pf » Archives for January, 2005

As web application developers we spend quite a bit of time building web forms. As such, you might find Luke Wroblewski's Web Application Form Layout guide handy.

Luke is the author of Site-seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability.

Amazon's search engine a9

has just added a pretty slick yellow pages directory.

The jTDS Project has released version 1.0 of the jTDS JDBC driver for SQL Server and Sybase. After 3 1/2 years of development, 21 releases and 100K downloads, jTDS is finally considered stable enough and JDBC feature complete to grant the first official production release.

If you need to create a message digest, you can use Java's MessageDigest class. Here's an example:

<cfset digest = CreateObject("java", "java.security.MessageDigest")>

<cfset digest = digest.getInstance("SHA")>

<cfset result = digest.digest(str.

I wrote a function today that I thought I would share. What it does is replace extended, or unicode characters with HTML/XML character entities. EG: the character à becomes &#224;.

Joshua Tauberer's Sender Verification plugin for thunderbird now supports Yahoo! DomainKeys.

I have been using the plugin for a few days now, and it works pretty well. You might need to tell it some IPs of mail servers on your network, but the interface makes it easy to do this as needed.

Macromedia promoted Stephen Elop (former COO) to Chief Executive Officer on Wednesday (surprised no one posted anything yet). Rob Burgess will continue as Executive Chairman, and Chairman of the Board.

Macromeida Press Release

The web developers at Amazon have been treated to a private conference with 16 top speakers in web technology. Jeff Barr has been blogging a summary of each talk on the Amazon Web Services Blog.

O'Reilly has launched a new book series called the Designer's Notebook Series. I just received

the books today from O'Reilly. They sent me Photo Retouching with Photoshop, and Illustrations with Photoshop, the first two books in the series.

PostgreSQL 8.0 was released today, with loads of new features.

I have (finally) added RSS feeds for finding Amazon deals to my Dealazon project.

There are six standard feeds:

Hot Deals RSS Feed - most popular products that are on sale.

I just found this Color Contrast Checker web site on del.ic.ious. You just give it your foreground (text) color and background color, and it will tell you if there is enough color contrast "when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen" (W3C).

If your using Microsoft's light weight version of SQL Server MSDE for a web application you should understand the limitations, so you can properly configure your database connection.

Apple hosts several calendars that you can subscribe to with Sunbird or iCal at: http://www.apple.com/ical/library/.

To subscribe to a calendar with Sunbird, simply use File - Subscribe to Remote Calendar. Enter a name for the calendar, and the url (for US Holidays use: webcal://ical.

Mozilla Sunbird is a cross platform standalone calendar application from the Mozilla Foundation. Though in the "experimental stage" it is pretty nice, and uses the same format as iCal on your Mac, so you can share and publish you calendar cross platform.