The tests proved that the tags where there and that the css was applied but I was still having the issue. So I just tried other tags and to my slight surprise the other tags worked. It appears that actionscript will not style “b” and “i” tags but will style “em” and “strong” tags. It will still interpet the “b” and “i” tags and apply their default styling it just will not let you overwrite those defaults with css. Sounds like either a bug or an undocumented exclusion… Either way very annoing and the manual is very unfriendly and slow. In fact online help through their livdocs was faster than through the program… Great manuals designed to be usable make or break software in the long run and this cannot be a good sign for Adobe. I’ve been playing/using flash since 2000 and their CS5 manual/help is much worse in terms of usability than their help was in 2000.

If you want to see a demo showing this issue try out the code below:

...
 
var newStyle:StyleSheet = new StyleSheet();
var styleObj:Object = new Object();
styleObj.fontStyle = 'normal';
styleObj.color = '#660066';
styleObj.display = 'inline';
 
newStyle.setStyle("b", styleObj);
newStyle.setStyle("i", styleObj);
newStyle.setStyle("strong", styleObj);
newStyle.setStyle("em", styleObj);
 
text_field.styleSheet = newStyle;
text_field.htmlText = '<b>Hi</b> <i>World!</i> <strong>Hi</strong> <em>World!</em>';
 
...

The output should look something like this:
Hi World! Hi World!

No related posts.

Related posts:

1. Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com
2. Upgrading Wordpress to 2.7.1
3. Wordpress Plugins in Use

Komodo Edit Logo

I starting using Komodo IDE as my PHP editor over Dreamweaver in 2006? I was tired of Dreamweaver not having features like “looking function definition” which jumps to where the php function is defined in some other file. I tried a few other editors and they just didn’t feel as intutive. Since Komodo has created an open source (read free) version call Komodo Edit and have been using that and having missed the edit features. There are a number of things I do to make the Edit program feel more like home. First I install a few extensions…

Best Extensions:

• Source Tree must have for quickly jumping around and viewing code
• HTML Toolkit great for auto-completing HTML/XML tags and previewing css images
• Remote Drive Tree great for editing files you usally do not have local copies of (e.g., php.ini)
• TODO Helper finds all your TODO statements so you don’t forget them

No related posts.

1. get viewing rectangle
2. get items intersecting or inside rectangle
3. check for visibility

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

QList<QGraphicsItem* > viewItems = m_pView->items(m_pView->rect());
 
for(int i=0; i < viewItems.size(); ++i) {
	if(viewItems.at(i)->isVisible()) {
		//payload
	}
}

Do not use other rectangle functions like sceneRect(), childrenRect(), contentsRect(), etc… as they will not give you the correct bounding region. Also this operation returns all items, so one must check for visibility manually and cast points to any derived class as appropriate.

With casting

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

QList<QGraphicsItem* > viewItems = m_pView->items(m_pView->rect());
NewType *newType;
 
for(int i=0; i < viewItems.size(); ++i) {
	if(viewItems.at(i)->isVisible()) {
		newType = dynamic_cast<NewType *> (viewItems[i]);
		if(newType != NULL) {
			//payload
		}
	}
}

Related posts:

1. Making a QPixmap transparent the Right Way

Due to resource limits on our Shared Hosting machines, it is not possible to allocate more than 20M of memory to PHP, although phpinfo() may report a higher number. You will be unable to increase the memory usage limit with a php.ini file.

O.k., first off why would they allow your to specify a higher number in PHP if they are going to ignore it? According to PHP if a script runs out of memory it will report with a message like this: “Fatal error: Out of memory error.” However, because of 1and1 allow PHP to think it has more memory and then killing it when it exceeds 20M, no error message is reported. I run across this situation on a different project in the past when processing images.

So I decided to test to see if this could be the case. The best page to test I found was the Tools->Import page. That page seem to be the one most likely to stop loading and blank out. It would load all of the admin menus but would not load the import list when some plugins were activated. So I added a few memory_get_usage() function calls and sure enough it appears that whenever the memory when above about 15,300,000 bytes of memory it would die. This is lower than 20MB but memory_get_usage does not necessarily report all memory used as seen by the OS.

Therefore, I must conclude that it is a PHP memory issue and that 1and1.com poor decision to allow PHP to report and indeed set a higher memory limit than 20MB but ignoring that number anyways suppresses the error message resulting in very odd behaviors. Since, Wordpress is a good well used piece of software this is a grave shortfall for 1and1 hosting especially at the developer level. I therefore am in search of a new host as I am not going to continue to pay money to a host with such a poor limit and support of PHP.  Hopefully this post might shed some light on odd problems you might be having with Wordpress on 1and1.

Related posts:

1. Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com part 2
2. Upgrading Wordpress to 2.7.1

Apparently in Qt, QGraphicsItem’s mouse events are a little different from the model I had in my head from Actionscript. In actionscript when a user uses the mouse to move over and then click on an MovieClip object these events occur (ignoring mouse movement events):

1. onRollOver
2. onPress
3. onRelease
4. onRollOut

In Qt it is not quite the same. If the QGraphicsItem accepts mouse clicks but is not movable or selectable then these are its events (again ignoring mouse movement events):

1. hoverEnterEvent
2. mousePressEvent
3. hoverLeaveEvent

Notice in Qt there is not a mouse release event called. Qt does have a mouseReleaseEvent but it is only called if the item is movable or selectable (both not set by default).

This fact would have been good to know. I had been allowing QGraphicsItems to move during debuging and had been using mouseReleaseEvent as my click event. When I removed the debuging code suddenly I could not click my items, which was most distressing as it was only minutes away from my live demo. Luckly, I discovered this Qt fact, changed the event to mousePressEvent and got it all working.

How demos work as told on PHD comics.

Related posts:

1. word 2007 spell checking inside tables
2. Grabbing all QGraphicItems current viewable in a QGraphicView

The classic situation that this problem can occur is when one wants to create a QPixmap with a transparent background and then draws on only some of the available pixels. This process is akin to creating a transparent GIF. Well there is a wrong way and a right way. I discovered this because I was using the wrong way and was getting away with it as long as I was writing to every pixel. Then there was a case when I was not writing to all pixels and the QPixmap unwritten to pixels (i.e., the background) was not transparent as I expected. Here is the wrong way.

The Wrong Way

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

QPixmap *pix = new QPixmap(Size());
 
QPainter painter;
painter.begin(pix);
painter.fillRect(0,0,pix->width(),pix->height(),QBrush(QColor(0,0,0,0)));
painter.drawPixmap(pix->rect(),*m_image);
painter.end();

The problem is that line 4 does not fill the QPixmap with anything as the alpha is set to 0. Think of fill with alpha as a merge operation and not a replace. I was thinking of it as a replace and therefore I was replacing every pixel with a fully transparent black. However, because fillRect is really a merge I was merging a transparent pixel with the background effectively doing nothing.

The correct way is as follows:

The Right Way

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

QPixmap *pix = new QPixmap(Size());
pix->fill(Qt::transparent);
 
QPainter painter;
painter.begin(pix);
painter.drawPixmap(pix->;rect(),*m_baseSymbol);
painter.end();

Notice that line 2 is new and this fill command is a replace fill.

Summary

In summary QPixmap fill(…) command is a replace fill; whereas, QPainter fillRect(…) is a merge fill. I hope this help clarity the nature of these two operations.

Related posts:

1. Grabbing all QGraphicItems current viewable in a QGraphicView

Previous thought but probably wrong…

It appears that in WP-SpamFree 1.9.8.3 breaks Wordpress 2.7.1. It also appears that Broken Link Checker 0.4.10 breaks Wordpress 2.7.1 in the same manner.

I upgraded from 2.7 to 2.7.1 and these plugins seems to cause some admin pages to stall i.e. end displaying html before the ending </body> tag. Case in point, the Tools->Import page does not completely load when the plugin was activated but does when deactivated.

Just thought I pass this info along.

Related posts:

1. Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com
2. Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com part 2

My objective is to find a WordPress plugin that will allow me to at least do:

• display in a post a download (link, picture) to an arbitrary file type
• to have the link to the download be neat and nice e.g. /download/filename.type
• provide a nice upload tool

Furthermore, it would be nice if added the download code to a post provided nice options like a picture or number of hits…

The Search:

So the hunt begins. I went searching through the plugins and I found the following ones a possible candidates.

• Wordpress Download Monitor 2.2.3
• Attachment Manager 2.0.1
• WP-DownloadManager 1.40

Wordpress Download Monitor

Pros: The plugin has a nice admin download page. It does support nice URLs. It also has a very nice integration with the edit post page.

Cons: It seems to require one to list the acceptable file types. It also puts the download admin page under tools, I would have preferred it under Media.

Attachment Manager

Pros: Nice icons to go with the download files.

Cons: Opps, it appears that this one should not have been a candidate for comparison. This one is focused on icons and not really file upload and download.

WP-DownloadManager

Pros: It places the admin pages under a new Download section. Not bad but I would still have preferred under Media. It has many nice options under the admin pages and a nice focus on download listing and stats. I however will probably have little download listing pages.

Cons: The download URLis tied to a number and not a title. Who wants a download url to be /download/1231 and not /download/filename.type?

The Find:

In conclusion I have found that Wordpress Download Monitor to be the plugin to best match my objectives. If your objectives are the same as mine, then I would recommend using this plugin for your file management needs.

Related posts:

1. Upgrading Wordpress to 2.7.1
2. Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com
3. A problem with jQuery’s .serialize() and the answer

The Problem
The jQuery .serialize() function was returning “” or nothing. Not what I wanted to say the least. Here was the setup. I was using .serialize() like this:

...
$(this).parents('.ARow').serialize()
...

and the xhtml was:

<form class="ARow">
<input class="food_state" size="10" type="text" />
<input id="NewFoodState" type="button" value="Add New Food State" />
</form>

The Answer
The problem was that .serialize() outputted “”. The answer was that if an input does not have a “name” field then .serialize() skips it. Of course that makes sense but sometime simple reasons can be overlooked. Therefore when the xhtml is updated to:

<form class="ARow">
<input class="food_state" name="food_state" size="10" type="text" />
<input id="NewFoodState" type="button" value="Add New Food State" />
</form>

The output of .serialize() becomes, as desired, “food_state: raw”. I hope this helps someone else.

This page is using: [download id="1"]

Related posts:

1. Grabbing a subsection of input field values
2. Comparing File Download Managers