Wassim Sidani

RU486

wassim — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 08:44:55 +0000

A common mistake regarding RU 486 is saying that it decreases the secretion of progesterone.
RU 486 does not interfere with the secretion of progesterone.
It is an antagonist of progesterone, which means that it simply blocks progesterone receptors and prevents progesterone from acting on its target cells without actually lowering its concentration in the blood.

Class of 2010

wassim — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:25:25 +0000

Dear LS students,
Here’s a link you don’t want to miss: http://www.sidani.info/ls2010/
Regards.

Arabic text from mySQL database using amfphp

wassim — Mon, 10 May 2010 18:31:39 +0000

I had this issue where arabic text and french text retrieved from a mySQL database were not displaying correctly in my flash frontend, I was using amfphp to communicate and query the database. Needless to say that the text does display correctly in phpMyAdmin so it is correctly encoded in the database itself.

So here’s what I did to resolve the issue:

- Ensure that the mySQL tables where the text is stored are using the utf8_general_ci Collation.

- Set $gateway->setCharsetHandler( “none”, “ISO-8859-1″, “ISO-8859-1″ ) in the gateway.php file (in case you’re wondering, yes you should simply NOT use iconv or utf_decoder or mbstring or the like, just disable the setCharsetHandler conversion by using “none” as the conversion method).

- in your php service file, say it’s called permissions.php, use the following :

$rsConnectionID=mysql_connect("localhost", "root", ""); mysql_set_charset("utf8", $rsConnectionID);

Be sure to have these set before running your query or passing the results to flash.

This should resolve all the issues you’re having, of course you should not use the following actionScript : system.useCodepage = true; as this will tell the flash player not to use utf 8 as default encoding and will surely get you into troubles.

Flash CS5 and the iPhone

wassim — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:10:43 +0000

I think that by now everyone in the flash community knows about the “Slap in the face” we, as flash developers, received by Apple, in case you didn’t you can read all about it in the “Go screw yourself Apple” post.

A side effect of adobe’s announcement that flash CS5 will export to iPhone and iPod touch was encouraging thousands of flash developers to buy an iPhone or iPod touch to have the appropriate hardware to test and develop Flash-based ipa, at least that’s what I did…Now Apple should be grateful to this “free Marketing favor” Adobe inadvertently offered to say the least…

I already have a windows mobile powered HTC touch diamond phone and I invested in buying a 3rd generation 32 GB iPod touch for that purpose, if Apple continues its tight policy about 3rd party-built ipa, then I will either have to invest in an Android or just keep my ipas for myself! I might even have to jailbreak the iPod to be able to use my own built applications on my device! please correct me if I am wrong (should the device be jailbroken to install my own self-built ipas without having to kiss Mr Jobs ‘hand’ to get approval?)

A new member joins the Sidani family

wassim — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:22:16 +0000

She’s Lara, our second child, a chilling cool baby girl that arrived on March 16 (one year and one day after the arrival of her older brother, Rami).

51.5 cm at birth and 3160 grams, DOB is March 16 2009 at 11:47 am.

ActionScript3 flash shopping cart-updates

wassim — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:51:26 +0000

Ok so we I had some good suggestions sent to my inbox, I am already improving and cleaning up some of the code of the actionscript3 flash shopping cart so It will be easy to integrate these new features. A full list of the new features will be published soon, meanwhile if you have any wish list, feel free to comment here.

actionscript3 flash shopping cart- new features

wassim — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:00:21 +0000

So we’re in the process of adding some cool new features to make competitors look small, these will be revealed very soon once we make sure no other cart includes the same features or even come close! You can expect things that will surely add to the usability of the
actionscript3 flash shopping cart and will satisfy even the most demanding users.
If you have any feature you would like to see implemented in the actionscript3 flash cart, please drop us a line.
We know what designers and developers want, and we have the right package for each, more to come in the near future.

Flash shopping cart

wassim — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:01:16 +0000

After months of work, we are glad to announce the immediate availability of the actionscript3 flash shopping cart.
Packed with lots of features (video support, multiple payment processors and gateways, supporting paypal, 2checkout and authorize.net) this new cart is probably the most flexible yet lightweight cart available today.

This actionScript3 shopping cart takes advantage of the rendering engine of flash player 9 and up, its performance exceeds actionscript2 carts by far and you can be sure your customers will receive first class user experience using our cart.

With a filesize less than 150 Kb, you will be amazed of the number of features this cart brings to your online store.

You can have several categories of goods sold through the cart, tangible and intangible (clothing, software, video lectures etc…). The cart supports all video and image formats supported by the flash player.

The cart comes in two flavors, an XML driven version and a mySQL+php adminPanel powered version; both flavors are ready to go products with no learning curves.\r\n

The XML driven version can run on any server, there are no special requirements, no database installation or server side scripting needed whatsoever.

The mySQL adminPanel powered version uses a mySQL database to store the details about the products and a php backend to manage the database through a very user friendly interface that makes sense!

Just fill in the details of each product, upload the images and you are ready to sell online.

Additional gateways and payment processors can also be incorporated into the cart upon request.

The actionscript3 flash shopping cart can be connected to an optional automatic delivery system (sold separately) which is extremely useful for digital goods; buyers can immediately download the digital product they bought without intervention by the merchant.

We offer two licensing schemes for maximum flexibility, a designer version and a developer version.

The designer package of the actionScript3 shopping cart does not include source code.

So what if you want to customize the look of the cart? Well it is easier than doing it yourself, you can simply send us a psd or a draft of your design and we can do that for you and send you the finished, ready to deploy, swf file.

A single license (works on one domain) costs 150 USD for the XML driven version and 250 USD for the adminPanel version.

The developer package allows you to do practically anything with the cart since full commented source code is included. The licensing scheme of the developer package is more flexible than the designer package since you can use the cart on an unlimited number of domains without restrictions.

The look and feel of the cart is easily customizable if you have the developer version, all you need is flash CS3 or higher and some basic flash knowledge.

The XML version of the developer package costs 1000 USD while the adminPanel powered version costs 1500 USD.

We offer free installation and technical support with every sale (applies for both the designer and developer versions).

We’re also capable of adding custom features, integrating the cart with existing flash sites, and translating the interface to different languages (additional fee, depends on complexity of the task).

Here’s the demo of the AS3 flash shopping cart, This version supports using videos as description of an item as well as a large picture or even an swf file.
the demo connects to paypal as payment gateway yet the retail version supports 2checkout and authorize.net as well.

ScrollPane AS3 issues

wassim — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 09:31:46 +0000

I had some free time to experiment and decided to port an application I wrote earlier to AS3. The scrollPane component is at the heart of this application and much to my surprise, the AS3 version has almost the same erratic behavior as the AS2 version when it comes to the scrollbars appearing when needed. It seems that we also need to find workarounds for the \”much faster, much cleaner version\” of actionscript i.e. AS3.\r\n

More About this in the coming days.\r\n

Flash CS4 released, or is it?

wassim — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:35:17 +0000

As a flash expert and enthusiast, I was thrilled when the release of the new Flash CS4 was announced. Like thousands of other flash coders, I went through the pain of downloading the trial version of Flash CS4 (almost one gigabyte large) just to find that the help files and API documentation were simply not there! The help menu takes you to adobe site to check the online version (if you are connected to the internet) or simply displays some very basic info with no code samples whatsoever.

I can now say with confidence, Adobe is following a pattern with every new release of Flash since CS3, the documentations are getting crappier with every release, not a good strategy if they want people to actually learn flash and if they want to expand the use of flash as a platform.

CS4 brought yet another disappointment to me and millions of RTF users, the “ligature” support is buried deep inside some user unfriendly classes and there is no simple way to access this essential feature for the average user by simply setting a property for a static or dynamic text field, way to go Adobe, really smart!\r\n

So was Flash CS4 really released or is this just another pre-release alpha quality software? The latter seems more probable.