markomedia Blog Feed from Marko Tomic

Customise Red5 applications and broadcast messages to Flex HOWTO

Marko Tomic — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:23:52 +0100

In one of my earlier posts Flex and Red5 simple demo, I demonstrated how to broadcast messages from Red5 server to all subscribed Flash clients and vice versa. This feature of Red5 open source Flash streaming server continues to impress me and I think everyone with a bit of AS3 and Java knowledge should take advantage of this fantastic piece of technology.

In this post I’d like to explain the code that’s required to exchange messages between Red5 and Flash/Flex client. &nbRead More...

Couple of useful OS X Tricks

Marko Tomic — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 04:31:58 +0100

I just stumbled upon 30 Fantastic Geeky Tricks To Get The Most From Your Mac and I thought I'd write down a couple of tricks I found useful.

Removing default icons from Flex Tree control

Marko Tomic — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:30:26 +0100

What's so cool about Flex framework is the fact that it's very extensible, which allows me to do almost anything I want with it.

For example, to remove folder/arrow icons from Flex Tree control, which prevents nodes from collapsing and also creates more space for labels, you can add the following in your stylesheet:{xtypo_code}defaultLeafIcon: ClassReference(null);
folderClosedIcon: ClassReference(null);
folderOpenIcon: ClassReference(null);
disclosureClosedIcon: CRead More...

Startup Script for Apache Tomcat on Snow Leopard HOWTO

Marko Tomic — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:01:44 +0100

I have just set up Apache Tomcat startup script on Snow Leopard and I thought I'd blog about it while it's still fresh in my head. Assuming you have installed Tomcat in /usr/local/tomcat directory, you can do the following to start Tomcat on system startup.1. Create your startup script:{xtypo_code}sudo nano /usr/local/tomcat/bin/tomcat{/xtypo_code}{xtypo_code}#!/bin/sh
# Tomcat Startup Script

CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat; export CATALINA_HOME

JAVA_HOME=/Library/Read More...

MySQL startup script on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Marko Tomic — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:26:48 +0100

I've had problems starting up MySQL database server on startup on Snow Leopard. MySQL preference pane seems to be flaky and it often fails to start MySQL server.

I created this startup script myself and it seems to work nicely.

{xtypo_code}sudo nano /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.mysql.mysqld.plist{/xtypo_code}{xtypo_code}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtRead More...

Zen Cart to VirtueMart csv export

Marko Tomic — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 06:51:25 +0100

Following my post on Zen Cart friendly URLs, I would now like to give VirtueMart some love.

I've been looking for ways to export Categories and Products from Zen Cart and bulk insert them into VirtueMart. Wishful thinking? That's what I thought after googling for a solution and couldn't find anything that's convincing and, of course, free.

This motivated me to download a free version of CSV Improved component for VirtueMart and have a look at the csv format required for imRead More...

Zen Cart Friendly URLs

Marko Tomic — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 05:35:56 +0100

I've been exploring Zen Cart shopping cart for a long time and one thing that, I thought, needed improvement was the support for friendly URLs. Ultimate SEO URLs break my site and I needed another solution. I found this little beauty called Simple SEO URL and it works beautifully. It's a little tricky to set up, but it's worth the effort. Installation process will take you about 15-20 minutes.

{xtypo_warning}I use Zen Cart 1.3.8a and SSU 3.8.3. If you have different veRead More...

Illegal override of activate in mx.managers.SystemManagerProxy - Solved

Marko Tomic — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:03:15 +0100

I've been quiet on the blog front for a while. I was having a rough time scuba diving in the tropics and so on... If you're interested, take a look at some of my holiday pics I uploaded on facebook.

Now back to business.

At Learnosity, I've been working on migrating our core Flex 3 app to Flex 4. One of the problems I encountered was embedding an external swf file into the main app. I was getting the following error:

{xtypo_code}#1053 Illegal override of activRead More...

Adding a startup script on Ubuntu server

Marko Tomic — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:35:44 +0100

This is a useful tip for my reference. I've been creating some startup scripts on my Ubuntu server lately and her are a couple of steps required to get this working.

Write your startup script and place it in /etc/init.d/ directory. Let's say you called your startup script - myScript. You then install your script by using update-rc.d debian utility:

{xtypo_code}update-rc.d myScript defaults{/xtypo_code}Have a look at man update-rc.d for more info.

And finally, Read More...

HOWTO convert and shrink your DVD into a web-playable format

Marko Tomic — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:48:02 +0100

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

It is my tool of choice when it comes to backing up my DVDs. It allows me to shrink DVDs to a relatively small size and convert them to a web-playable format, such as mp4.

I use the Command Line version of HandBrake simply because it is more efficient and I love typing geeky commands in my terminal window. So here it is, the simplest command tRead More...

yellowtrace blog

Marko Tomic — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:57:06 +0100

I would like to welcome my dear sister to the blogosphere - the yellowtrace blog. She has been blogging for about a month and I'm amazed with the number of ideas and thoughts she has shared in such a short period of time. I find her blog posts very inspiring even though we have completely different careers and characters.

She's a very talented Interior Designer and I'm just a code buster.
She's cool and I'm not.
She's extremely creative and I'm not.
Her bRead More...

Flex and Red5 simple demo

Marko Tomic — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:52:01 +0100

I've been using Red5 Flash Streaming Server for a while and the more I use it, the better I like it. Sure, Adobe Flash Media Server is an excellent commercial product which does the same thing and supports server-side ActionScript. Red5 doesn't support server-side ActionScript at the moment (this will probably change), but it is an open source Flash server and with a little bit of Java knowledge you can achieve the same result and possibly more.

The following example shRead More...

Recursively remove .svn directories from your project

Marko Tomic — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:06:21 +0100

Occasionally I find .svn directories in my old projects that are not in Subversion. The quickest way to recursively remove them is to run the following command:

{xtypo_code}find . -name .svn -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf{/xtypo_code}You need to cd into your project directory before running it.

You can also run the command to quickly disconnect your project from Subversion.

Installing Tigase Jabber Server using console installer

Marko Tomic — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:50:54 +0100

Couple of months ago I installed Tigase server on my laptop and it was working beautifully until this morning. I've installed quite a few major OS updates on my laptop since then and I must've done something to upset Tigase. I visited Tigase Website to download a fresh copy of the server and see what the command is to install it using console. The Website seems to be in the middle of some sort of upgrade and many links appear to be broken. Thanks to Google cached search results I managed Read More...

Generate Self-Signed SSL Certificate - HOWTO

Marko Tomic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:12:45 +0100

This is another one for my reference. I've had to generate a self-signed SSL certificate quite a few times and I'm sure I'll do it again in future. First of all, self-signed SSL certificates provide the same level of security as any other commercial ones, such as Verisign certs. The 2 main differences are:

1. Self-signed certificates are free
2. Self-signed certificates are not recognised by web browsers by default. They need to be installed in browsers manually in order to Read More...

SSH Tunneling - Add secondary address to your loopback interface HOWTO

Marko Tomic — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:14:44 +0100

I'm writing this one for my own reference because almost everything I do for work, is done through SSH port forwarding. If you're not familiar with SSH port forwarding, you'll have to read up on it elsewhere. And the reason why we use SSH port forwarding is because it is secure and powerful.

I generally set up my port forwards to run on my local computer on an arbitrary port and configure SSH to create a proxy connection to the normal port on a remote computer. Then I configure myRead More...

MAMP vs Entropy PHP on OS X

Marko Tomic — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:15:36 +0100

Following my post on Snow Leopard Gotchas, I discovered another problem you might run into. SL comes with currently the latest version of PHP 5.3.0. However, not all PHP projects will play nice on v5.3.0. What you could do is:

1. build and configure an older version of PHP from source - e.g. 5.2.11
2. Install Entropy PHP (note: this will modify your SL Apache config files).
3. Or just be lazy and install MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, PHP) in a few seconds.

I choRead More...

Snow Leopard Gotchas

Marko Tomic — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:29:48 +0100

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard from 10.5 and everything went relatively smoothly. I was particularly pleased to see extra 13GB of hard drive space.

However, I noticed a couple of things that I wasn't so pleased about:

Apache unable to start
PHP disabled
MySQL unable to start

I've already walked a couple of people through this, so if you run into the same problem you can try the following:

1. For some reason Snow Leopard modified the following file:

Hello Computer

Marko Tomic — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:03:09 +0100

I've been thinking about blogging for a few years now and one of the main reasons for my hesitation was the commitment. These days, I feel a lot more settled :) and I feel that I should start contributing to the community, which has been very helpful to me and my professional career.

For those of you who don't know me, I come from an engineering background. I graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney in 2003 with a Computer Systems Engineering degree under my belt. I currRead More...