$text = String.new “World”

print “Hello #{$text}”

Archive for February, 2008

Alegria!

Posted by siegem on February 25, 2008

Bon soir! That’s what’s for me now…

This is not like the other topics I have posted. This is about something that I watched yesterday and liked a lot. Yes, as the topic has already induced, it’s the wonderful show of Cirque du Soleil, Alegria.

I would recommend for everyone to see this, but don’t know if they are performing anywhere but here, in Brazil. If you live in the city of São Paulo or Porto Alegre, you must see, if you doesn’t and have conditions to travel, you must too! It’s colorful, with lots of very cool jokes and it focus on Alegria! There’s no way to come out of it without being touched by joy and fascination, a must see.

That’s all I will write, you need to go and see it for yourself, because that I will not enter in details. For the end of the post, I will place a piece of the theme music, Alegria, from the Terra’s lyrics site.

Alegría
Come un lampo di vita
Alegría
Come un pazzo gridar
Alegría
Del delittuoso grido
Bella ruggente pena, seren
Come la rabbia di amar
Alegría
Come un assalto di gioia

Alegría
I see a spark of life shining
Alegría
I hear a young minstrel sing
Alegría
Beautiful roaring scream
Of joy and sorrow, so extreme
There is a love in me raging
Alegría
A joyous, magical feeling (…)

Written by Franco Dragone, Manuel Trados, Claude Amesse and Rene Dupere

May you like this show! Alegria for you!

Posted in Culture, Entertainment, Life | Tagged: , , | 3 Comments »

Firefox 3 Beta 3

Posted by siegem on February 21, 2008

It’s a little old but Firefox 3 Beta 3 was released in february 12. I managed to download it and tested on my virtual machine (I’m a little paranoid with betas) and tried to see some of the improvements and new stuff.

The first thing that is noticable about the third version is the new theme that comes out of the box. It was visually improved (still I like the actual version default theme) and had some new functionalities. The back and forward buttons seems to have their history function merged, the address bar has now a button in the left to drag and create a link to the page, in the right part of it we have a star to bookmark the current web site and the auto-complete web site address now inform us if it is bookmarked and other informations about the site.

There are some major upgrades on security like anti virus integration (for the happiness of windows users), Web Forgery Protection, malware protection and now firefox integrates with Vista Parental Control. For the status bar, we can now see download information on it, simplifying the download management.

Something that hooked up my attention was the integration of history and bookmark allowing us to search directly from both on auto-complete and sorting it based on visit frequency. It’s now possible to bookmark something with tags!

The Smart bookmarks button on the bookmark toolbar allows us to locate the most visited, the recent bookmarked and recent tags.

I’ve read in the release notes that the speed was improved and the memory usage was optimized but didn’t notice it, maybe I need to test it a little more… :)

That’s my impressions from the Firefox 3 Beta 3 plus some information that I read from the release notes. But it would be cool that you take your own impression from it using and sharing some problem you find with the mozilla community.

You can download it from this link and this other has informations about system requeriments.

Have fun!

Posted in Browsers, Firefox, Technology | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Popup on Flex

Posted by siegem on February 18, 2008

These days I was playing with PopUpManager component on Flex. I was searching for some way to create Popup windows, in the moment for a Login screen, and came across this component.

It’s simple to use, you need only to import it on the script and use it directly. There are four things that you can set on a popup from the component, you can add a popup to the Manager, put a window on the top of others, center it and remove it from the Manager.

I will put some examples here. Let’s first consider creating a popup, we need to extend some component to create a container for the popup.

In this sample, we will use the TitleWindow component as the extended component. Before it’s creation, we need to set up some properties, we will leave it with the default.

Next, we need to set up some basic behaviourof the window, like it’s title, show it’s close button and the code that will take place when someone closes the window. To set all these things up we will need to do the following:

  1. On the TitleWindow component set the parameter “showCloseButton” to true and set the function that will be called when the event “close” is captured (it can be anything, be creative);
  2. In the script component, you need to add the definition of the function you set to the close event and code the “PopUpManager.removePopUp(this)” to close the window, you can add some other code too;
  3. You can add, if you want, a title for the window using the”title” attribute.

With the new component implemented, we can now go to the main program and instantiate it to create the popup window, but, to achieve this, we can use two ways. In the first, we create an instance of the component you created and then add it to the PopUpManager, in the second, we use the PopUpManager to create the instance to us, then we cast it to the type of our component and send it to an empty variable.

The first way is done with this code:

var bar:foo;
bar = foo(PopUpManager.createPopUp(this,foo,true));

Being foo my customized component based on TitleWindow and bar the variable that will contain the instance of the popup. The first parameter is the parent component, the second the component type of the window to be created and the third is the modal definition (if other popups will be avaliable while this one is opened).

The second way:

var bar:foo = new foo();
PopUpManager.addPopUp(bar,this,true);

Being foo the same as above and bar the instance of the component, but this time we do instantiate it and only send it to the PopUpManager. The way you choose is almost identical, it’s up to you if you need to instantiate it manually or let the manager create it to you. In this case, the parameters changed a bit, the first is the component instance, the second the parent and the third is the modal definition, again.

I saw some usefulness in the second if your component have some parameters to be sent on the constructor, but I’m still meditating about it. Some day it can become one post or half…

Best Regards!

Posted in Flex, Howto, Technology | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »