Flash suddenly stops working in Firefox v3
Sometime in the last week or so, Flash stopped working me on many sites. It seemed to stop working around the time of the last Microsoft Vista updates, but I can't be sure. The strange thing is, it worked on some sites (like Adobe) but wasn't working on a lot of the sites I was visiting. I tried reinstalling Flash, but that didn't fix it. Since it wasn't a high priority for me, I haven't had time to look into it until today.
Today I was doing some QA on our site and noticed one of the Flash components was no longer working. Since Flash seemed to break for me around the time of the last Windows Update, I thought I should probably look into things to see if this is a wide spread issue.
I quickly fired up a couple of different versions of Firefox (and on different PCs) and they were all working fine. This seemed to indicate the problem might be local to my installation.
Next, I decided to actually examine the source code in Firebug—which is when I noticed something odd. The <object /> tag was grayed out like it was hidden or being ignored. So, I fired up the same page in another Firefox install and the <object /> tag was being shown as expected.
NOTE:At this point I also checked some of the sites I remembered where Flash was working and sure enough they were using the <embed > tag instead of the <object /> tag.
Since I thought this was extremely odd, I decided to fire up a brand new Profile to see if things would work in an empty Profile. Dropping to a command prompt, I used firefox -P to create a brand new profile called "test". Next I used firefox -P test -no-remote to open up the new profile (the -no-remote argument allows you to open a separate instance of Firefox using a different profile.)
When using the new Profile, Flash was worked as I expected. This told me something was wrong with my normal Profile, but what?
In order to track things down, I first tried disabling add-ons that looked like primary suspects (Firebug, Web Developer, AdBlock Plus, etc.) Nothing changed. I next tried uninstalling these add-ons. Flash still not working. I finally just uninstalled all the add-ons. And what do you know? Flash started working again.
In order to try to determine which add-on was causing my Flash problems, I tried installing each add-on individually. Unfortunately (at least from a troubleshooting standpoint) after re-installing all the add-ons Flash is still working correctly.
So I obviously had a problem with my profile that was caused by one of the add-ons I had installed. Unfortunately, I do not know which add-on was the culprit. I do know that after removing all my add-ons and reinstalling them Flash is now working properly again.
UPDATE:Here are a list of the add-ons I had installed, all of which have been reinstalled:
Adblock Plus 1.1.1
Clear Cache Button 0.9b
ColorZilla 2.0.2
Download Statusbar 0.9.6.5
Firebug 1.4.3
Firesizer 0.92
Free Download Manager 1.3.4
Html Validator 0.8.5.8
IE View 1.4.4
Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.1
Organize Status Bar 0.6.3
Page Speed 1.3
Print Context Menu 1.2
QuickFrame 0.5.1
QuickProxy 2009.07.19
Web Developer 1.1.8
XMarks 3.3.2 (NOTE: I didn't actually uninstall this add-on, it was the one exception of an add-on that I did not uninstall.)
Rounding to the nearest fraction (i.e. specific decimal place)
I'm working on some "star rating" code and I really wanted to round numbers of to the nearest fraction. While the math is really basic, my math skills are rusty and this took me longer to solve than I care to admit. So I thought I'd just blog the solution for anyone else that might find it useful:
round( value/fraction ) * fraction
Like I said, it's very basic math but is very handy when you want to round to something other than to the closest integer.
Safari 4 z-index issue with Flash
I was doing some testing with Safari 4 (on Windows Vista) and noticed that it was running into the z-index issue that's normally fixed by having a wmode attribute. The issue is that Flash was always displaying on top of all other elements. Normally this can be fixed by applying the wmode attribute of either "opaque" or "transparent" to your SWF, however that was already present.
After playing around with the problem for a good bit trying various solutions of applying an z-index to elements, I decided to check to see if I had the latest version of Flash installed. Turns out I was running Flash 10,0,22,54 and 10,0,22,87 is the latest version. Sure enough, after upgrading Flash everything started working as expected.
So, if you're having problems with Flash being overlaid over all of your elements in Safari, try upgrading to the latest version of Flash to see if it fixes the problem.
(To see how things should work, check out http://pipwerks.com/lab/swfobject/z-index/2.0/dynamic.html. If mousing over the menu options is not showing some pop-up elements, then something has gone awry—so try upgrading Flash.)
Flash + IE7 + SSL + XML = Epic Fail…
Yesterday I ran into a very weird issue that one of our users reported. They complained that a Flex component was not working. Originally they described the problem as the Flash wasn't loading at all, but after digging around (and having the user send a screenshot) I realized the Flash was running, but it just wasn't getting the data.
Sure enough, I fired up Internet Explorer 7 and I saw the exact same issue. This was working fine in other browsers (such as Firefox, Safari and Chrome.) I was also having no issues using SSL on our development server. All I can think was "WTF?"
So, off to Google I went looking for an answer.
After some digging, I finally came across Mark Speck's IE7 + SSL + XML? = Flex "Error #2032: Stream Error" post. While I had found a number of similar posts declaring the same problem, every other article I found indicated this was only a problem if the "Cache-Control" header was being sent—which my production server was not sending. However, Mark also documented that this issue could occur with no "Cache-Control" heading—which matched what my production server was doing.
Since I wanted to be able to handle this problem programmatically (because I didn't want this issue to crop up again if we ever migrate servers or add more servers to the cluster,) I decided the best method to solve this problem was to serve up the XML dynamically using ColdFusion. I was able to resolve the problem by moving my XML into a CF template with the following code:
<cfheader name="Content-type" value="text/xml" />
<!---// this is required so IE7 will load the XML over SSL //--->
<cfheader name="Cache-Control" value="no-store, must-revalidate" />
<cfheader name="Pragma" value="public" />
<cfheader name="Expires" value="-1" />
<cfcontent reset="true" />
<xml>
<goes />
<here />
</xml>
Thankfully this resolved the issue.
However, I was never able to figure out why I was not having the problem in our development environment. The headers were virtually the same between the two servers. I'm beginning to think this problem might have also been related to the static XML being served via GZIP over SSL, but my dynamically served file is still being GZIP and is using SSL—so I'm not positive GZIP played a part.
I did find one other solution and that was to serve the static XML over HTTP instead of HTTPS. However, we're forcing traffic over SSL, so that option would work for us.
Moving Flex Builder Plug-in to a fresh Eclipse install
Mike Jones just publish an article on Reconnecting Flex Builder Plug-in To Eclipse—which shows how to move an installation of your Flex Builder Plug-in to a new installation of Eclipse without having to uninstall/install. His instructions are for Mac OSX, but it looks as if they might be virtually the same for windows.
Below are Mike's original instructions.
- Install a fresh copy of eclipse, but don't delete the old version yet. (I called mine eclipse-new, you can rename it at the end)
- Copy start_fb.jar to the root of your new eclipse installation
- Copy the Flex Builder link file com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.osx.link to the "links" folder in the root of your new eclipse installation (If you are using Ganymede - 3.4 or greater you'll need to create this folder)
- Open up the bundles.info file located in you old eclipse installation/configuration/org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator in a text editor
- Copy all of the Flex Builder related entries - use the file reference as a guide as not all of the packages have Flex in the name
- Now open up the same file, but in your new installation and paste those entries at the top and save it
- Start up your new clean eclipse install and bask in your 1337 s1<i||z :p
- If all went to plan you can now close eclipse, delete the old version and rename the new one - job done.
While I haven't tested this, it looks like this should work in Windows with the exception being the "link" file is actually named com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.link in Windows.
Barney Boisvert releases FlexChart v2.0
Barney Boisvert released FlexChart 2.0 yesterday. This is a Flex-based charting tool that can be used to easily adding graphs to your ColdFusion projects. While ColdFusion does have a number of Charting tools integrated into the product, it seems every time I go to use them I run into limitation after limitation that prevents me from using them. So, if you're looking for alternative charting for ColdFusion, the you should check out the FlexChart demos.
SVN post-commit for Windows
As I mentioned early I've been working on a SVN post-commit script. We've got a SVN repository that will be modified by several remote developers and I really need to keep an eye on this repository and I need to closely monitor changes to this repository.
There are two major functions that I needed in my post-commit script:
- I needed to update the working copy on my server
- I needed to e-mail the changes to myself, so I know when developers are making changes
There are an abundant of examples showing off how to do this in various *nix flavors, but I couldn't find any good Windows-based solutions that didn't require Perl to be installed on the server. That led me to create the following post-commit.bat script.
Debugging Subversion Repository Hooks in Windows
I've been working on a post-commit hook for our Subversion install and was running in to a number of issues. The post-commit.bat file would run fine from command line, but I just could get things to work as I expected from SVN. After much debugging and scouring Google for answers, I've found a few tips that will hopefully help you to troubleshoot your own SVN repository hooks.
1) Subversion executes all hook programs with an empty environment
This was the biggest issue I was running in to, because I was expecting the my script to be able to find any programs in my %PATH% statement. That's the main reason my scripts were working fine from command line, but were breaking when executing from my SVN hook.
Working from home, isn't all it's cracked up to be...
Whenever the topic of my employment comes up, everyone's first reaction when I tell them I work from home is: "Wow, that must be really nice!" While working from home definitely has some benefits, it has some cons.
As Cameron Childress mentions in his post on Coworking in Atlanta, the two hardest things to adjust to are the lack of socialization and self motivation—both are issues Cameron and I have talked amongst ourselves about in the past.
Using Eclipse to restart your Web Server
Scott Stroz (who's always up for a round of golf) today asked How Do You Set Up Your Development Environment? In his article, he has an excellent tip for restarting your local install of Apache using an Ant script. This is a great tip and something I quite frankly never thought to do.
But what if you're using Windows and want to stop a service on remote server?
Eclipse Navigator Toolbar - "Link With Editor" button...
I have to admit, I only use a small portion of the features that are in Eclipse. That's because there are so many features that I often miss things, even buttons that stare me in the face everyday. I love Eclipse, it's a really powerful IDE and one of the most impressive uses of client-side Java that I've ever seen.
Yesterday Michael Henke posted a nice entry (complete with screenshots) on some of the features of the Eclipse Navigation Toolbar. I've used the "Go Into" feature quite a bit. If you have a large project that you're going to be working in exclusively, it's a nice way to keep your navigation tree to just the relevant files and folders.
However, I must admit that I've never taken the time to figure out what the "Link With Editor" button does. I've clicked it once or twice, but never saw an immediate purpose for the button. Thanks to Michael's post, I know now that the clicking the "Link With Editor" toggle button will cause the Navigation pane to automatically jump to the active file open in the current editor tab.
Since I often have many tabs open at once (sometimes even dozens) I can see this feature being useful. Especially since often related files are grouped together in my project.
Adobe Labs releases Flex Builder 3 (Public Beta 3)
Adobe always seems to like releasing things to Adobe Labs in mass. They've also just released Flex Builder 3 (Public Beta 3). I actually found beta 2 to be pretty stable and have even rolled out a project into production based on beta 2. I plan on upgrading as soon as I have some time.
Abobe Labs releases BlazeDS - Remoting and Messaging technology
Adobe Labs just released BlazeDS as a new Open Source project (released under the LGPL v3 license.) Essentially BlazeDS is the remoting and messaging technology behind LiveCycle Data Services. For people familiar with Adobe Flex, they know that this is the "push" technology that allows you to build interfaces that are updated automatically when the data on the server changes. This means you can make data on the screen change in realtime as changes on the server occur.
I spent a few minutes looking through the BlazeDS documentation, but didn't see any real good information related specifically to ColdFusion. However, according to the Release Notes it looks like you can integrate BlazeDS directly with ColdFusion 8.
ESET/NOD32 causing "Save Problems" in Eclipse
All the sudden today I started getting a weird problem when trying to edit files in Eclipse. I could save the file once, but on a subsequent save I was getting the following error:
If I closed the file and re-opened the file, I could save it again but only once.
This had me really scratching my head. My projects actually exist on my LAN as I save the files directly to my personal Dev Server. I thought the problem might have related to some kind of network problem, so I went through a bunch of steps—including rebooting both my Dev Server and my Workstation—but nothing was working.
Finally I got the bright idea to disable ESET Smart Security (which is the new version of the NOD32 scanner.) What do you know, things started working again. I had to play around with things for a while before I was able to figure out what exactly was causing the problem.
It turns out the "Real-time file system protection" was causing the problem. I'm not sure why it's causing the problem, but the fix is easy enough.
- Open up ESET Smart Security
- Make sure you're in the Advanced mode layout
- Go to Setup > Antivirus and antispyware
- Click the "Configure..." option
- Click the "Setup..." button
- Un-check the "Scan all files" option
- Keep clicking the "OK" button until you're back to the ESET Smart Security window
NOTE:If you prefer, you could just add the specific extensions you're having problems with to the "Exclude" filter list, the option is up to you.
I'm going to open up a ticket with ESET's support and see what they have to say about this.
Adobe Acrobat Connect ("Brio") now free for 3 participants...
Adobe has just posted Brio—the next generation of Adobe Acrobat Connect—to Adobe Labs for downloading. The new beta version allows you to:
- Host unlimited online meetings with up to 3 meeting participants.
- Interact with easy-to-use screen sharing, chat and whiteboards.
- Access your meeting instantly with a personalized, easy-to-remember URL.
- Distribute documents and files to meeting participants.
- Use integrated VoIP, teleconferencing and multi-point video.
I've had interest in Adobe Acrobat Connect (which is a horrible name,) but it was way out of my price range. Now that they've opened it up for free for up to 3 participants, it looks like it's time to check it out!