Tutorials

MapQuest AS3/Flex Club Finder

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | Technology, Tutorials, Web Design, Work | No Comments

This past release Erich C. and I have been working on a new AS3/Flex Club Finder.  We currently have 2 different club finders on our website seen here:

Flash Club Finder:

24 hour fitness flash club finder

24 hour fitness flash club finder

JSP Club Finder:

24 hour fitness jsp club finder

24 hour fitness jsp club finder

This new project is meant to allow our members to set their favorite clubs in their profile.  This would allow them to quickly access the club’s resources, such as group X class schedules, phone numbers, amenities, ect.  We were given one release cycle to duplicate the basic functionality our previous club finders delivered.  What a challenge! This is what we achieved:

24 hour fitness flex club finder

24 hour fitness flex club finder

This was a very beneficial project for me because I was to help build it from scratch. We overcame some very technically confusing challenges (such as loading an unsecured swf application inside another secure swf application). I got a lot of exposure to Flex’s event driven architecture and enjoyed learning a ton about laying out components with Flex.

I’ll make another post about the specific challenges and how we resolved them.

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Installing Leopard on x86 PC – Dell Dimension 4500

Monday, December 8th, 2008 | Technology, Tutorials | 22 Comments

It took me roughly 12 hours and 20 installations before I stabilized my installation of Leopard on an old Dell Dimension 4500. Along the way I read a ton of guides and references that helped me finally install Leopard 10.5.4 on my x86 desktop. I figured I’d centralize them all as well as offer my experience in hopes of making it a little easier for the next person.

Guides:

Resources:

  • OSX86Project – Solid reference for all things related to getting OSX on your PC
  • InsanelyMac – First hand problems and solutions. Great place for dynamic help. Having a problem with the OSX installation? Post a question here for help.

Installing Leopard on a Dell Dimension 4500:

  1. Get DVD image JaS 10.5.4
    • If you happen to have lost your legitimate copy you might be able to find a replacement at “thePirateBay.org” by typing “JaS 10.5.4“
  2. Burn the image
  3. Boot the PC and insert the DVD
  4. Enter bios (delete key as soon as computer powers on)
  5. BOOT > Boot Device Priority – you want CD/DVD 1st and hard drive 2nd
  6. Save and exit
  7. After POST you’ll see “push any key to boot from CD or push f8 to boot from cd with options” – guess what?  push a key…
  8. It should pop up to a gray screen with an apple logo and a circle animation rotating underneath
  9. Select your language
  10. OSX Installer app should pop up with a welcome screen – this overall looks a lot like OSX.
  11. On the bar at the top of the screen click “Utilities” > “Disk Utility”.
  12. When it opens you should see your hard drive on the left at the top (It may have some partitions under it).
  13. Select the hard drive and then click the erase tab then click erase.  ( dont worry about “Volume Format” or “Name” as these will be taken care of in the next step)
  14. It Should only take a moment, then click on the only partition under the hard drive and then back to the erase tab.
  15. Change the “Volume Format:” to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and rename the partition to something pretty like “Leopard” or “BlueBird”.
  16. Click erase and wait for the progress bar to fill.
  17. Close the Disk utility app and the installer should pop back up.
  18. Click continue then agree then select the newly erased partition and continue.
  19. Click “Customize” and select packages:
    • Kernal package: Intel SSE2 SSE3 9.2.0 Sleep
    • Driver Package: Intel-ICHx
    • Device Identification: NVIDIA GeForce nForce Chipset Fix
    • uncheck clean
  20. Click Done, then install
  21. You can wait for the “disk check” just to be sure, but after I verfied the disk was fine once, i skipped it every time after that to save about 20 minutes.
  22. Wait for the install to complete
  23. Restart the computer
  24. Pop out the DVD
  25. During the next boot hit any key to add options to the HDD boot.
  26. At “boot: ” enter “cpus=1″ and hit enter
  27. Enjoy booting into Leopard

Additional useful information:

  • If your system dosen’t boot up try “-x” at the same place you enterd “cpus=1″ above.  This will boot the system into safe mode.
  • If for some reason that still doesnt work… Try using “-v” which displays the boot messages while starting rather then the apple graphic.  These messages help with debugging.

Once you get the system booting add the parameters to “com.apple.Boot.plist”:

  1. Open Finder
  2. Go to your partition
  3. Then go to Library > Preferences > SystemConfiguration
  4. Open com.apple.Boot.plist with “Property List Editor”
  5. Add parameters to “Kernel Flags” (I added “cpus=1 -x”)

Additonal things you can add:

  • “Boot Graphics”=Yes|No    see graphics mode or text mode when starting.
  • “Quiet Boot”=Yes|No       Use quiet boot mode (no messages or prompt).
  • “Graphics Mode”=”WIDTHxHEIGHTxDEPTH”  such as “1024x768x32″ wher depth is the color in millions

Update:

So i was inconsistantly recieving a kernal panic during boot.  It was caused by my PCI Ethernet card that just happens to be a RealTek 8139 chipset card.  So by checking my Console.app under “Utitilities” I was easily able to narrow down what was causing the kernal panic by seeing:

Dec 14 10:53:13 mad-cloudss-mac-pro kernel[0]: {      144 680a0066} RTL8139::receiverInterrupt – not OK
Dec 14 10:53:13 mad-cloudss-mac-pro kernel[0]: {      1b0 48115104} RTL8139::receiverInterrupt
Everywhere….  After doing some research, I found the solution to be quite simple.  It turns out, the kext i was using (that came with Leopard) was incompatiable with this chipset.  By replacing it with a working version of the kext it resolved the problem.
  1. Download this zip and extract the contents:   pcgenrtl8139ethernet_120
  2. Open the Termianl.app in “Utitilties” and type these commands:

  3. sudo su

    rm -R /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/AppleRTL8139Ethernet.kext

    cp -R <path to>/PCGenRTL8139Ethernet.kext /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/

    chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/PCGenRTL8139Ethernet.kext

    chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/PCGenRTL8139Ethernet.kext

    touch /System/Library/Extensions

    shutdown -r now

  4. Enjoy a panic free boot!

Please feel free to post comments/questions!

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Inkscape Whirls, Twirls and Swirls: SWIRL

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 | Tutorials | 8 Comments

So for a long time I wanted to know how to create Whirls, Twirls and Swirls with Inkscape.  I’ve looked over many tutorials and would like to summarize my findings into a central location as well as add my own style.  I’m going to try and make this as easy to follow as possible.

Lets start off with a simple “Swirl“:

Creating a swirl in inkscape

Creating a swirl in inkscape

A Swirl is a line that curves smoothly along a path.

These simple steps can be modified to create complex Swirl graphics:

Complex Swirl with Inkscape

Complex Swirl with Inkscape

1)  Create a simple rectangle.

Use F4 to create a square

Use F4 to create a square

2)  Then convert that rectangle object to a path:  Path > Object to Path (or Ctrl + Shift + C).  Switch to your “Edit path by nodes” tool by hitting F2

(Ctrl + Shift + C) then (F2)

(Ctrl + Shift + C) then (F2)

3)  Now highlight all the nodes by drawing a square around our rectangle or hit (Ctrl + A).  After, add additional points to the rectangle by clicking on the “Insert new nodes into selected segments” once.
Add additional nodes to our rectangle

Add additional nodes to our rectangle

4)  Highlight the four corner nodes by holding shift and clicking on them individually.  Once highlighted hit (Delete).
Remember to hold (Shift) while selecting nodes

Remember to hold (Shift) while selecting nodes

5)  This shape will be stretched out to create our final Swirl.  The next part of creating our Swirl requires us to create the “path” onto which we will stretch our “diamond” out on.  To create an appropriate path click on the Bezier Curve tool (Shift + F6).  Next left click in our workspace, move the mouse, and right click.  This creates a stright line inbetween two nodes.

If you cant see the "arms" after bending, highlight a node.

If you cant see the

6)  Hit (F2) or click on our “Edit nodes” tool.  Highlight both our nodes by hitting (Ctrl + A) or click and dragging a square around them.  Now click and drag on the segment connecting the two nodes to create a bend.  This will also display the arms we will use to modify our Swirl path.
Left click to create the first node then right click to create the second

Left click to create the first node then right click to create the second

7)  Click and drag the arms to create the desired path to stretch our diamond onto.
This is the shape your Swirl will fill

This is the shape your Swirl will fill

8)  Now highlight your “diamond” and click the “Insert new nodes into selected segments” button about six times until you have roughly 256 nodes as seen on the bottom of the Inkscape interface.  This step helps the shape stretch smoothly over our path.
Add additional nodes

Add additional nodes

9)  Switch to your selection/transform tool (F1) and click on your diamond.  Because order of creation is important we need to bring the diamond to the front by selecting it and hitting “Bring to the front” in the second row of icons at the top.
Use this button to bring our diamond to the front

Use this button to bring our diamond to the front

10)  Now all our hard work is going to pay off.  Highlight the “diamond” and the path by drawing a square around them with our selection tool (F1) or hit (Ctrl + A).  With both object selected go to Effects > Generate from Path > Pattern along Path…  This will bring up a dialog box.  Switch the “Copies of the pattern:” field to “Single, Stretched”.  Leave everything else as is.  I like to check off “Line Preview” to verify I got the effect I was going for.  Hit “Apply” and you will have a beautifully generated Swirl.
Creating a swirl in inkscape

Creating a swirl in inkscape

11)  As a clean up step I recommend highlighting the newly created Swirland hitting (Ctrl + L) which will simplify our path and remove roughly 90% of our added nodes while keeping the edges smooth.

If you enjoyed this tutorial, please leave a comment!

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