Revolution Web Design Blog - Code

Programming is like a dream

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:28:00 -0600

I don't know how many times I've tried to explain this phenomena to people in my company, or others who work with/for programmers, but the truths espoused here are so very self-evident to us programmers, but maybe not so much with everyone else. Anyhow, great article and here is a link to it: "Programming is like a dream" Here's my favorite excerpt:


My brother contends that it is this same phenomena that makes programmers so bad at estimates. The problem is, as he says, that the programmer already knows everything that needs to be written. When you have it all in your mind, it seems like it should be easy to write it all down. But it's not. The physical act of writing the code takes a long time. But more importantly, your mind never thinks about all the "meaningless" details. It knows how to code them so well it doesn't even need consider their existence anymore. Unfortunately, the computer still needs them. It can't infer. All those loose ends, niggling details and corner cases end up eating a great deal of time... sometimes more than the rest of the program.

Smells like Football (NFL is finally almost here!!)

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 19:36:00 -0600

how cool... it's my favorite tv to program and code and design website's to... NFL Football... and tonight's pre-season "Hall of Fame Game" and that mean's it's almost time for Nerdfootball.com And that means also, that it's almost time for the Oakland Raiders (my team) to play the San Diego Supercharger's at the Coliseum in Oakland on the very first Monday Night Football game of the year. nerdfootball.com is a really fun football pool that i built many moons ago, and in our now 8th year of running we have one of the largest pools yet! it's a pick and confidence type pool, where you assign a "Confidence Factor" to each game, and for each game you get right, you get those points. points range from 1-16 (if there are 16 games that week) and you better pick wisely, because every point matters! Oh and of course there is a "Smack Down" area where you can let your opponents know just how you feel! there is also a suicide pool on the site, where you can run each type of Nerdfootball pool on your own, and it's all self manageable! if you'd like to setup a pool for this season, we are open for business and would love to host your pool. each pool can be purchased with a credit card, through paypal, and we are real honest nerds, who just love football and website geek stuff :) the cost is very reasonable, and negotiable. in addition to the football pool website, we also have Nerdbasketball.com that enables you to run and be a part of the coolest NCAA MARCH MADNESS BASKETBALL POOL! It's built using Adobe Flex and is possibly, the coolest RIA Basketball pool on the planet! We are "The House of the Nerd" and we welcome you to a time tested tradition of football pool and basketball pool fun! Below is an image and if you click on it, you will see the larger version of it, which gives you an idea of the interface for picking games.

a change i'd like to see in the flashplatform

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:50:00 -0600

id love to see coldfusion and flex/flashplatform converge into a tool that us coldfusion diehards can more easily migrate to. there doesnt seem to be any reason we couldnt use cf-like tags inside mxml to replace what happens in actionscript... actionscript is hard to migrate to after all these years in coldfusion tag-based-land. make it happen :) please, thanks.

Emitter failure from a WCF Webservice

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:51:00 -0600

so i was attempting to hit a WCF webservice today from Coldfusion 8 written by a colleague here @ Navtrak in WCF and kept getting the following error:

Emitter failure. There is an undefined portType (thisService) in the
WSDL document http://ourdomain.com/thisAPI/ThisService.svc?wsdl=wsdl0.
Hint: make sure  is fully qualified.

so, we dug a bit deeper and figured out that his SVC file did not have the following declaration at the top: [ServiceBehavior(Namespace = "http://ourdomain.com/")] this fixed it right up, and we are rockin and rollin' now!

Adobe Browser Lab - limited preview open

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:09:00 -0600

From Adobe's website:

BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand. BrowserLab is a powerful solution for cross-browser compatibility testing, featuring multiple viewing and comparison tools, as well as customizable preferences. Since BrowserLab is an online service, it can be accessed from virtually any computer connected to the web. Also, Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 software users have access to additional functionality such as testing local and active content.

Great little testing tool, that took a lot of work I'm sure! View the Browser Lab Website (FYI: i was able to login with my Adobe credentials that I use for forums, Alpha stuff, etc) Some gripes... there is no choice for Chrome, which I realize is new-ish, but come on guys :) Also, no choice for Mobile Browsers? I guess these things will be coming soon enough!

htm/html file parsing by ColdFusion 8

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:30:00 -0600

Ok, I know this isn't widely accepted as "ok" and not many people will ever do this, but having the ability to do this, is nice if you need it. And I needed it for a new project that is wrought with a boatload of .html files that I need to utilize and I do not have time to re-create things right now. Anyway, thanks to a couple sites (and oddly enough the final bit of information came from an Experts Exchange post) I have put all the pieces together to make this work with Coldfusion 8. Here is a link to the Adobe Technote on this process. For the webserver side of it: Windows 2003 (IIS 6.x)
In IIS manager, right-click the website and select properties. Select the Home Directory tab. Click Configuration. Select the .cfm extension in the list and click Edit. Copy the path in the Executable box to the clipboard. Click Cancel. Click Add. Paste the path in the Executable box. Type .html in the Extension box. Deselect the Check That File Exists option. Click OK. Restart IIS. Apache 2.2.x
Go to the configuration directory for Apache. Edit the httpd.conf file. Locate the "AddHandler jrun-handler" entry. Add the .html extension at the end of that line. For example: "AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws .cfm .cfml .cfc .cfr .cfswf .html" Save the file. Restart Apache. Sun One Web Server 6.1 (iPlanet)
Go to the configuration directory for Sun One Web Server. Edit the obj.conf file. Locate the following line and copy it to the clipboard: ObjectType fn=type-by-exp exp=*.cfm type="jrun-internal/ext" Create a duplicate of the code block by pasting it below the original. In the duplicate code, modify the exp attribute as follows : ObjectType fn=type-by-exp exp=*.html type="jrun-internal/ext" Save the file and Restart the server. Then for the Coldfusion side of it... edit this file: C:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\WEB-INF\web.xml Modify and insert at the end of the other mappings (making sure to change the id="" sequential):


       CfmServlet
       *.htm
   
   
       CfmServlet
       *.html
   
   
       CfmServlet
       *.htm/*
   
   
       CfmServlet
       *.html/*

(*note - one visitor has noted that removing the id="" altogether worked for him, and that having numbers in there in fact, did not work) Step 2: Open a command window (Start --> Run --> type "cmd")navigate to: C:\Coldfusion8\runtime\bin enter this line exactly: .\wsconfig -server coldfusion -ws IIS -site 0 -coldfusion -map ".htm,.html" -v Restart the webserver. (using iis reset from a command line prompt) Restart Coldfusion. (from the services panel in administrative tools)

Quick Reminder: OnRequest method and Webservices

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:40:00 -0600

Just a quick reminder to anyone who may run into this... When using Coldfusion and the Application.cfc - if you have an "onRequest" method in your Application.cfc file, you will NOT be able to expose CFC's as Webservices. I ran into this today while trying out something new, and for the life of me could not remember this key little fact! Big shout out to the Coldfusion JediMaster - Ray Camden for the tip. Click here to visit his blog, it's the best way I can re-pay him for the memory jogging! I don't really see it as that big of a deal, since the OnRequestStart() method exists, and I've always just kinda used that anyway... Can someone please explain the difference? and then also explain why the OnRequest method doesn't work in this setup? That kinda doesn't make sense to me at all.

An Absolute Beginners Guide to iPhone development

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:18:00 -0600

i found this link today while combing through some tweets in my favorite little twitter application twhirl. the guys @ Switch on the Code have put together a VERY simple and easy to understand guide to making your first little "hello world" application for the iPhone. all you need is the following:

a mac computer and the iPhone SDK
Xcode
Interface Builder
iPhone Simulator that you can use for free.

if you want to actually put your new App on an actual iPhone or into the AppStore, you have to pay the $99 fee. i really want to build an iPhone application, and i plan to, trust me! But until then, im just going to collect more links, store them here, and hopefully build a nice little pool of guides that will help me! now, if someone would just buy a new MacBook Pro 15" with 4gb of ram, i'd be able to get started!

5 CSS3 Techniques For Major Browsers - using jQuery???

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:09:00 -0600

yah, great post, from a site that i found while reading some tweets this morning. thanks ray camden for the point in the direction, this is a cool little explanation of 5 different things you can do with jQuery that used to be cumbersome, if not down right impossible with plain old css. anyhow, check this post out... cool info.

Dynamic text inside an image with ColdFusion

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:42:00 -0600

So I had a problem I had to tackle, and this is one that I've tackled before using various methods, but this one I wanted to tackle a bit differently. Imagine a text area inside a graphic that would be at the head of a page... kinda like this one (look on the right side, the text inside the white rectangle) View banner Image here And then imagine that you want that to appear on this page, but it has to be in the center of the page, it needs to be dynamic (the text on the right side) and you dont feel like making a <DIV> sit on top of the image, with text, and links... how many different ways can this be done, probably 2 or 3. however this time I wanted to harness the power of ColdFusion 8 to do this, this time. Since I know ColdFusion can write text in an image, and I already had the image, why not make the space blank, generate the text and the links from a database call and write those values to variables, then take those variables and write them to the image, and then display the image? To accomplish this I did the following (First I had created the base Image with no text on the right hand side, just white space. I saved it as a transparent PNG and ColdFusion preserved the transparency!!)

Read the image into memory imageNew()
Create strings for each of the text row's
Create an attribute structure to give size, shape and weight for the font
Set the drawing color for the color of the text
Use the imageDrawText() function to write each of the strings to the image at the most correct spot (note that the x/y coords are for the bottom left portion of the text
Then I simply use the tag to write the image to disk, and the tag to display my newly created dynamic text inside the graphic, exactly where I want.
I used an image map on the page where you can see it live

[More]

Coldfusion server that NEVER goes down... is that possible?

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:08:00 -0600

Well, I think so. and I'll tell ya why.
But first, did you know that there were choices in the Coldfusion 8 Server Monitoring portion of the administrator to setup alerts?

Did you know that there were alerts that you could setup to let you know that your server was going into an "Unresponsive" state... and that while it was going to alert you, it would also start the task of killing hung threads all the while preventing new requests from bogging the server down once it gets back on it's feet?

Did you know that you could also watch the memory that is being used by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and if it gets to be too large you can have it do all of the above, plus spurn some garbage collection to boot?!

But that's not it, it gets better :)

You can also, detect that your server is "running slow" ie, too many requests taking too long, and do the all of the above, OOooh and I forgot you can email yourself too, heck you could even setup an sms gateway and send sms messages out to alert you, your team, even maybe the president on his blackberry :)

Anyway, i'd get into more of this here, but Charlie Arehart did a great job of explaining not only this but the entire "ColdFusion 8 server monitoring" series on Adobe.com's Developer Connection in the ColdFusion Developer Center.

Definitely check it out, I hadn't heard of this until tonight and that was a result of needing just the things this amazing feature offers! And with the aforementioned, I believe it would be possible to have a server that never goes down... right?

Thickbox + Jquery = Great lightbox effect!

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 09:07:00 -0600

so, im doing a new site for a friend and had to implement a new web 2.0 style (woo hoo yeah woo) lightbox effect. well, after toying around with mooFX, scriptaculous and jquery (by itself), i got really really frustrated. the code seemed to be bloated (as ive read now), the visuals were kinda klunky, and it just was more than i needed... thankfully, the dude who wrote this, thinned things out, and it works like a charm... so, here we have THICKBOX - a great tool built on jQuery that needs, jquery's latest build, the thickbox.css file, and the thickbox.js file to include. literally, its as simple as this... for the javascript files

and like this... for the .css file

and then for the ajax part of it, and to actually make it work, use this


Description:

Use a hidden HTTP request (AJAX) to fetch files from the same server and have ThickBox display the contents of the files.
Instructions:

    * Create a link element ()
    * Give the link a class attribute with a value of thickbox (class="thickbox")
    * Provide a path in the href to the file/directory on the server. (href="ajaxLogin.htm")
    * In the href attribute, after the URL path to the file, add the following query on to the end of the URL:

      ?height=300&width=300

    * Change the values of height and width in the query accordingly
    * Optionally you may add modal=true to the query string (e.g. ?height=300&width=300&modal=true) so that closing a ThickBox will require calling the tb_remove() function from within the ThickBox. See the login example, where you must click cancel to close the ThickBox.

and in the tag you want to use to activate the lightbox, simply use this:


Update your profile

where the .html file i have could be any file you want to pull into the div that becomes your lightbox! its that easy!!! im a designer/developer hybrid, not quite a javascript expert, and more of a designer than a developer, except when it comes to ColdFusion, whereby, EVERYONE can be a developer :) hahha, ok, anyway, the implementation is soo darn simple, i can only say, that thanks to jake at rainn for showing me about thickbox, and dan vega who last night told me about jQuery, not only am i implementing thickbox, but im populating the thickbox window with another external html file, using AJAX! hah! so, me, a lowly designer is using all these cool things, and it couldnt have been any easier to implement. head on over to the thickbox implementation page, and check it out... ps. here is my little piece that im doing click on "Update Your Profile" on the left side, just a bit down the page... (the site isnt done yet, its going to be a cool site overall, and the cause is awesome, so, if when im done the site, you feel like donating to RAINN, go here, and do so. thanks!)

Demo of the Google Android Platform

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 05:48:00 -0600

this cool little video gives a brief demo of the Google Android Platform capabilities as well as some cool video shots of some real live applications running on a Android enabled phone.

my favorite take-away from this is the message that steve horowitz gives about a 14 seconds into his part... where he says

"The first device I'd like to show you today is a prototype I've been living with for about the past six months, why? Because we believe that in order to make a great product, you must live with it."
WOW. thats amazingly simple, yet so profound!
So, hopefully we can write some web services in ColdFusion, and hit them with the Android platform, and deliver cool tools to our phones with ColdFusion stuff we build on the backend!!!

cfwindow for cf7

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:11:00 -0600

dan vega, a tireless cf developer has created a great little custom tag that enables cf developers who are still on cf7 to have cfwindow like functionality by extending the extjs library. here is a link to the riaforge page, and here is a link to his demo page.

Sexy? Geeky? I'm truly not sure...

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 10:51:00 -0600

ok, so there is some growing movement whereby geeks are the "NEW JOCKS" and that "Geeks get all the girls"... well, I think this is a true testament to that! enjoy! Moan My Ip and yes, its MOSTLY safe for work...