Viewing By Month : August 2004 / Main
August 31, 2004
Matt Voerman asks that question on the RocketBoots blog. Pop along and give him some comments. I'm not a Flash expert and I've never been able to build anything useful with Flash until the screens feature appeared in Flash MX Pro. I've managed to build a couple of small but useful apps with it so it's definitely helped me.
August 30, 2004
We've all encountered this issue - a user presses the reload or back button in the middle of your carefully constructed web application and gets a nasty browser warning (about reposting data) or you get multiple submissions. Ugh! That's life on the web. We've also all seen the workaround for this... You haven't? OK, well go read this article: TheServerSide.com - Redirect After Get. It goes into more detail than any previous discussion I've seen of this problem and lists lots of use cases that can cause trouble and shows how this solution avoids them.
Java IDE comparison: a re-posting of the session of the same name from JavaOne 2004. It's quite interesting to learn more about the comparative (and subjective!) feature sets of various IDEs. For CFers, seeing Eclipse (the basis of He3 and the host for CFEclipse) compared to other Java IDEs may be instructive (especially since it does comment on Eclipse's somewhat daunting feature set / UI).
August 28, 2004
ALA | 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000: This list is a few years old now but it really is interesting (and scary!) to see some of the things that regularly get banned from public libraries. Classic works like "The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn" (Twain), "Of Mice And Men" (Steinbeck) and "The Catcher In The Rye" (Salinger) and all in the top twenty. Children's books also come under the hammer with alarming regularity: the "Harry Potter" series (Rowling) and "The Witches" (Dahl) are both in the top thirty.
To me, this is censorship - having what we can and cannot read dictated to us. Tell the censors you won't stand for this - go to your local library and borrow one of these books and if they don't have it, demand that they order it!
To me, this is censorship - having what we can and cannot read dictated to us. Tell the censors you won't stand for this - go to your local library and borrow one of these books and if they don't have it, demand that they order it!
August 27, 2004
FUSEBOX CONFERENCE: Just two more weeks left at the $199 rate (it goes up to $249 after the 10th!) so hurry up and register. Lots of interesting topics including the release of Fusebox 4.1 and a lot of real world Fusebox experience being shared.
As previously indicated, I'm speaking first thing on Sunday morning about what Blackstone can bring to Fusebox applications and I expect I'll be part of the Mach II Birds Of a Feather session, as well as attending many of the other sessions.
See you there?
As previously indicated, I'm speaking first thing on Sunday morning about what Blackstone can bring to Fusebox applications and I expect I'll be part of the Mach II Birds Of a Feather session, as well as attending many of the other sessions.
See you there?
August 26, 2004
A couple of people have reported an error in their CF Admin after applying the latest updater. This occurs if you have your CFIDE directory in two places (e.g., you copied it to your web server web root). Damon Cooper posted this message on cf-talk highlighted the issue and pointing folks at the Tech Note where this is discussed. So it's really a case of RTFM since it is explicitly called out in the release notes. I know, I know, who reads instructions these days... not me either!
Robin Debreuil's Blog has a nice diversion on it. A graphical representation of.... what? I guessed correctly which means I'm probably more of a geek than I would like to admit!
Fusebox Music Video - Steve Nelson's Personal Blog: sounds like another compelling reason to attend the Fusebox conference in September! Steve's always producing some off-the-wall ideas so this one should be a blast!
The Fusebox Conference Schedule shows that I am speaking on Sunday morning (at 8:30am - oh my!) about Blackstone and what it means for Fusebox and Mach II developers. I'm still planning out the talk so I can't share any details of what I'll actually cover but it's pretty likely that I will at least demo the Fusebox 4 / event gateway integration I've knocked up...
August 25, 2004
mesh on mx announces a preview release of "TattleTale" which is an easy way to keep track of Macromedia news. The Mac OS X version puts an icon in your menu bar that blinks whenever new content appears on a Macromedia RSS feed. I've been using an internal preview for some time and I find it invaluable for staying on top of company news and blogs!
Macromedia - ColdFusion TechNotes : FAQ about the ColdFusion MX 6.1 Updater - new DataDirect drivers, over 65 bug fixes. Make sure you read the installation notes in the Release Notes, which also includes full details of all the fixes.
August 22, 2004
On Thursday I gave my "Mach II at Macromedia" talk to just over a dozen folks at the ISITE offices - ISITE host the Portland ColdFusion User Group. Thanx to Kevin for organizing the meeting (he has posted my presentation to the website) and to Simeon for going out of his way to pick me up and drop me back to my hotel!
The cat show is going well and our little girl did very well in the ICAT cat agility tournament, getting a 30 second clear run on her first competitive run!
I've been working on some ideas for a talk at Fusebox 2004 - more details shortly!
The cat show is going well and our little girl did very well in the ICAT cat agility tournament, getting a 30 second clear run on her first competitive run!
I've been working on some ideas for a talk at Fusebox 2004 - more details shortly!
August 18, 2004
Well, I guess I've been assimilated... I'm now listed as a Sys-Con Author because the ColdFusion Developers' Journal has published my CFUN-04 report! Thanx to Michael Smith for making this happen and to Simon Horwith and Jamie Matusow at CFDJ for editing / publishing.
August 16, 2004
As mentioned, I'll be in Portland Thursday evening to talk about Mach II at the CFUG. Logistics being what they are, it would be great if someone could give me a ride to / from the CFUG meeting. I'll be staying at the Holiday Inn Portland Airport, 8439 NE Columbia Blvd which is about 9 miles from ISITE, the location of the CFUG. I might be able to get my wife to drop me off but since she'll be busy with cat show stuff it will be hard to pick me up afterwards. If that journey is on your route, I'd be glad of the ride...
August 15, 2004
This Thursday I shall be speaking at the Portland, Oregon ColdFusion Users Group about Mach II at Macromedia. My wife & I and our friend Dagny will be driving up Wednesday evening / Thursday morning for a cat show and arriving early enough for me to speak at the CFUG meeting on Thursday!
See you there?
See you there?
I picked up on this from Robin Hilliard's blog, a fellow Mac user, and he's tried Fire but prefers Adium. I figured I'd try Adium for a while. So far I like what it has to offer, especially tabbed message dialogs (you can tab by buddy group too which is especially useful) and the borderless, transparent buddy list. The alert notification schemes are very flexible and very useful too. It seems to be very customizable and there's a great "extras' site too with themes and sounds etc. And it's open source (on SourceForge.net). One downside is that it doesn't support IRC which I use pretty heavily. However, it's chat capabilities are nice enough that I think I'll switch over from Fire and then I'll use Conversation as my IRC client, especially now version 2.0 Beta has added a "single window" mode which makes for a nice clean interface when manages multiple channels or private chats.
August 13, 2004
For those of you who are anally obsessed with "performance", you'll probably enjoy this Servlet Performance Report. JRun gets a pretty favorable review in this analysis. Thanx to Micha Schopman for posting this link on cf-talk (Micha is very concerned with performance!).
Macromedia - Developer Center: Upcoming Changes in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2: reported on other blogs but I've only just found time to read through this article myself. It's really good to see Microsoft getting serious about security but after reading this, I have to wonder how much end users will really benefit. First off, end users are clearly going to find XP SP2 quite disruptive at first as they are bombarded with alert dialogs asking them if all sorts of incomprehensible operations should be allowed. If they say "no", they'll probably find a lot of their programs stop working. So they'll probably get into the habit of just clicking "yes" and allowing pretty much everything to happen. That will make them very vulnerable again since they'll almost certainly click "yes" on an invalid operation and yet another worm / virus will be on the rampage. I bet that virus writers will simply make sure that whatever SP2's security dialogs ask a user contains some very plausible program name. But it is a step in the right direction I suppose and it looks as if Microsoft have taken this opportunity to enhance Internet Explorer with some of the privacy, security and pop-up blocking features that many other browsers have had in place for years and that is definitely a good thing, no matter what you might think of IE (Uncle Bob likely won't switch from IE so let's at least make it a bit safer for him to use).
August 12, 2004
UK scientists roll out Wi-Fi proof wallpaper | The Register: something to keep an eye on if you're worried about people hacking into your wireless network. As the article notes, you'll still need to replace your windows (I didn't even know you could get radio-absorbing glass!), but it's an interesting concept and more confirmation of the mainstream nature of WiFi these days.
I saw this on Ben Forta's blog and figured it was worth repeating for anyone who missed it. Even though it is not a supported combination (either by Macromedia or Oracle), Oracle has released this Technical Note which describes how to install CFMX 6.1 J2EE edition on top of Oracle's Application Server. Apart from just the basic usefulness of this tech note (I've seen several CFers express interest in this platform), the real bonus here for ColdFusion is that the tech note is by Oracle themselves and hosted on their knowledge base, showing their recognition of ColdFusion as a popular and important development platform that works seamlessly with their own technology!
SourceForge.net: Project Filelist: cfcUnit 0.8.3 is now available for download from the Open eXchange for ColdFusion (OpenXCF).
My views on interactive / step debuggers are well-known (and seem to surprise some folks) but I'm clearly not the only CFer who uses extensive
cflog tags: RocketBoots is Robin Hilliard's new consulting company and his blog is always worth reading. In this blog entry he talks about using logging and watching the log files in a separate window, saying how much better it is for him than, say, cfdump. Only yesterday I was debugging a complex problem (involving a JMS event gateway I'm developing with Blackstone) and my application writes to three separate log files. I just popped open three terminal windows, each running tail -f on a different log file. Very easy to see what was going on!
August 9, 2004
Daring Fireball: The Art of the Parlay, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Platform Licensing and Market Share: this is a fascinating piece by John Gruber examining some of the myths behind the idea that Apple could have been Microsoft if only they'd...
InfoWorld: Macromedia to boost reporting, clients in ColdFusion tool: August 09, 2004: By Paul Krill : APPLICATION_DEVELOPMENT : APPLICATIONS : PLATFORMS. More press coverage of what's coming in Blackstone, including more about the event gateway.
Macromedia ColdFusion to Get Feature-Rich Upgrade: eWeek covers the forthcoming release with lots of quotes from well-known folks in the CF community.
August 8, 2004
Montana - Summer 2004: some pictures of my recent trip to Montana. You can see why they call it Big Sky Country!
August 6, 2004
MicroSoft Corporate Blogs & Other Stories - Global PR Blog Week 1.0 - an analysis by John Cass on why corporate blogs provide added value to both the corporation and their customers.
Confessions of an internet junkie - Spike's blog has an interesting tip about overriding the builtin tags. The example he gives is to override
cflocation so you can more easily debug code that does a lot of redirection but I can imagine other uses for this technique. As he says, it's definitely a "caveat programmer" type of thing since you're off in unsupported territory. One thing he doesn't mention which I think is important to note: if you override a tag with your own code, do not try to use that tag in your replacement code - you'll end up calling yourself recursively and get stuck in a loop!
FUSEBOX CONFERENCE: there's some interesting topics at this year's Fusebox conference, including the next version of Fusebox (4.1), using Java with Fusebox and lots of real-world experiences and lessons. The early bird price has now expired but even at the current price of just $199, this conference is excellent value!
Forta.com - Blog has a nice round-up of articles that might help you counter the "We need to move from ColdFusion to {insert some other scripting technology}..." arguments. As someone who uses PHP for non-work stuff, I can certainly attest that PHP takes a lot more effort than CF! I'm currently building a small membership / registration application for a non-profit and making it robust and user-friendly in PHP is much more work than I would ever have imagined - guess I've gotten too used to the power and simplicity of CF!
Macromedia - ColdFusion MX "Blackstone" Release provides the official public information about this exciting new version. This newly-added section of the website will continue to be updated with more and more information about what Blackstone will provide as the release draws nearer so keep it bookmarked and check it regularly (or, if you're using Firefox, get Firefox to automatically check for updates and notify you when the page is updated!).
Still digging myself out from under the mountain of email but I'm back online and so it'll soon be business as usual. I saw some commentary on Macromedia's latest figures. I don't understand analysts and the money market at all - Macromedia meet expectations, profits are up and yet the stock price doesn't pick up... what exactly do those people need to see?
August 3, 2004
Thanx to our ultra-reliable '94 Mustang we're stuck in Boulder, Montana waiting for an engine cooling fan. Not that we're really complaining: this is the most beautiful place I've been in America! It will mean another day without blogging tho' (I'm not even going to consider catching up on my email using a 26k dial-up connection).
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