David A. Molanphy

The folks at Walmart are getting ready to bust out their new logo in the Fall – which unsurprisingly is just as bad as the service in their stores. Seriously? This is all they could come up with?

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I've never been a big fan of monkey-boy Steve Ballmer. For whatever reason, he strikes me as a not-so-bright individual who happened to be at the right place, at the right time. And of course, he's always making remarkably stupid comments, like a recent interview with the Washington Post in which he things all print media will disappear in 10 years.

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It is largely understood that Windows Vista is — in many ways — a flop. So it's no surprise that Redmond is trying desperately to *gasp* come up with something interesting to offer. Tonight was a much-anticipated appearance by monkey-boy and the evil emperor at All Things Digital in California where they were to give people a sneak peak at Windows 7 (what? No funky name?). What they delivered? Multi-touch support on Windows 7. *yawn*. For those of you interested, here's a live blog of the encounter, complete with a short video of multi-touch in action. Now don't get me wrong, I think multi-touch is very cool and I hope to see much more of it. But it's gonna take a whole heck of a lot more than a bigger iPhone to redeem the flop otherwise known as Vista. And just one question I have: who wants a laptop screen full of fingerprints? *sigh*.

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I recently had the opportunity to re-design Best Buy's corporate site (www.bestbuyinc.com), and as part of that effort, I encountered a problem I had not worked through before — different languages in Flash. I learned a great deal about dealing with different languages and for the most part, it was not as complicated as I expected (and feared it) to be — that is, until I needed to include Mandarin Chinese in the mix.

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What is the modulos anyway? I have used this operator (%) only twice before and I didn't quite understand it either time. All I knew is that it was doing what I hoped it would. I figured I should probably know what the modulus operator does so I called on the mighty name of Google and voila!: The easiest explanation I found so far can be found at Mote Interactive. For some interesting uses, check out Grant Skinner's post on the matter. And finally, if all you're looking to do is figure out odds or evens, Keith Peters found a nice post on an alternative to modulos. I love Google. [update]: Well, this wasn't so helpful was it? Looks like the primary link is dead, so to better understand what modulo is: The remainder of expression 1 divided by expression 2. In plain english: if you have something like 12 % 5, the returned value is 2. Five goes into 12 twice, and the remainder is 2.

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If you're a faithful Safari user (like me), you have undoubtedly run into the issue where different Google apps refuses to open in a new tab even though you're holding down the Command key (Mac of course). Admittedly, this alone is enough to send the fence-sitters running to Firefox, but for those of you who are true to the cause, here's a tip for ya: Open your terminal and enter this: defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true Now restart Safari and enjoy having only one window - no matter how many Google apps you visit! Now if only Safari supported plug-ins! :) (And for those of you who ask why not Firefox, the answer is simple — albeit pathetic — I don't like the way it looks.) Welcome to my life.

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A very fun little quiz for you font aficionados out there. I got a 32/34 — bummer.

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About a week ago I decided to finally give AS3 a real test drive as every other attempt I have made to understand the language has ended up in complete frustration that it doesn't do things the way I'm used to. I have to say the experience has been painful, but I am beginning to understand (albeit slightly) how to work with classes and objects and all that fancy stuff. [Warning: Geek-talk ahead] Today, I ran into a particularly interesting problem. In AS2, any time you referenced Stage...from anywhere, Flash knew what you were talking about. In AS3, it's not that simple. Sometimes you will want to reference stage from a class that hasn't yet added anything to the DisplayObject (in other words, you haven't used any addChild commands yet), and therefore Flash has no clue what the stage is, therefore throwing stage = null.

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Just recently I started playing around with adding PayPal buttons to a Flash file and was pleasantly surprised at how simple it was. Granted, I only did a basic "buy now" button which is about the simplest piece of code they offer. For those of you interested (and for my own code archiving), here is how to go about doing it:

Set up your Sandbox

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