Nice Face (book)

Ah, now there you go. Facebook get negative press one day and then they come back and seemingly offer "control" to their users.

Actually, it seems like a solid move in the fast evolving world of social networking.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg said the aim was to "open up Facebook so that users can participate meaningfully in our policies and our future".
From Facebook offers control to users on the BBC

Facebook has good market share and has become one of the key "names" in the social networking world. But, what you need to remember with all this, is that names, particularly in the dot.com world, can disappear quicker than a duck into a Ferrari if you're not careful.

Who remembers using Alta Vista as the go to search engine? Hmm, certainly do, but nowadays I never seem to go there. The ubiquitous Google occupies the dominant search engine position and is the name. How about Friends Reunited - once a major name, now who goes there? Or Internet Explorer? (OK, that's wishful thinking, although...)

Anyway, Facebook seems to be giving back some control, perhaps even a town hall type of approach with votes and everything to decide policy. In the increasingly wiki-world that seems like good sense:

"People should own their information. They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service."

I'd say that's a step forward. And a good way for Facebook to retain their growing status and market share as well.

Spring is here!

Ah, baseball on the radio.

Nothing makes me feel more like it's spring time. The world's about to become a warmer place: splendid.

My adopted Tiger, Ramon Santiago, slides into home to beat out the throw and put the Tigers up in the first spring training game of 2009 over the Atlanta Braves. Nice play - Ramon went 2 of 2 with a run and an rbi.

Free antivirus

Someone, let's call her "Hayley", asked about free antivirus software.

Well, as you might have read there are a whole bunch of "dodgy" free antivirus software around. So, as always, be careful what you're downloading!

What is certain, though, is that you need antivirus software and you need to keep it up to date. But you also need to take a lot of care where you go on the internet and what you do there.

A couple of half decent free resources, then would be:

AVG Free or Avast.

I've used both and they're both OK. If you really get a real problem then Sophos has a free 30 day trial. It's expensive to sign up for the full version, but if you need to get out of a problem then Sophos might be the cure if nothing else is working.

Of course, you'll also need to make sure to check for spyware, malware and all the other nasties.

Testing, Testing, 124

Test plans rock.

Really, they do. They're sooooo important. But they're always the stuff people leave out.

One of the key things with a Database Testplan (for the AQA Applied A Level course btw) is that the plan needs to relate clearly to the evaluation criteria. This is totally like crucial dude - check out the markscheme AO4 Line 3.

So, you can have all of your generic testing stuff like field sizes, queries and whathaveyou, but if you don't have specific testing points related to your evaluation critieria you're not getting very far down the mark line.

Here are a couple of someone's evaluation criteria. We'll call him "Alex" (it's OK, he's not a duck...):

Test Number 11
Test: User can edit data (eval crit 2)
How tested: I will try to edit data in tables
Expected Outcome: Able to edit data

Test Number 12
Test: The database prints weekly and daily reports related to that week/day (eval crit 3)
How tested: I will try and print reports which automatically print the records for today or this week
Expected Outcome: The right data will be printed without anything which is not needed

Ideally you want to refer all of your evaluation criteria to points in your test plan. I'll say it again: this is in addition to the generic testing points that you might have. That's really important. Like, really.

Or the ducks will know.

The Ills of Social Networking (sniff)

Feeling a bit under the weather? Can't shake off a sniffle?

Hmm, so maybe it's all that social networking you've been doing.

Lots of reports about this just now, with an 'expert' claiming that social networking sites could harm your health because they limit your face to face contact with other human beings. I guess that what you make up with in not catching their germs, you lose by, well, this:

...evidence suggests that a lack of face-to-face networking could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance.

This, (the expert) claims, could increase the risk of health problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia.

Blimey! Good job I'm old and we didn't have all this internets stuff when I was growing up.

So, if you're tweeting on facebook all the time, maybe you should think of your health a bit more? Do you think??

Mind you, it seems even the trees are getting in on this social networking larch. There's an Activity Forest park in Devon that's got a Facebook profile.

Flash: multiple answers and upper/lower case

So, a Flash quiz with a text entry box?

Well, what if your user doesn't think the same as you? You show them a car and they write "motor car" rather than "car" in the text box. Shouldn't this be a valid answer?

You need a way of getting more than one answer accepted by the action script.

Here's a walk through...

I created a very basic question:


Really simple, eh?

• all I have there is a question, an answer box and a button;


• the answer box is set as an Input Text box with an Instance Name of answer;


• then I have a 15 frame animation (it could be 3 frames long actually - I just like to spread my frames out!);


• the Actions layer has stop(); at the 1st, 10th and 15th frames;


• the background layer has my question at frame 1, the "Well done" bit at frame 10 and a "Try again" dialogue at frame 15.

OK with that? Simple stuff eh?

What we need to do then is attach some ActionScript to the button so that when it's pressed the answer in the box gets checked and we get moved on to the right place in the movie to give the feedback to the user.

The key is that I want to allow an answer of red or scarlet. And I want to allow an upper case answer and a lower case answer (or a mixture in case the user hits the Caps Lock key by accident half way through!).

Here's the ActionScript...

Need to see the script more clearly? Click the image then!

Now, I'm going to walk you through that line by line, so here goes...

1 on(release) {
All this does is say when the button is released do whatever's inside the curly brackets

2. answer.text = answer.text.toLowerCase();
Ah, this is a beauty, but you need to get the capitals in exactly the right places or else it screws the entire thing up. All it does it take anything that goes into the answer text box and convert it to lower case for the purposes of the ActionScript. Clever eh?

3. if(answer.text.indexOf("red") != -1 answer... )
Hmm, tricky. What this is doing is saying if whatever's in the answer box is red or scarlet then do what follows inside curly brackets.

But it does this in a cool way. It looks at the textbox and says if the boolean response (the true/false response) to the question "does it say red?" is not equal to (the != means not equal to...) false (the -1 means "false") then do what comes next. Read that again. And again. Get it yet? That's OK, it's a bit complex. Just know that it works!!

Then it says Or if it's scarlet. It does this with the symbol (you'll find the key at the bottom left of the keyboard just by the zed). This symbol means Or. Promise it does.

4. {
Opens what happens if the if statement is true (i.e. it's red or scarlet)

5. gotoAndPlay(10)
So go to the keyframe which says "Yay, you got it right dude". I could have used gotoAndStop and I could have named the keyframe. Both would have been cool.

6 }
So stop doing this if it's true

7 else
Why, do this if it's not true then...

8 to 11 should make sense - we check to see if we've closed all the brackets!

Adapting the Script:

Easy enough to do. You can keep adding or... by adding answer.text.indexOf("maroon") to the If statement. You can make this line as long as you want - but if there are lots of possibilities then perhaps you need to think about your question?

I'm not sure, but in a long quiz you might want to call the textboxes answer1, answer2 etc...

You can also add a check to make sure the user put something in the textbox. I might blog this one tomorrow if I feel like it.

And you can start to add up right and wrong answers nice and easily if you wanted to. This doesn't take too much doing!

Flash scene names

So, you have a movie with a bunch of scenes. But they're all called really useful names like Scene 1, Scene 37 and whathaveyou.

Even more annoyingly, they're not numbered in the right order. Ugh.

Wouldn't it be good if you could rename them? Hey, you might even have tried to do this. And failed...

First off you need to get the scene names up in a panel on the right. You'd think they'd make this easy woudn't you? Hmmm...

1. Go Window > Other Panels > Scene (hey, keyboard shortcut madness: Shift+F2)





2. A little windowy, panel thing pops up


3. You can dock that windowy thing over on the right if you click on the little dotty things to the right of the word Scene at the top and drag it into the panels. Easy eh?






4. Then you can double click the scene name and rename it

You know, you'd think that'd be a bit more usable really...