ActionScript 3 and cross-domain problem
One of the most typical problems when coding AS3 to, let’s say, read data from an external XML source, is the cross-domain problem. According to security policies, not an url outside the domain where the AS application is being executed can be read, and different subdomains (such as www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com) are considered as different ones.
If the external resources you are trying to use come from your own application in another domain / server that you manage, then it can be fixed by adding a cross-domain policy file. This file must be defined on the content source server, and your AS application has to explicitly declare this server as allowed.
Security.allowDomain("domainone.com"); Security.allowDomain("domaintwo.com"); |
But if this is not the case and the content source is on a different remote server like, for instance, when implementing an RSS news reader which grabs content from sources like online news sites, then this problem can be worked out with a PHP proxy file.
Basic web mapper
Sometimes it is useful to have an automated tool to get the full web map of your site. Perhaps not your own web site, since you have already implemented some kind of automatic generation and notification to Google (have not yet?), but a client’s one.
There are a few tools to map an external web site, I tried some in my particular case. They were just adware, or demos, or they obscured the links in the final report… Yeah, of course, sometimes a $30 license is worth it, but you might not want to acquire a new piece of proprietary software every time you need a new feature, might you?
So I decided to write it myself in PHP, not for the money, but for the fun 
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Scrum / agile development
Some resources and useful information about this development technique:
- About Scrum (Spanish) http://www.proyectosagiles.org/
- Agile Software Development http://www.agile-software-development.com/
- Good Agile Project Management software, community / free version available http://www.rallydev.com/
- Scrum project management software, for Windows (Desktop) http://www.scrumdesk.com
- MoSCoW method to prioritize tasks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoSCoW_Method
MySQL clean reinstall
To perform a clean reinstall of the MySQL server (which regenerates start scripts, databases and config files) use:
1 2 3 4 | sudo apt-get install mysql-server</li> sudo apt-get remove --purge mysql-server</li> sudo apt-get autoremove mysql-server</li> sudo apt-get install mysql-server</li> |
Some times is useful!
FTP server on Ubuntu
I write this post more as a reminder for myself than as a generic tutorial. Anyway, it is about a precise FTP server configuration on Ubuntu that might or might not be useful for other people. It is just useful in the environment I am using (web server, just one Unix user, some FTP accounts). Here we go:
The server that I’ve used in several cases, and which I prefer just because it is simple enough to have it running quickly, is VSFTP (Very Simple FTP). It works in integration with the machine’s users so that we only need to add users to the server in order to have them available for the FTP daemon. Once the server is installed, a few configurations must be done. In file /etc/vsftpd.conf:
