2007 March :: Gilluminate

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Archive for March, 2007

Mac OS X hidden files: why???

March 14th, 2007 | Posted in Developer Blog | Tags: Mac

Why does Mac OS X create a hidden file for every file that is saved?

I tried searching for an answer to this question on Google, but unfortunately I got a bunch of results about how to view hidden files in Mac OS X.

I’m no Mac expert and maybe some Mac enthusiast can convince me otherwise. But isn’t it absolutely absurd to create a hidden file for every file saved on a Mac? Specifically, I’m talking about the stuff I’m seeing in our Samba shared drive here in the office. Anything saved to that shared drive from a mac, also puts a hidden file with essentially the same name as the original file, but with a dot-underscore (._) before it. And of course, since I’m on Windows this becomes very annoying because if I remove the real file, the hidden file is left behind and after a lot of usage these hidden—seemingly useless—files pile up. Where’s The Fire??

I assume it has something to do with file association, but isn’t Apple smarter than that? Is there a way to turn this off?

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Using SWFObject for Flash Version Tracking

March 9th, 2007 | Posted in Developer Blog | Tags: Flash, JavaScript, Omniture

At my company, we use Omniture SiteCatalyst for our web analytics/tracking. Unfortunately, Omniture does not give user’s Flash Version statistics in their standard reports like Google Analytics does. On the other hand, Omniture gives you the freedom to create custom reports that you can determine on your own using their provided JavaScript code.

I am already using SWFObject to load the flash piece on our homepage to users with a specified version. So I figured I could hack that code a bit in order to pull the version it was already determining for me, and plug it into the Omniture code.

After mulling through the SWFObject code, I finally was able to run this page successfully, which will alert the exact version of flash I am using:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>test</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>
</head><body>
<script type="text/javascript">
alert(deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().major+
"."+deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().minor+
"."+deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().rev);
</script>
</body>
</html>