Friday, November 28, 2003
Since subscribing to CFAUSSIE I have been skimming through the daily digests and today I learned something about MySQL I didn't even realise I could do. I am building a little Flash Remoting app to read in recent news and developments but I don't want the whole table loading in, so I thought I would use the Dreamweaver code to set the minimum and maximum rows as I have done with my .cfm pages, however this didn't work and that is when I remembered something I had read on CFAUSSIE! I never knew you could use 'LIMIT 1,10' in your SQL statement to read in 10 records starting at position 1! Perfect, cheers Ryan Sabir for pointing that out.Jon 11:14 AM Permalink
I have encountered a few problems and I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing wrong. When I set the datasource as "myDatasource" everything is fine, however I tried to set it to "#request.DSN#" as I do with my cfm pages in the same folder and it throws an error saying the query could not be executed?
Also I was wondering if I still use cfqueryparam for my WHERE statements in my queries?
Jon 9:04 AM Permalink
Thursday, November 27, 2003
Today I decided to broaden my skills once more now that I understand a bit of ColdFusion and so I took on Flash Remoting in a head to head battle! First of all there was a reason for this as I am currently building a site for my boss in Flash and he wants to be able to update it easily, now I was thinking about doing it in XML as I have done previously for a client but I found it a little slow and unpredictable - probably due to my coding (although I did use a healthy chunk from Branden and Sam's book.)Anyway I have temporarily used one of my client's databases hosted on Austiger as they have CFMX and Flash Remoting installed. I created a new table to test things out and after a few hours of scratching my head I finally worked a few things out, it seems pretty easy to create CFC's especially when you want to get all the latest news from a table, I just "select *', piece of cake! I have the recordset then output as html text into a scrolling textfield eh voila! The beauty of this is that within 10 minutes I had built a basic CMS in Coldfusion to enter new news entries into the database so my boss can do it himself!
Now I just have to convince my boss to switch hosts so I can implement this on the new live site (once it is finished that is...)
Jon 6:09 PM Permalink
Monday, November 24, 2003
I have been feeling a bit hypocritical lately after looking at my non-semantic approach to my blog's list of links and my web standards crusade at work. I was warned when I first built freaksauce using CSS to create the left hand links list as, yep a list! But in my rush and ignorance I put each link as an individual div, bulking up my code and making no real sense. I have now corrected this with the slight upgrade in appearance I thought it was about time.Inspiration for the code change came from A List Apart.
Jon 10:38 AM Permalink
Congratulations to the boys on the fantastic World Cup final win on saturday night. Sydney was rockin' as we painted the town red and white!
Jon 9:42 AM Permalink
Thursday, November 20, 2003
I'm not sure if I have mentioned this before but I have found Pablo Varando's Easy CFM site a very good resource for us Coldfusion newbies. I have even asked Pablo himself a question which came with a quick response and answer to my CF troubles, what a nice bloke!Jon 3:24 PM Permalink
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Last night I attended my first CFUG meeting in Sydney and not only did I get to see some Central development but also Breeze Live in action for the first time. Admitedly there were bandwith problems which were later resolved by reducing the screen resolution but this can hardly be blamed on Breeze! I was probably more impressed with Breeze Live than Central to be honest as I am still trying to decide how useful Central will be and after a discussion on Flex last night I am left wondering if I will ever use, or develop, for either?Andrew Muller's presentation on Central gave me an insight into the development process for both MX and MX 2004 and how Flash Remoting can be used to build Central Applications, another grey area for me and something I am hoping to learn more about from these meetings.
I finally got to meet the Goog Meister, Geoff Bowers who let me in on some incredible stats about 'goog' and made sure that Andrew's Breeze presentation was at least audible for those of you in NSW trying to get a sneak peek of Andrew's current Central application he has been developing.
Thanks to the guys for asking me along and see you next time!
Jon 9:18 AM Permalink
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Tonight I am off to my first CFUG meeting in Sydney and what a meeting to pick as my first, not only will there be a presentation on Central Apps but with yesterday's announcement of Flex we are also due for a brief insight into the new addition to the Macromedia arsenal!I have been in Sydney for a year now so I figured it was about time to get myself along and meet some fellow dev-type peeps! Thanks to Geoff Bowers for the invite, else I wouldn't have realised CFUG was happening.
Jon 2:59 PM Permalink
Monday, November 17, 2003
I have ever so slightly re-designed freaksauce to fit in with my new photoAlbum application, and eventually my new CV site which is taking forever. The photo album can be viewed at freaksauce.com/photoalbum this is just a beta design so the folders will probably change.Jon 2:49 PM Permalink
Better than it was before, better, stronger, faster!
Well it might not be faster...and it won't have quite as much functionality as my old Yahoo Photo Album but my own Freaksauce Photo Album is currently under construction using my newly aquired ColdFusion skills. I forgot how many photos I had though...it might take some time!
Jon 12:26 PM Permalink
Friday, November 14, 2003
I seem to have broken the comments for my last post on hiding the DSN in Coldfusion. Just in case anyone had tried to leave an explanation of how to put code examples in blogger posts it should work below this post!Jon 1:55 PM Permalink
I remember a while ago I saw an article explaining the importance of hiding the DataSource names in your ColdFusion queries. So I searched the web and it took me ages to find this info so I thought I would share it for any CF newbies out there.
First of all in your Application.cfm file add the following code: (blogger would not allow me to post the surrounding tags so I have replaced them with [ ] anyone know how to get around this?)
[CFSET request.DSN = "yourDSN"]
Then simply change your queries in your CFM pages to read:
[cfquery name="Recordset1" datasource="#request.DSN#"
SELECT * FROM products WHERE prodCatIDFK =
cfqueryparam value="#URL.prodCatID#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_char"
/cfquery]
Also notice the use of
Jon 9:35 AM Permalink
Thursday, November 13, 2003
I have had a few problems with all my online photo albums recently as I cheekily had them hosted across 3 Yahoo accounts. They have now introduced a '30-day-log-in-or-your-account-is-emptied-and-disabled' policy, at least on your emails and your photos lose all the nice folder set up. So this pissed me off initially but then I thought hang on, I have just moved freaksauce to a new 250Mb domain with ColdFusion MX, ASP, PHP, MySQL (2 databases), Perl and Python at my disposal and all for $7/month from f2o.org which I think is a pretty amazing deal, and although I haven't got a clue about ASP, PHP, Perl and Python I do know a little about CFMX! So I am now building my own photo album in ColdFusion (with a little help from Dreamweaver MX, what would I do without it!)I had completely forgotten how much I like CFML, it rocks!
Jon 3:51 PM Permalink
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
For 2 days our business email and internet has either been incredibly slow or non-existant, now we are at the point where I can see certain sites, like blogger for instance, but not Macromedia? I have received no emails since monday. You can imagine how damaging this can be to a small design agency where we are pretty dependant on email to show clients proofs, and for me I can't ftp most of my sites, which wouldn't normally matter except one of those not working is the site I am currently developing!! grrr....Sort it out Telstra, you are worse than BT!!
Jon 9:31 AM Permalink
Monday, November 10, 2003
After my recent post about the impressive platform engine over at menace.ch I received a comment from Klas Kroon over at OutsideOfSociety about another Flash (Sonic) Platform demonstration by Strille.net this is truly outstanding work and runs at 40fps on my G5 in Safari!Jon 10:53 AM Permalink
OK I thought I would share my weekend misfortune with you all, below is a picture of the result of my surfing weekend in Gerringong, NSW. The board was one I borrowed of a friend...yikes! I decided on Sunday I should buy my own board and I am now the proud owner of a new 7"2 mini mal.
Jon 10:36 AM Permalink
Thursday, November 06, 2003
I have probably mentioned this before but seeing as I just got a new version I think it is worth a mention again. Zeh has produced a very comprehensive Tween prototype using Robert Penner's easing equations. He has included a few extra methods, getTweens(), isTweening() and stopTween(). The prototype is very simple to use and also has the facility to use a callback function which comes in very handy!Nice work Zeh!
Jon 2:27 PM Permalink
[ via Yahoo ]
Using a technique called capacitive coupling, Sun engineers have been able to transfer data between components at 21.6Gbit/sec. -- about half the speed of the 800-MHz front-side bus on Intel Corp.'s latest Pentium 4 microprocessor, "without even trying," Gustafson said. The rate at which data can be transferred between components like the computer's memory and processor has increasingly become a bottleneck for the computer industry, since the silicon and wires connecting computer components have simply not been able to transfer data as quickly as new components can process it.
"It's a choke point," said Gustafson. "For the longest time there was no hope in the industry of getting past that choke point."
But proximity communication could represent a work-around to this problem. Gustafson predicted that within a few years, the Sun Labs team could achieve much faster transfer rates using this technique. "We could do up to a trillion bits per second, in and out of a chip, which starts to match the speed of the computer," he said.
Jon 9:03 AM Permalink
[ via Yahoo ]
Aimed at companies that don't want to incur the expense of buying, managing and maintaining their own servers, IBM's Virtual Server Services lets companies buy server computing power from the vendor. They then are billed for what they use in the same way water and electricity utility customers are. IBM refers to this model as on-demand computing.
Jon 9:02 AM Permalink
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
This sounds like one of the most annoying uses of mobile technology so far, send anonymous messages to other bluetooth phones in range. Read the full story at the BBC siteJon 12:44 PM Permalink
I followed a link on Moik78.com to a Matrix game called Bullettime Fighting created in Flash (it is at the bottom of the page, scroll down) which is graphically simple but cool slow mo button and running up the walls! Anyway I checked out the author's website, menace.ch and came across a Flash version of Sonic he has created, check it out.
Jon 9:53 AM Permalink
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Today was the biggest event in Australia's racing calendar, the Melbourne Cup - it's like the Grand National without the inevitable death for some poor old nags.Anyway we had an hour down the pub (even though most people get the whole afternoon off!) and I only went and picked the winning nag!!! I put put $10 on the nose and got $90 back, treeeeemendous. I did put another $30 worth of bets on so the winnings weren't that big but nevertheless not bad for my first bet on the Melbourne Cup. I can't remember what I was doing last year...probably sunbathing.
Jon 4:09 PM Permalink