AS2Dac

Almost 2 years since it was first written, AS2 NaturalDocs AutoDocumentor, now tersely titled AS2Dac has been given a bit of an overhaul.

JavaDoc support and some dynamic command line options have been added, AS3Dac is also in the works.

In the spirit of not repeating myself, there is much going on at the project home at Google Code : http://code.google.com/p/as2dacperl/ (check the Wiki for the full info…)

There is no timeline as yet for the AS3 version release.

Add comment March 12th, 2008

FDT 3 Out of memory error

When you first get started with FDT3 from PowerFlasher http://fdt.powerflasher.com / http://fdt.powerflasher.de you will probably get the message…

Not enough memory to run FDT - add the following line to your eclipse.ini

-Xmx512m

On a windows machine the eclipse.ini is easy to find, and should be in the same folder as eclipse.exe, editing the file in notepad and altering the line

-Xmx256m

to the value above, should be straightforward. If you struggle with opening and saving files in notepad, sadly this blog post isn’t going to give you the file editing 101 that you sorely need.

If you are cool with the file change, restarting Eclipse and opening the FDT perspective will solve the issue.

On a Mac OS X machine things are a tiny bit trickier, the eclipse.ini file is tucked away inside the Eclipse application package, which you probably have stored in your Applications folder.

The quickest way to get at the eclipse.ini file is to Ctrl + Click the Eclipse application and select the *Show Package Contents* option from the menu.

If you then navigate to Contents/MacOS/ inside the package you’ll see eclipse.ini edit it with TextEdit or whatever you like to use to edit text files (TextMate http://macromates.com/, Eclipse, BBEdit?) and change the line

-Xmx256m

to read

-Xmx512m

Save eclipse.ini and close the finder window, restart Eclipse and you should be good to go.

This information is probably in the FDT forum, but I just figured this out five minutes ago and decided to post here instead.

Add comment March 3rd, 2008

AMF Format opens up..

Thanks go out to Adobe this week, for opening up the AMF (Flash remoting message format) specifications.

A PDF is available from here…

Add comment December 22nd, 2007

Debugging with Flash Player 9,0,28,0

All the kids are debugging with Flash Debug Player these days, (haven't you heard?)

For those of you that don't know, the Debug version of the player sends trace commands to a text file which you can watch with a variety of tools, but we'll get into that later.

To get the Debug Player visit http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html and get the latest Netscape (Firefox) and ActiveX debug players.

With the latest upgrade of Flash Debug Player (9,0,28,0) there's been a few changes to accomodate the wonderful(?) Microsoft Vista, Which imposes certain security restrictions. Please note: this post only relates to Windows.

Adobe have provided documentation for the debug player, and for most people it'll work just fine, however, if you're in a corporate environment no doubt you have a roaming profile and this is where the fun begins.

Previously the environment variables %HOMEDRIVE% and %HOMEPATH% were used by the debug player to find it's settings file mm.cfg. It appears that this is no longer the case (the Adobe livedocs page doesn't tell you this.)

It seems that %USERPROFILE% is now used to determine the location of mm.cfg which will allow you to set the config of Flash Debug Player.

The rest of the information in this LiveDocs page is fine. I'll save you the trip over and give you the rest of the infor. The new fixed location of the Player log file is: %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs\flashlog.txt and within the mm.cfg the settings now available are...

As far as setting up your mm.cfg file goes, it's a simple text file.

Using notepad enter the following lines

ErrorReportingEnable=0
TraceOutputFileEnable=1

Then save as the file to %USERPROFILE%/mm.cfg

If everything is working ok you will be able to read trace messages from Flash in the file %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs\flashlog.txt

Log viewers...

There are a number of tools out there to view log files, and there are some which specifically target the Flash Debug Player, however due to the latest changes, many of these no longer work properly...

FlashTracer by Alessandro Crugnola (of SEPY fame) is a FireFox extension which will follow flashlog.txt output. You can get it here

A nice alternative is Log Viewer from BrineSoft a bog standard windows based file watcher.

Of course for the truly hardcore there's the unix tail command, available to windows users via the Cygwin project. If you want to play with that one, it's for command line veterans only.

Hopefully now you can stop mucking about with these XMLSocket or LocalConnection solutions, (or heaven forbid TextField.. I ask you!)

11 comments February 1st, 2007

FocusManager code error (Flash mx.managers package)

Just a quick note of an error in the Flash mx class library, the FocusManager class (mx.managers.FocusManager) has an error on line 728.

727:    if (getFocusManagerFromObject(o) != this)
728:		o == undefined;

Because 728 won’t actually result in any useful computation, It appears the line should read…

727:    if (getFocusManagerFromObject(o) != this)
728:		o = undefined;

However, the following lines (731 - 735) make this code redundant, as you can see… (with line 728 intact)

727:		if (getFocusManagerFromObject(o) != this)
728:			o == undefined;
729:
730:		// trace("actual focus is " + o);
731:		if (o == undefined)
732:		{
733:			o = form;
734:			// trace("using form " + o);
735:		}

Just another one of the wonderful wierdnesses in the MX library. Do I win a prize? (Ed: Have a peanut you monkey.)

Add comment November 9th, 2006