ATCP, LLC

[AS2, Flash CS4 Professional]

This might sound silly, but it is extremely useful. I just did a job for a client that needed to rotate their banners on a site that they had done for them 4 years ago. The site was hard coded to:

MovieA_______________________________________________

loadMovie(”flash/MovieB.swf”, intro_mc);

intro_mc is a simple, 1 frame movie in MovieA’s library that holds a Rectangle shape the size of the banner area. You use this rectangle to precisely position the asset in Movie A. intro_mc is placed as soon as it is needed, sometimes before the frame here that loads it.

MovieB_______________________________________________

This movie has the job of loading banners and displaying them. This is a great approach for lots of reasons, but for us the most important is that we don’t have to hard-code our banner rotation worker, MovieB, into MovieA or any other caller.

MovieB loads it’s movies from an XML file called banners.xml, which looks like this:

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A fast one for everyone.

If you have occasion to use POSIX based systems like Linux, UNIX, and yes, even Macintosh, then you will end up using cron eventually to schedule things to be done on your behalf. Cron is the tool built into these operating systems, and can seem intimidating to a new user/admin. Here are two quick tips to making cron immediately useful.

1. Generate a cron template.

2. Generate a local copy of your cron jobs.

Create a file in your home directory called cronjobs. Copy and paste the below template, and use it when needed to make a cronjobs file for another user: More »