pf » Archives for February, 2005
February 28, 2005
Borland takes Strategic Developer role in Eclipse Project
Borland is taking a bigger stake in the organization it helped found, joining the Eclipse Foundation's board of directors as a strategic developer, officials will announce in a press conference Monday at EclipseCon 2005 in Burlingame, California.
February 28, 2005
Do you use NerdCaps?
CamelCase may be a term that web developers are not as fimiliar with, as traditional Java or C developers may be, but none the less, is useful to know what it means. You may infact use CamelCase already when you code, but not even know it.
February 28, 2005
Jeremy Allaire Launches New Media Company BrightCove
Found this on Marketing Shift: Jeremy Allaire (the co-creator of ColdFusion) to Launch BrightCove, a company whose theme is democratization of media. PaidContent.org writes:
...
February 25, 2005
How long does it take to get a Google PageRank
I have noticed that new web pages don't get a page rank right away, it actually takes quite a while. I checked on a couple sites including my blog, and it looks like it takes about two months to get a page rank assigned to your page.
February 25, 2005
I give up! Installing SQL Server 2005 Express
I have given up hope for installing SQL Server 2005 Express on my computer. When I run the installer I get this message:SQL Server 2005 Beta 3 Setup has detected incompatible beta components from Visual Studio or SQL Server.
February 25, 2005
StarOffice 8 Beta looks like Microsoft Word
I downloaded the Staroffice 8 beta from Sun last week. It looks like they have come a long way in improving the user interface using native controls, I think you could trick a lot of people into thinking it was Microsoft Word finally.
February 25, 2005
Microsoft adds SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition
Microsoft is Expanding their SQL Server 2005 Product Line, with the introduction of SQL Server Workgroup Edition. These new price points are no doubt in response to open source database competitors such as MySQL and PostgreSQL.
February 24, 2005
Forta's ColdFusion MX 7 Books on Sale
Ben Forta's ColdFusion MX 7 books are now available for pre-order from Amazon.
February 24, 2005
Powerbook Sleeve Cases
I am looking for a simple sleeve case for my 12" powerbook. One I found that I like has been out of stock for a while, the Booq Viper XS.
February 24, 2005
Parsing Atom Dates (ISO8601) in ColdFusion
Need to parse the dates in an Atom feed? Atom feeds use ISO 8601 formatted dates, something like this; 1994-11-05T08:15:30-05:00 with a UTC offset, or like this: 1994-11-05T13:15:30Z in GMT.
February 23, 2005
Free SSL Certificates for OpenSource projects
GoDaddy is giving away free SSL Certificates for open source projects. Sign up here.Go Daddy is committed to the open source community. We want your site and data to be secure and were willing to foot the cost to make them just that.
February 23, 2005
Eye Tracking
I just found an interesting blog called the Eyetools Research Blog. Eyetools is a company that has developed eyetracking technology that creates heatmaps showing which areas of a web page subjects focus on.
February 23, 2005
Using Subversion Hooks to send out build emails
The subversion version control system has a wonderfully handy feature called hooks. Hooks are essentially scripts that are triggered by a version control event (such as a commits, or revision property changes).
February 22, 2005
Top 10 Things I like about subversion
Craig Walls posts the top 10 things he likes about subversion version control on his weblog.Atomic Commits
February 22, 2005
Bea JRockit 5 JVM Released
Bea has released JRockit 5.0 JVM. Here is a link to some release notes.JRockit 5.0 is a J2SE 5.0 compatible Java Runtime Environment. The JRockit JVM main design goal is performance, and the 5.0 version shows a 5-10% performance increase over their previous version on linux.
February 22, 2005
Strong Encryption Technote shows undocumented features
Macromedia has just released a technote entitled: Strong Encryption in ColdFusion MX 7. It has lots of information useful to anyone planning to work with these features. In addition I noticed mention of two undocumented arguments in the Encrypt() and Decrypt() functions.
February 22, 2005
If-Modified-Since and CFML Part III
Roger Benningfield pointed out to me that most clients use a value from a Last-Modified header as the value sent in the If-Modified-Since. So you will want to ensure that you are setting that header as well, if your planning on checking for If-Modified-Since.
February 22, 2005
Virtual Desktop Manager for Windows XP
The other day I blogged about a virtual desktop manager for Mac OS X - if your interested in getting one for Windows XP, you can get one from Microsoft's PowerToys download page. To enable it right click on your taskbar, goto the Toolbars menu, and select Desktop Manager.
February 19, 2005
Mac OS X Multiple Virtual Desktops
One very cool feature in Unix / X-Windows graphical environments is that you can have multiple virtual desktops. Each desktop has its own windows, and you can move windows onto different desktops.
February 18, 2005
Java 1.5 for FreeBSD Patchset Released
The first patchset for Java 1.5 on FreeBSD has been released.Greg Lewis has released the first patchset (patchlevel 1) for the JDK" 1.5.0 software. This is initial patchset and suitable for early testers and developers.
February 18, 2005
If-Modified-Since and CFML Part II
Now that you know how handle HTTP requests with the If-Modified-Since header in ColdFusion, lets take a look at how you might write a HTTP client using CFHTTP that sends If-Modified-Since headers:
February 18, 2005
Supporting If-Modified-Since HTTP header in CFML
The If-Modified-Since header in the HTTP protocol allows user agents (typically RSS aggregators, or Spiders) to check and see if the content they are about to download has changed since their last visit.
February 18, 2005
Poll Results: What Version of CF, New Poll What Edition
I am retiring (note you can still vote for retired polls in the poll archive section) my poll What Version of CF do you use in production after 272 votes in two weeks.
February 17, 2005
MySQL Slow Query Log File
MySQL has a feature that allows you to log slow running queries to a file. To enable you just need to add some lines to your my.cnf file, and restart. Add the following:log-slow-queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.
February 17, 2005
Apache mod_rewrite URLs Also Provide Validation
I Realized something when using Apache mod_rewrite for search engine safe url's, they also provide input type validation. I can use mod_rewrite to ensure that only integers are passed in my url in the id.For example, on my site macread I use url's like: http://macread.
February 17, 2005
Changing the Eclipse Splash Screen
There is some talk about changing the startup splash screen for eclipse, and other branding options on the CFEclipse mailing list.I just tried changing the splash screen for eclipse, and its pretty simple.
February 17, 2005
JavaScript Debugging with Safari
If your doing web development or testing on Safari, JavaScript exceptions are quiet, like they are on most modern browsers (remember the days of annoying javascript error popups?).
February 16, 2005
Macromedia and New Atlanta on Expert Group
Macromedia and New Atlanta are both on the expert group of Java Specification Request (JSR) 223 - Scripting for the JavaTM Platform.The JSR 223 specification defines the technologies and APIs Java developers can
use to include scripting engines in their Java applications.
February 16, 2005
Firefox Statusbar Extensions
I have come across some very sweet firefox extensions that run in the status bar (down on the bottom of the window).
February 11, 2005
CFTIMER - Little things in ColdFusion 7
I am digging the new cftimer tag in ColdFusion MX 7.In previous versions when you want to time how long something takes, you would do something like this:
<cfset tick = GetTickCount()>
run your code here...
February 11, 2005
Apple and Mac Blog Aggregator
I just launched a new online aggregator for Apple, Mac, OS X, and iPod news at macread.com. Think Fullasagoog, or MXNA for Apple stuff, instead of Macromedia stuff!It is currently pulling in 44 feeds with updates on the hour.
February 10, 2005
cfdirectory adds recursive support - Little Things in CFMX 7
I know I have written recursive custom tags, and functions (more than once) to solve this problem in the past, but now you can just add a simple recurse="true" to your cfdirectory tags in ColdFusion MX 7.0<cfdirectory action="list" directory="#ExpandPath(".
February 10, 2005
IsValid - CFMX 7 Little Things
ColdFusion MX 7 added a new function called IsValid. The IsValid function performs data validation just like the CFPARAM tag, and supports all the new data types in cfparam (see my previous post) as well.
February 10, 2005
onEclipse - improving productivity of eclipse users
I just came across the site onEclipse a site devoted to improving the productivity of users of the Eclipse platform.Check out the news page which has an rss feed
February 10, 2005
ColdFusion 7 Strong Encryption
ColdFusion MX 7 adds strong encryption support to the Encrypt and Decrypt functions. In addition to the legacy algorithm used in Encrypt, and Decrypt - ColdFusion MX 7 now makes it incredibly easy to use AES, Blowfish, DES, and Triple DES encryption.
February 09, 2005
CFPARAM - New Features in CFMX 7
ColdFusion MX 7 is packed with lots of little new features, that are, well killer! I am starting a series on my blog called Little Things that Kill that will expose some of these killer new features and subtle improvements. And yes, the name is inspired by Bush (the band).
February 08, 2005
ColdFusion MX 7 on Mac OS X
If your installing CFMX 7 on Mac OS X and getting hung up on "Starting Graphing..." then you need to add a property to your JVM Arguments. Add -Djava.awt.headless=true in your JMC Server - Settings - JVM Settings - VM Arguments.
February 08, 2005
Installing multiple versions of CFMX on JRun
I like to setup my development machine with different versions ColdFusion, but all with the same web root. I setup a server for each instance, so I can use the same url on different ports (eg CFMX 6 on port 8600, CFMX 7 on port 8700, etc).
February 07, 2005
ColdFusion 7 Tags and Functions added to cfdocs.org
I have added support for new functions and tags in ColdFusion MX 7.0 to the cfdocs.org site, as well as multiple version support. So now if you want cfdocs.
February 07, 2005
Joel Spolsky to give Keynote at CFUnited / CFUN 05
It has not been posted to the CFUnited web site yet, but Joel Spolsky mentioned on his blog that he will be giving the Keynote at CFUnited (used to be CFUN) this year.Way in the future, like, July or something, I'll be giving a keynote at the Cold Fusion conference in Washington, D.C.
February 07, 2005
Microsoft Solution for Securing Windows 2000 / 2003 Server
Microsoft has updated their security guidelines for Windows 2000, and Windows 2003. Via secguide.
February 06, 2005
Joel on Hardware
Joel Spolsky has started a series called Colo Expansion on his blog: Joel On Software. Joel is upgrading all his server hardware, and is blogging the experience.Here's one tidbit I found to be handy:
I called up Dell and got a quote for this whole mess.
February 04, 2005
New Poll: What version of CF are you running in production?
Steve Bryant wanted to know what version of CF most people are running these days, so the question on my new poll is "What version of CF are you running in production?"You can vote more than once if you run more than one version in production, but please only vote once for each version.
February 04, 2005
Triggers in MySQL 5
Peter Gulutzan shows a sneak peak of Trigger support in MySQL 5 alpha in his article MySQL Triggers Tryout on O'Reilly OnLamp.
February 04, 2005
What IDE do you use?
Rob Rohan referenced my poll (what ide do you use?) in his presentation on CFEclipse yesterday in San Diego. And I have been thinking for a while its time to retire that one, and setup a new one. Let me first summarize the results...Dreamweaver, 39 votes 29.77%
February 03, 2005
Yahoo!'s new Y!Q Service
Yahoo has just launched a service called Y!Q that allows you to embed a search related info button on your web site.The way it works is kind of dumb however.
February 02, 2005
Adding a CSS StyleSheet to your RSS Feed
It's pretty easy to add a CSS stylesheet to your RSS feeds. I created one in about 10 minutes for my RSS feed. You can do a lot more with an XSL stylesheet (turn links into clickable links, etc), but CSS can make your feed look much less scary for the non-technical crowd.
February 02, 2005
How to write Efficient CSS
I came across a good article called How to write efficient CSS today. It is a guide that shows several ways you can reduce the size of your CSS files (CSS shortcuts, etc).
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Pete Freitag is a software engineer, and web developer located in central new york.
Pete's company Foundeo Inc. builds products for web developers and provides consulting services.
In 2003 Pete published the ColdFusion MX Developers Cookbook with SAMs Publishing.
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