So, have you ever arrived at your car to see a parking ticket for $68 on your windshield and you pull out your Proof of Payment stating that you paid for parking on that particular stall? I have. After doing some massive research on Impark, I’ve found a discussion topic on the Discover Vancouver forum stating that he’s had the same problem that I have just encountered.

Check this out:

You’ll notice that my Stall# is 448–and the stall #’s on the Proof of Payment + Parking Ticket match. You’ll also notice that I have VALID parking until 2AM January 3. You’ll also notice that I paid at 9:45AM on January 2, 2008. This is the second time I’ve been falsely accused of not paying for parking. The funny thing is, it’s the same Patroller that issued both these parking tickets.

Is Impark trying to scam me? Do they honestly assume that I don’t keep Proof of Payment for Parking, VISA records, etc? I always pay with VISA–which is awesome because I can just log into my Online Banking to pull up all my transactions.

Also, when you try to dispute these parking tickets, it’s so hard to find the proper phone # on their website. It’s like they’re purposely hiding it.

Has Impark ever tried to pull this on you, as well? Do tell your story. From what I can tell from Googling Impark, there’s a lot of cases out there where they’ve tried to falsely accuse people for not paying for parking. So, please, do tell your story!

Problem Analysis

While doing some front-end performance enhancements on a project that utilized extensive javascript and flash, I found that IE6 doesn’t like it when you compress text/xml with mod_deflate/mod_gzip. From a user perspective, the Flash component would show, but any XML data being transferred to the Flash component will be rejected–you get a blank canvas/UI without any data/Preloader will show. Incidentally, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2+, Safari all handle gzipped text/xml without a problem.

Final Solution

Only apply gzip to the following content types: text/plain, text/html, text/javascript, and text/css–Do not apply it to text/xml if your Flash components use XML data sets from the back-end.

This solution gzips all your assets (Javascript and CSS), without breaking Flash components in your web application.

Further Reading

mod_deflate tutorial - http://www.howtoforge.com/apache2_mod_deflate

Guess who’s back.

I always incorporate YUI Library because its excellent documentation, blazingly fast performance, and lightweight size. Just recently, Yahoo! released a new version of YUI. Below are the new additions to the library.

• Rich Text Editor
• Base CSS
• YUI Loader
• Image Loader
• Colour Picker
• Testing Suite

I’m really excited about the Rich Text Editor and the Image Loader–I’m anxious to start coding now!

On a really geeky note, I’ve been testing the Rich Text Editor for the past 30 minutes, trying to fool the formatting–so far, I find that it’s highly responsive, very intelligent, and sleek. I’m going to test the hell out of the image loader now.

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EDIT: Oh man, after stress testing the Rich Text Editor–you end up finding a few user interface flaws, which aren’t that critical, but they are obvious. When you select a different font face, and you click somewhere else to take the focus off the text editor, the font face switches back to Arial.

Steps to reproduce the bug:
1) Type any amount of text into the editor
2) Select the text and choose Comic Sans MS and decrease the font size
3) Click somewhere off the editor to take the focus off the editor

You will notice that the font face switches back to Arial and the size switches back to 13.

I recently saw a cool Brickles AJAX game made with Prototype.js. The website goes into detail about how to create the game–showing how to develop the classes/objects and explaining how the user interacts with the game.

Do you remember playing classic games, such as, Pac-man, Brickles, Hangman, and Carmen Sandiego in black and white? Do you think that bringing old school games to the browser using AJAX is feasible? It would be interesting to re-create a game like Final Fantasy VI (my favourite of all the Final Fantasies).

Something to think about.