Revolution Web Design Blog - ColdFusion

From the Navtrak Blog - Ven·dor ac·count·abil·i·ty

Tue, 25 May 2010 08:26:00 -0600

Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility.
Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? But how does the concept of accountability transfer into the corporate world? Specifically, in high-tech companies like ours that offer GPS tracking services, -where promising "immediate" ROI's and "free trials" is the norm?
We've been around since 1990 (and our sister B2B communication companies for 30+ years), which makes us, , "industry veterans," and as such we've seen countless vehicle tracking companies come and go. The ones that make it, like us, do business the right way by treating each customer as a partner, and realizing that if the customer doesn't succeed, we don't succeed.
Read more: http://navtrak.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/gps-tracking-video/

Help a fellow CF Programmer

Wed, 05 May 2010 06:39:00 -0600

this is TOTALLY snagged from Ray Camden's post on this topic... Pardon the brief, probably overly dramatic title, but I wanted to get your attention. ColdFusion Community member Aaron West is one of many people suffering with due to the Nashville flooding. A Paypal donation site has been set up to help him out: http://friendsforaaron.blogspot.com/ This is 100% legit. If you've been a user of any of my open source stuff and have been looking to visit my wishlist, I'd urge you to send a donation to help Aaron and his family out. They are close to half way to their goal of 5K. Please give what you can! And yes - the blue arrow is his house:

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.

Navtrak releases it's newest website navtrakgps.com

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:46:00 -0600

So, yesterday my company launched it's 6th or 7th incarnation of our website. Here's a link to the first one :) Starting back in 1999 we had this crazy idea to start tracking vehicles on the internet, and now here we are 10 years later and still kickin! Things have come a long way, the product has matured into a VERY stable platform complete with a tracking API, a newly released AIR Application (interface designed by me), Flex application and a Coldfusion driven reporting system (done by your's truly.) So go check it out, and if you or someone you know could use vehicle tracking for their company, give 'em my name, and our website http://www.navtrakgps.com

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!

Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa

Tue, 12 May 2009 12:14:00 -0600

im posting this so that i can have it for later use on the topic. apparently this will greatly improve the semantic web of data we have at our hands, and make searching and indexing it faster/better/greater success in delivering good content that a user wants! anything that we as web developers can do to make our sites more indexable for our client the better! so, anyway, here is the link to the article itself Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa and as the man behind the internet, himself Tim Berners-Lee stated so eloquently: "The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. " - Tim Berners-Lee credit for this article is due to Timothy O'Brien at O'Reilly and here is a link to Tim's blog (blog.discursive.com)

Avoid the GPS service Black Hole

Tue, 12 May 2009 09:11:00 -0600

Avoid the GPS service "black hole"
Most fleet owners and managers recognize that knowing the precise location of your vehicles and their daily activities can quickly lead to substantial savings on fuel, overtime, insurance premiums, and other critical operational costs. However, this is only one small part of the picture the part anyone can see, even before they decide to use a GPS tracking system. The rest of the picture emerges only after a system has been installed. Once you experience the financial boost that comes from your initial trimming away of wasteful driving patterns, side trips and fuel usage what comes next? All too often, the vendor that installed the system hasn't bothered to train you and your staff on how to make the most of the information you're getting in the long term - to incorporate it into your everyday processes and routine. They get you up and running, but you never see them again. This is the GPS service "black hole" that exists for most vendors of fleet management "solutions." But the truth about GPS services is that the more you use them, the more valuable and indispensable they become for your daily operation. [Check out this customer success story for just one example of what we mean.] And the responsibility for making sure this is the case shouldn't be all yours. Click here to read more about Avoid the GPS service "black hole" by Navtrak GPS Tracking Navtrak Proudly uses ColdFusion 8, Flex, LCDS and many other products from the Adobe Stack of web technologies.

Create a Wordle of your tweets, a Twordle!

Tue, 05 May 2009 20:16:00 -0600

i thought it might be neat to see what words i most use when tweeting in my favorite twitter application, Wordle to see if i could generate a beautiful word cloud. first i went to my twitter page, and made sure that all of my tweets from all the way back to the first day i signed on "April 17th, 2008" and simply copy and pasted them into my favorite text editor, adobe dreamweaver cs3, and from there removed some words i didnt care to see in there "twittelator, twhirl, am, pm, etc" Anyway, here is my Wordle very cool to see... go try it with yours!

to all my non-geek friends (shameless blog promotion)

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:22:00 -0600

you can hide these blog postings if you'd like... i understand... they are not for you... and would bore me if i were you... facebook has a great feature whereby you can link your blog to your facebook page and draw interested web searchers that way. conversely, to all of my geek friends, you might want to try adding your blog's rss feed to facebook's "notes" system and see if help's generate traffic! i know that i have enjoyed a 280% increase on my Google Adsense payouts this month, and i'm looking to get that return to increase even more. why not. we have good knowledge, that new people in the industry want - more and more each day! good luck, im sure you will be able to figure it out. but if you cannot... here is some information that i found here at SiteProNews "5 ways to Import and Promote your blog on Facebook"

Import Notes
Notes is an application that allows you to create notes, which are almost like blog posts, for your friends to see. Every time you post a new note it shows in the public timeline for all to see but, many do not know that you can import a blog into your Facebook notes. From the Notes application you will see an option in the right hand column under "Notes Settings" to import a blog. Setting it up is pretty easy, you'll just need to enter either your blog or RSS feed URL. After going over the preview of an imported blog post and confirming the import you'll be all set. Facebook will then check your blog every couple hours for new posts. As I mentioned above, this is also great to set up with your Facebook page.

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.

Coldfusion 8 Curriculum released by Adobe

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:01:00 -0600

so that i have this link, and in case anyone else doesnt get the news in the coldfusion blogosphere, here it is: http://www.adobe.com/education/instruction/teach/cfcurriculum.html There are 10 units spanning everything from Building a search interface to Securing an application.