Sinuous Technical Notes

Today a strange rendering bug in adobe flash caught me out today. A small white box would appear in a flash video window - but only on the Apple Mac. I’d tested the video play back on windows and mac in flash version 9.0.28, and all seemed well, however when i watched the entire video through on a mac a strange white box would appear to flicker and flash near the corner of the video window.

I had no shapes in the swf that could be causing this so i thought i’d upgrade the flash player on the mac to version 9.0.115 and suddenly the flickering white box was gone. Note there was no problem displaying with the windows version 9.0.28.

The flash changelog doesn’t show any particular fix for this issue, but it does seem that they have done some heavy development in the video realm (the H.264/HE-AAC codec i’m particularly happy about).

Earlier this week I was testing a site and noticed some weird extra characters being displayed in the page, I checked the html source to see where they were coming from. the characters being displayed were:

-->

ah! easy that’s just an end html comment, I must have left in by accident, but when i checked the source it was not the case, there were no end comment tags that had not been opened by the appropriate begin comment tag. On closer inspection I did notice something funny:

<!--
<tr>
<td>Phone:</td>
<td>--</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Email:</td>
<td> </td>

</tr>
-->


it turns out that the two minus characters were actually ending the html comment, and so the actual end comment tag was seen as extraneous. I thought that was pretty odd, so i checked how things rendered in opera 9.5 - looked fine, IE 7 - looked fine, so then I tried the w3c validator to see if there was anything invalid about having two minus characters inside of an html comment. The validator complained about them - bitterly, so who’s right here? is this merely a parsing bug in the w3c’s validator and the firefox renderer, or are Microsoft and Opera wrong for hiding my mistake?

I was getting this error today when trying to connect to a SOAP service using the built in php5 soap extension, i’m not sure if it had anything to do with it but the soap service offers SOAP 1.1 and 1.2 methods simultaneously. Upgrading to PHP 5.2.4 fixed the issue, and i note in the PHP 5 change log a number of bug fixes in the internal soap classes.

This is mentioned in the php manual, in php4 the get_class function returns the class name in lower case while in php5 it is returned in the true case the class was defined in. eg: for a class called DateSpan

PHP4: get_class($dateSpan) == ‘datespan’;

PHP5: get_class($dateSpan) == ‘DateSpan’;