Larry Mahony

Changing Jobs

1 comment August 2nd, 2007

I’m finishing up in Interactive Services on friday and starting a new job in the College of Surgeons later in August. I’ve had a great time in Interactive and learned loads but after 7 years it’s time to move on to new challenges.

E-learning research

Add comment February 6th, 2007

I got a chance to go down to DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute) in Galway yesterday to check on some e-learning research they’re carrying out. DERI is a worlwide collaboration between many institutes, of which Galway is the Irish base, whose main interest is the use of semantics and the semantic web. They’re doing a lot of interesting work but with this type of research you need keep a close eye on what’s been done to ensure it meets your business requirements and that it will be applicable in the corporate world.

Research and Development has quite often been overlooked in Irish based IT work but in recent times the government have pledged financial investment. R&D is critical to the long term success and growth of IT companies but too often it’s an afterthought or sidetrack from the day to day work. All about return on investment I suppose!

Flash player help

1 comment January 26th, 2007

A lot of work we deliver uses Flash Player so we’ve encountered almost every issue under the sun that clients can have when they ring up and tell us “it’s not working”. You get the mix of ActiveX issues in IE, dodgy installs of the flash player, browser or server caching of older versions of work, incompatible drivers and a sprinkling of abnormal client behaviour! The joys of figuring out why the application doesn’t work for one guy in outer Mongolia even though it works for the the other 9,999 employees is indeed profound

We generally use SWFObject to embed Flash in a web page. If you are still using the default embed code or not using any detection you should switch to SWFObject, it’s a JavaScript method that allows for progressive enhancement.

There’s a handy little Firefox extension called FlashSwitcher which is useful when you do a lot of Flash work. It allows you to switch between different versions of the plugin by just clicking a button on the bottom right of the toolbar window.

Ruby on Rails

1 comment January 25th, 2007

I finally got round to checking out the much hyped Ruby on Rails development framework. I know I’m a bit slow getting to it but it’s hard to find time to do everything! We don’t use it at work because it doesn’t fit in with our Microsoft platform oriented clients. In fact the whole open source area is not something any of our clients seem too keen on working with.

It’s an open source web framework that makes developing database driven web applications very easy. I downloaded it and started some basic work and within a few minutes had it connected to one of our SQL Servers here and then with one line of code and some incredibly clever naming conventions you can manipulate your database tables at the drop of a hat. I’ll have to spend some more time checking it out, in between the .NET, Java, JavaScript, ActionScript and everything else I’m currently doing.

From a quick glance it appears that Blacknight are the only company in Ireland that offers hosting for it. Whatever anyone else says about them it’s good to see an Irish hosting company keeping up to date with the latest developments.

.Net and Flash

Add comment January 12th, 2007

Finally getting into some serious asp.net development, creating a custom solution for a client using asp.net 2(c#), Flash and XML. A mini stumbling block is trying to find a way of getting the asp.net page to read values in the flash movie. Previously would have done it in Javascript using flashmovie.GetVariable(”flash_data”). Not sure how or even if I can simulate something similar from the asp.net code. [Update] Can’t really. You still need JavaScript. So I’m doing that and using XMLHttpRequest to channel the data through to the asp.net code.

Still using Flash 6 too! Just can’t get away from it. So many of the companies we work for specify Flash 6 (and even bloody Flash 5) as a minimum. I guess these large corporations need to keep their systems locked down so the staff are prevented from upgrading anything and there’s still a sense of a distrust of Flash out there too.