Jean-Luc Marion, probably the most well-known French philosopher alive, is giving a lecture at Wheaton this Thursday, April 3, at 7:30pm. The names we study in college are dying off — Derrida, Gadamer, and Rorty all in the last five years. Take advantage of the opportunity if you can. I'd be there if I could. Maybe someone will come to USC or UCLA one of these days.

Until today, I'd never really delved into when and when not to use a semicolon to close a line in JavaScript. I used to use them excessively, which is safe, but recently tried abandoning the semicolon after all closing brackets ("}"). This apparently broke some of my code today though, and I discovered that I need to keep the semicolon after the closing bracket of function expressions, while it is safe to leave it out after the closing bracket of a function statement. The different usage being illustrated here:

// Function expression

var myFunction = function(...) {
    ...
};

// Function statement

function myFunction(...) {
    ...
}

One of the projects I've been working on does a lot with communication between JavaScript and Flash. The ExternalInterface available in ActionScript 3 makes this a lot easier, and I've been wanting to do something cool with it. For now, I've worked on this example to illustrate the basics of how ExternalInterface works and its simplicity.

The relevant portion of the ActionScript:

// Add an ExternalInterface callback for communication from JavaScript

function flashCallback(data:String):void {
    textBox.text = "JavaScript: You clicked " + data + ".";
}
ExternalInterface.addCallback("flashCallback", flashCallback);

// Add listeners to communicate to JavaScript via ExternalInterface

circle.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, function(event:MouseEvent):void {
    ExternalInterface.call("jsObject.callback", "Green Circle");
});
square.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, function(event:MouseEvent):void {
    ExternalInterface.call("jsObject.callback", "Red Square");
});

The relevant portion of the JavaScript:

// Create a JavaScript object containing the callback for communication from Flash and triggers to communicate to Flash

var jsObject = (function() {
    var triggers = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
    var init = (function() {
        YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(triggers, 'click', function(e) {
            YAHOO.util.Event.stopEvent(e);
            YAHOO.util.Dom.get('mySWF').flashCallback(this.innerHTML);
        });
    })();
    return {
        callback: function(data) {
            YAHOO.util.Dom.get('flash_response').innerHTML = 'Flash: You clicked the ' + data + '.';
        }
    }
})();

View source on the example for more details.

Example

Download the FLA

I find people often spend unnecessary amounts of time and money either paying for expensive software or trying to obtain said software by illegal means when there are in fact plenty of free solutions out there. The Yahoo! front page recently ran an article on good free software. I agreed with some things on the list but not all. Here's my list of non-intrusive, well-made free software:

• Adobe Reader - PDF document viewer
• Audacity - Audio recording
• AVG Free Edition - Antivirus software (think free Norton/Symantec/McAfee)
• CDBurnerXP - CD/DVD burning (think free Nero)
• Daemon Tools - CD/DVD emulation for mounting ISO images
• DVD Fab HD Decrypter - Rip any DVD directly to an ISO image
• Microsoft Virtual PC - Virtualization for Windows virtual machines
• Microsoft Visual Studio Express - Microsoft SQL Server Express and other tools
• Microsoft Windows Defender - Antispyware software
• Mozilla Firefox - Web browser
• MySQL - Database server
• OpenOffice.org - Office suite (think free Microsoft Office)
• PHP - Server-side scripting support
• PrimoPDF - PDF document generator (think free Adobe Acrobat)
• PSPad Editor - Lightweight IDE (what I work in at Yahoo!)
• QuickTime and iTunes - Movie trailers, music, etc.
• Shareaza - File sharing
• SmartCVS - CVS client
• Ubuntu - Easy-to-use and good-looking version of the Linux operating system (think Mac OS X for PC…sort of)
• VMWare Server - Virtualization for Linux virtual machines
• WinRAR - Handler for RAR, ISO, etc. packages
• WinSCP - FTP/SCP client

Been working on some layering issues with our Yahoo! Finance interactive charts:

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=BRK-A

Making HTML/CSS/JavaScript content appear above the Flash portion is tricky in some Mac/Linux browsers. Today I fired up Firefox in my Ubuntu Linux virtual machine and went to Adobe's homepage. It seems that even the people who make Flash don't know how to fix all the browser layering issues because the dropdown menus there fall behind the Flash in the Linux/Firefox combination rendering them unusable:

http://adobe.com/