Greg Sims wrote me an email the other day asking for some Drupal 7 internationalisation architecture advice, having seen the Christian Assemblies International website for which I’m the tech lead. Here is his email (reproduced with permission), my answers interspersed.

Hey John,

You want to be cool, innovative, open and all that. Or perhaps, you just want your videos to work on iOS. Either way you’re going to have to replace Flash video with HTML5 video on your website. This is a practical guide to HTML5 video solutions for those that need subtitles or captions (the “track” element) to be available on their videos.

Follow this guy's instructions for installing it with procrun.

1. Download the Windows Redis port by Dušan Majkić. Extract it to C:\Program Files\Redis or your desired directory.
2. Download the Windows Redis service program by Konstantin Cherenkov and put it into the same directory.
3. Run the following (or follow the instructions on the Windows Redis Service page):

On my initial attempt of installing Redis on a development Centos machine I kind of balanced "getting something going" with "doing it right". Now I had to install it into production so I actually paid attention to exactly what I was doing (I mainly followed in the footsteps of this guy who has written a nice albeit harder to interpret guide). Here are the steps:

Got this error in Flex?

1067: Implicit coercion of a value of type String to an unrelated type mx.core:IFactory.

You tried the following type of thing in your MXML and it worked:

itemRenderer="com.example.MyItemRenderer"

But now you set it in actionscript and you get this error.

Solution:

item.itemRenderer = "new ClassFactory(MyItemRenderer);"

Header Renderer Example

In my case I had the following in my Flex 4.6 project and it was working fine:

In an interesting little mathematical exercise, Zach Pace from the team implementing the new picture sign-in for Windows 8 says that on a phone with a 4-digit pin, 4 unique digits is the most secure against a smudge attack. I contend that he is wrong, and that 3 unique digits would be more secure.

I've just been reading some fascinating articles. This guy writes a post of which I would describe about the first third as fascinating, correct, vital insight for its target audience (young developers). The rest of the post is interesting too. He mentions some interesting information, such as the allegation lots of programmer job applicants can't actually program. Is it true? Let me tell you a story:

Update: Please checkout my new and improved (incidentally how can something be new and improved? Either it's new, or it's improved, in which case it's not new) article Install Redis as Service on Centos 6, which is a better guide.

The documentation on printing in Flex is pretty sparse. There are some unrealistically simple examples and no treatment of real printing situations, apart from an interesting article (in the Flex 4.5 doco in this case) called using a print-specific output format. It would be great to see more comprehensive examples along this line involving other objects. For example, what about printing charts?