingConnecting to wireless networks on Vista
We were having trouble connecting a ThinkPad to a local wireless network. It would first say there were no networks available, then when I would locate one, it kept requesting Username, Password and Domain, as if there were an authentication server involved. The wireless network is simply set up with a WEP key, so there are no individual users associated with it – anyone with the WEP key can log on.
It turned out that previous efforts to connect had set up a “wireless network” entry in a list somewhere which needed to be deleted and set up again correctly.
- IMPORTANT: be sure to check that the wireless switch on the front of the laptop is turned on. It is difficult to see and it must be turned on or all your other efforts to connect will be unsuccessful.
- First, select Start Menu > Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center. Under “Tasks”, click Manage wireless networks.
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Changing the window scope in Firebug
If I had to choose one piece of advice for new web developers, I’d tell them to learn to use Firebug. Firebug is probably the most valuable debugging tool available, but if you are just getting started, it may seem pretty opaque at first.
In addition, some things do not appear to work as advertised. In particular, the “cd” function does nothing as far as I can tell.
The page that documents the commands you can use within Firebug lists the cd command as a way of changing the window scope:
Meet Monifa, the Pygmy Hippo!
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 readingGrowth Factor I, insulin sensitivity, life extension
Andrzej 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.”
iTunes garbles playback on all songs
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 readingMovable Type comment error: invalid Request: Corrupt Character Data For Character Set
After 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 readingError #1056: Cannot create property x on loaded clip in AS3
I 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.
useButtonMode = true not working in AS3
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 reading1119: Access of possibly undefined property error in ActionScript 3
I 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:
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