I came across a fun issue with my pop-up flash mp3 player to be used on our new Vital website (coming soon.) I’ve designed a ‘listen’ button on the main shop website for each audio file preview. When this listen button is clicked on, a pop-up window is opened (if not already) and the flash player loads the respective audio file and begins playing. If a second listen button is clicked, the new track will be added to the existing play list and that track will begin playing. I discovered this method only worked when clicking listen links on the same parent page view. If the parent page is refreshed or a new page of the site is loaded, the reference to the pop-up window is lost. What then happens is any new listen link clicked will cause the pop-up page to reload from scratch and loose the play list. Whatever audio was playing stops, whatever tracks were in the play list are gone. Following, is my solution.

(more…)

If you’re setting up a new DSN to use with keyed import in UPS’s Worldship, you may get this error:

“ODBC Source ‘xyz’ is not valid for ‘export’/'import’”

You may need to specify the ID (username) and Password in the Worldship “Select an ODBC source” setup options. Even if you’ve already specified them in the DSN itself.

So I’ve been trying to use the United States Postal Service Rate Calculating tool in testing mode over an HTTPS connection. I was having one heck of a hard time getting to this rather simple solution.

(more…)

The problem with Hibernate HQL is that it looks exactly like SQL. The one thing that held me back the longest on understanding how it works is that it’s NOT SQL. You’re not querying SQL tables, you’re querying objects and their variables.

(more…)

I’d like to provide a small example of interfacing with an Adaptive Alpha LED display bar via RS232. In this case, I’m working with an Alpha 215R although it should also work with anything else in the Alpha 200 series.

(more…)