pf » Archives for April, 2005

I just received my copy of High Performance MySQL by Jeremy D. Zawodny (from Yahoo) and Derek J. Balling.

Via Loose Wire - Someone has registered the domain googkle.com, the site attempts to install spyware, viruses, etc.

The O'Reilly Radar has an entry Designing from the outside in - the design philosophy of 37 Signals - the design firm that created the BaseCamp Project Management suite.

Here's something a co-worker showed me today that is pretty handy. In Firefox, goto Tools - Options - Advanced - Accessibility, and check Begin Finding when you begin typing.

I just tried out an eclipse plugin for spell checking. It works with the CFEclipse plugin, Java, JavaScript, JavaProperties, XML, HTML, JSP, and PHP.

While the dictionary could use some work, the plugin is pretty good.

Just download it and unzip to your eclipse directory.

As I mentioned the other day I ordered Mac OSX 10.4 for $95 off of Amazon. Since Tiger is not out yet, and I selected free shipping, and group my packages into as few shipments as possible, Amazon was holding the other items that I ordered and waiting to ship them until Tiger arrived.

I just got some spam emails within the last few days that contained ASCII Art messages. This is clever, and they did make it past spam assasin. The last one I got received a spam assasin score of 3.0, a 5.0 is required to classify a message as spam on our server.

I just upgraded to BlueDragon 6.2 on our secondary web server, it was previously running BlueDragon 6.1. The process was pretty smooth, I was worried about having the server down for an hour while I upgraded, but it turned out that I only had a few minutes of down time.

I was wondering why there aren't any hosting providers that offer Macromedia Flex hosting (or should I say Adobe Flex hosting).

I think I finally put my finger on why hard-core Macromedians are generally un-easy about the pending Macromedia acquisition. Its that everyone hates Adobe.

I refrained from posting about the merger yesterday, though I had some thoughts written up - I never got around to posting them. Lots of people have commented on the topic since, Jason Kottke has a good summary of some of the recent talk about the merger.

I just ordered my upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger off of Amazon because they have a $35 mail in rebate if you order by May 1st.

I also grabbed a copy of iWork 05 for $74, and iLife 05 for $69.99 (saving another $16). You can get some good deals at Amazon on Apple software.

Textamerica has released their new developer api for mobloggers. They are also giving a $500 prize to the first 20 applications (with source code) which we deem to be the most useful to the Textamerica Community as a whole.

The first example app is a Textamerica4j by David Czarneck.

The Web Standards Project has a new web standards test for browsers called the Acid2 test. No web browsers can currently pass the test. Here's what Firefox (1.0.

I was just looking at the Linux system requirements for ColdFusion MX 7. For supported linux operating systems, it lists:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS & ES 2.1 or 3.0

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.x

TurboLinux 8 Server (Japanese only)

In 6.

One thing I just realized today - that is a bummer, is that the new types supported by cfparam, and IsValid (eg integer, email, zipcode) in ColdFusion 7 are not supported by the returntype attribute in CFFUNCTION, and not supported in the type attribute of CFARGUMENT. Whats up with that?

That's what WDDX stands for. It was created in 1998 by the folks at Allaire (headed by Simeon Simeonov) 7 years later the web is just starting to embrace the concept. Granted, not many folks are using WDDX, rather they are using SOAP, or REST web services.

A study conducted MailFrontier shows that 92% of the 12,000 people surveyed got at least one question wrong in the 10 question email phishing survey. The study was conducted in the UK.

ReturnPath has announced that they are aquiring BondedSender from IronPort Systems.

BondedSender is a dns whitelist that companies must pay a bond ($$), and go through a TRUSTe privacy certification in order to get listed on.

I didn't know that you couldn't buy SSL certs for international domain names (naive americans). I have only ever bought them for .com names.

Greg Yardley has created a firefox plugin called Objection in response to my, and other blog posts about the privacy concerns of Local Shared Objects, or Flash Cookies.

The plugin adds a clear button for Local Shared Objects to the privacy options in Firefox.

Search Plugin's in firefox are a pretty cool feature, especially since they are so easy to make. However if you want to remove an installed search plugin I can't find any way to do this inside firefox. It should be in the extensions manager, or something like it.

As you may have noticed I recently added tags to my blog. The main reason I implemented tags was so that I could find related posts based on mutual tags. So if two posts have similar tags, they will show up in as related.

About a month ago I linked to Geert Bevin's post about his frustrations with Laszlo (an xml to swf generator). Geert, has posted an update since moving to the latest version of Laszlo.

If you want to save yourself some typing, note that cf_sql_varchar is the default value for the cfsqltype attribute in the cfqueryparam tag.

So you can omit the cfsqltype attribute, if your type is cf_sql_varchar at the expense of some readability.

Mozilla browsers support a feature called link prefetching, which allows a web page to tell the browser to prefetch a url if it is idle. Google has been using this technique in their search results, telling Mozilla to start loading the first result. I also noticed that MXNA 2.

Suppose you have a page that is only run by background processes, or a page that can take a lot of resources, but you don't want it to. Since ColdFusion MX is written in Java, you can access the thread object that your CFML request is running as.

The ColdFusion Developers Journal has an article called: CF Six Pack by Greg Cerveny which lists 6 tags new developers should be using.

I pretty much agree with all the tags on the list, except for cfsetting, I think if your a newbie, just enable whitespace suppression in the CF admin.

BlueDragon's CFIMAP tag is awesome! I use IMAP for my email, and because of that I tend to store a lot of mail, especially old mailing list messages. I was telling our linux dude, Steve, that I wanted a way to remove messages in certain folders that are older than, say 30 days.

I have read things about QuickSilver for a while, but never got around to trying it. Well I finally installed it, and had my ah-ha moment with it.

ClickZ has a good article on how HTML Validity affects e-mail deliverability.

The article points out that AOL is checking for valid HTML in email messages, and will reject mail with a 554 HVU:FO error response.

AOL HVU:FO Error:

This is what happens when media companies take bloggers too seriously. Or perhaps we shouldn't be taking the media too seriously?

Matt Raible posted an april fools joke saying he was going to work for Microsoft, much like Rob Rohan's april fools post.

If you tried using the Yahoo Web Services with CFHTTP and your cfhttp.filecontent variable had the value: Connection Failure, or if you had throwonerror="true" and you got the error: Connection Failure: Status code unavailable it is due to an encoding issue.