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I was just reading my RSS feeds (in the fabulous FeedDemon) and I followed a link to an Excel spreadsheet (on purpose).

I’ve not used IE (outside of FeedDemon that is) in so long that I forgot that with Microsoft Office documents it opens them within the “browser” for you. Yuck. I wasn’t expecting that, not at all - and it scared me, quite a lot. This kind of thing (and the slow loading speeds with this kind of thing) is the reason I don’t let Firefox load PDF’s inside itself.

Am I wrong? Sitting here looking at an Excel spreadsheet within FeedDemon you’ll have to forgive me for thinking that it’s all a bit scary.

Towards the end of last week I spent quite a lot of time working with customisations of the ComboBox in Flex 2 for work, and it was really beginning to bug me how when I typed to select an item, the selection was only ever the first item that matched the letter I was typing. Having had it become second nature, since it’s a feature of my browser of choice Firefox, that I can type the beginning of a word to jump to an option (e.g. "United K" to jump to "United Kingdom" in a list of countries) I now really missed it when using Flex.

I didn’t have time to look at a work around during work hours as it really isn’t a feature that is needed of our product, just something that annoyed me. So I decided that I would quickly knock a solution together at the weekend and then write up a short post of how it was done, in case other people wanted to find out how to do it.

However it didn’t quite work out that way.

After a few frustrating hours I managed to get a fully working solution which I thought I’d share. You can read on for the story behind the component, or you can head straight to the FoxyComboBox code page to view the results.
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While just writing my first post about Flex which required some code examples in MXML, I found that currently GeSHi (Generic Syntax Highlighter) doesn’t have a MXML language file, and I couldn’t find one when I did a few searches.

So using the XML language file as a base I quickly knocked one together.

Firstly, I know I've been very quiet recently, that's because a lot has happened recently - which I'll go into in more detail at another time. The upshot of these changes is I'm now working with Flex quite heavily (YAY!), hence the Flex Tip post.

So what do I mean about being careful with your names, well today I had the following:

Which seems reasonable enough, however the compiler hated it, throwing me a 1202 error of "Access of undefined property testSteps in package testHelper.".
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I'm releasing a Yahoo Widget that I created a long time ago and have been meaning to release for quite a while too.

The story all begins when I took over the Coldfusion platform support for, I started to find myself spending a bit of time watching cfstat on the servers to get a feel for the current status of the machines. As we had multiple servers (then 4, now 6) and only being able to get to cfstat directly on the machine, this was not really practicable.

What I really wanted was a little desktop application that could give me the headlines of cfstat for as many servers as we had, all in an easy to digest format, the result is the CFStatShot Yahoo Desktop Widget.

I know you, just like me, has looked for a cool throbber/loader graphic for your web application more than one. Go on admit it.

Well there is no need to search any more as I've found a site that lets you create one from many available styles: AjaxLoad.info. Fantastic!

I just read a post on Autosport.com on the subject of a failed trademark application for exclusive rights to the abbreviation "F1" and I found it very odd and interesting that the Trademark Registry cited content found on Wikipedia in their response:

As Wikipedia comments, F1 is the highest class of single-seat, open-wheel formula auto racing. There is no hint in the Wikipedia references to indicate that F1 is seen as anything other than a particular form of motor racing...

Maybe this marks some sort of watershed in the arguments as to the validity of Wikipedia, or maybe that's already been and gone and this is the first time I've noticed it. Any which way I thought it was interesting.

I've had a site hosting an animation of mine called The Mime since mid 2002. I did have in mind to have for the site to be from the perspective of The Mime from the film and that he would have a diary etc. etc.

This was back when I was hoping to work in some sort field in 3D animation, that is before I accidentally became a full-time web developer (don't worry I've progressed a lot since I did the site for the animation).
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A recent tradition in our inter-office messenger chat has been to talk in pseudo-code, usually just because it makes a statement a lot more funnier. Yes it's a little (ok, a lot) geeky.

Today I received this message:

I think someone's trying to say I'm old.

Now I didn't expect to hear this when I came into work this morning:

"Dude, look Safari on Windows"

I was a little incredulous at first, but it turns out it's true you can now get Safari for Windows.

While this is interesting I think I'll be sticking with Firefox, as I've never got on with Safari on the Mac anyway. I'll give it a try though as it does seem silly fast compared to the other Windows browsers.