How to get rid of blank pages after a table in Microsoft Word

There might be another way of doing this, but this is the best way that I have found. I know this is an issue in Word 2007 not sure about 2010. Here are the steps you take:

  1. Click on the Show/Hide paragraph button to show paragraph marks.
  2. Select the paragraph mark on the extra page you want to remove.
  3. Change the font size to of the selected paragraph mark to 1.
  4. Click on the Show/Hide paragraph button to hide paragraph marks.

That should do it. Those extra pages can be really annoying, so I hope this helps.

FPS and Memory Profiler

With Flash shifting more of it’s focus to games it is becoming more and more important to optimize and ensure good performance. A great way to gauge performance is by the frame rate that your game can maintain on the desired device. I recently made a simply little tool that can be used to test the frame rate of your game or app. It is really easy to use, it only requires one line of code. Here is what it looks like:

as3 fps profiler

Here is all the code that is needed:

FpsProfiler.profile(this.stage);

I hope this can be useful to some of you looking to optimize your Flash games. Please feel free to give me some feedback. To download the source files click on the link in the bottom right hand corner. Enjoy!

 

Download Source Files

The Future of Flash

So I recently read an article that I like to call The Future of Flex and a couple of days ago I read The Future of Flash. We’ve known for a while now that Adobe is shifting their focus for Flash to online gaming and high end video online. In this article there are some new insights however the biggest in my opinion being ActionScript 4.0. They don’t come right out and say that, but an overhaul of ActionScript = new version in my mind. It’s a great article worth reading. Go check it out here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadmap.html

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. So as everyone knows Thanksgiving is a great time to get together with family and what better to do with family then play computer games. In my family Age of Empires II is still the all-time classic. This afternoon while getting one of my computers ready to play AOE2 I noticed that the colors were showing up weird. This particular computer is running Windows 7 64 bit. After trying a bunch of things and searching around online I found the answer. To make the colors show up right you need to follow these steps:

  1. Launch the game.
  2. While it is launching start the Task Manager.
  3. Click on the Processes tab.
  4. Find explorer.exe, click on it then click on the End Process button.
  5. Alt+Tab to get back to AOE2

That’s it and you’re off and running like normal. When you’re done follow these steps to start the explorer.exe process again:

  1. Ctl+Alt+Delete then select Start Task Manager.
  2. File -> New Task (Run…)
  3. Type explorer.exe in the text field where it says Open.
  4. Click OK

Now you have everything back like it should be and you’re good to go.
I hope this helps someone else out there that might be trying to play AOE2 on a newer computer or any other older game. When trying to play any older game try to run it in compatibility mode and try this. If neither of those work then you’re probably out of luck. Enjoy the turkey and pie!

Remove Duplicates from an Array AS3

I recently needed function that would remove duplicate values from an array. After looking around online and modifying what I found to fit my needs I came up with the following:

var arr:Array = ["a", "b", "c", "a", "d", "a", "a"];

removeDuplicates(arr);

trace(arr);

function removeDuplicates(target:Array):void
{
	for(var i:uint=target.length; i>0; i--)
	{
		if(target.indexOf(target[i-1]) != i-1)
		{
			target.splice(i-1, 1);
		}
	}
}

If you are searching for a way to do this, I hope this helps!

Let Me Explain

So if you’ve read the previous posts on my blog you might be wondering what’s going on. Before abandoning it, please know that I’m still going to blog about cool programming and graphic design stuff, but now and then I’m going to add some cool quotes and yummy recipes. After all any good programmer or graphic designer needs to hear some awesome quotes and definitely needs to eat some delicious treats. Oh and to make up for the treats I might every now and again throw in one about nutrition or exercise.