According the the Apache URL rewriting guide, the way to handle Canonical Hostnames is like this:

Well, those rules are not always sufficient. Specifically, what if you also owned the www.example.com.au domain, and wished to redirect it also to the primary www.example.com domain? The solution is simple - we just need to add a single $ character to the end of the match-pattern of the first RewriteCond like this:

Now that will work nicely as long as the hosts use standard ports (ie 80 for HTTP, and 443 for HTTPS). However, some Python versions unnecessarily append the standard HTTPS port number to the Host HTTP header. Also I discovered today (after some Apache debug logging) that Adobe AIR applications have the exact same misbehavior for HTTPS, but only when running under Mac OS X.

A couple of weeks ago (well actually, back in September), I received an interesting email from Lyora MacRae of Adobe.  To quote the email:

"Thanks so much for reporting 3 or more bugs for Flex SDK. As a thanks for your hard work, we want to send you a free t-shirt we're designing with all the developers' names on it. Therefore, we need your shirt size and mailing address to include you!"

Yesterday, I was trying to write a custom hierarchical cursor class that implements the IHierarchicalCollectionViewCursor interface. But no matter what I tried, the AdvancedDataGrid would not recognise my implemented cursor class as being hierarchical. When I extended the existing HierarchicalCollectionViewCursor class, the AdvancedDataGrid would happily recognise it - even I overrode every single method and property... yet, as soon as I switched the class to implement IHierarchicalCollectionViewCursor instead of extending HierarchicalCollectionViewCursor, the AdvancedDataGrid would break again.

Last night I received some pretty exciting (to me) news about something that's just been released on Adobe's pre-release site (which I am a member of)... unfortunately I can't say what it is yet (I've been sworn to secrecy), but it will likely help with a number of technical issues I'm currently facing in a major project at work, so I'm very happy with the timing! :)

At work, we've been having some significant performance issues with the Flex AdvancedDataGrid control, so my boss has begun a dialog with some of the AdvancedDataGrid control's developers over at Adobe. As part of that dialog, my boss asked me to write a brief summary of the problem - which I've done. But it has occurred to me that the problem description is likely to be very interesting to some people, so I've decided to publish it here too. And so, here it is...

I'm currently sitting in (and posting from) the first Adobe AIR Camp in Australia... there's not much going on yet, but the day is young! :)

Currently, Andrew Spaulding is introducing Flex Builder 3... since I've been using it for some time now, this part's a little slow ;)

Okay, now he's talking about using transparent images for application chrome... getting interesting... better go now :)

The Adobe AIR command line compiler (axmlc) adds a "Flex Data Visualization Trial" watermark to the background of chart and AdvancedDataGrid controls. If you are licensed to use Flex Builder 3 Professional, then you can fix this quite easily...