iJeff.com

CFQuickDocs

Wed, 07 May 2008 09:11:12 -0500

There is a new Firefox search plug-in for CFQuickDocs. If you've ever gotten frustrated with Adobe LiveDocs, you owe it to yourself to check out this site. The search plug-in may be the latest reason to use CFQuickDocs, but is far from the only reason.

PS - I need to blog more.

Javascript stopped working in IE7

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:38:02 -0500

I upgraded to IE7 a while back and have been enjoying the improvements it has over 6. I still use Firefox as my main browser but it has been nice to use a decent browser when sites require IE. Things had been going swimmingly until all JavaScript quit working. Changing the security settings did not make a difference. After scouring the internet, I found the solution. Installing the latest Windows Scripting Update. I don't know why IE broke, I don't know why this fixes it...but hey, JavaScript works again!

CFCUnit and Coldfusion Meetup

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:43:53 -0500

John Mason gave a great presentation on CFCUnit. I've used this on a small project last year and was flying blind. Watching this presentation really gave me a new appreciation for the power of this tool, in particular the integration with CFEclipse and ANT.

This presentation was give to the Coldfusion Meetup group. There are usually one or two online presentations a week and they are almost always informative. I'm looking forward to ANT presentation next week and the MXUnit presentation to the same group in two weeks. Automation is the easiest way to increase your value and productivity.

Hurricane Hunters

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:06:57 -0500

A friend of my sent me this amazing story of a hurricane hunter in trouble during Hugo 1989. As a ground zero Hugo Survivor (Charleston, SC), I find this just a truly unbelievable story. I feel in part that I owe my life and those of my friends and family to the bravery of these Hurricane Hunters. So, thanks to these folks 19 years after the fact.

Why cfqueryparam is mandatory

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:04:46 -0500

You can never predict what a user will do as this xkcd comic illustrates.

New Design

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:44:48 -0500

I've been working on a custom design for the site for a while. I'll say that the MT template system is quite powerful (which is code for complex). I'm still having some issues with the content font, but everything else is looking good. It's amazing how easy things are with CSS these days. The navigation rollovers are nothing but an unordered list with some background images switched out when the mouse is hovering over them.

Bit Flags and Fancy Math

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:07:34 -0500

Over on CF-Talk today, Dennis Powers had a problem with selecting the correct records when dealing with bit flags. I'm a big fan of flags and bitwise math, so I jumped in and helped him out. I had to think about the operations a bit (no pun intended) too long, so I decided to drop myself a note as a refresher.

When dealing with bit flags, here is a handy cheatsheet:

myMask = 1st and 8th flags set (10000001 -> 2^7 + 2^0 -> 129)

myVar & myMask = myMask (All masked flags are set)
myVar & myMask > 0 (At least one masked flag is set)
myVar & myMask = 0 (None of the masked flags are set)
myVar = myMask  (All masked flags set, all other flags not set)

Happy masking!

Domain Name Resellers

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 17:30:00 -0500

I have a client that manages and resells domains to their hosting customers. Currently, they just purchase them from a registrar and then bill their clients and do it all manually! Does anyone know of a registrar with a good reseller API? The only ones I've been able to find are WildWestDomains (part of GoDaddy), eNom and ResellerClub. Anyone that has any experience with any of these, I'd appreciate it if you'd drop me a note with your experience.

Analysis paralysis

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:57:27 -0500

Analysis paralysis is an informal phrase applied when the opportunity cost of decision analysis exceeds the benefits. Analysis paralysis applies to any situation where analysis may be applied to help make a decision and may be a dysfunctional element of organizational behavior. Often phrased as paralysis by analysis, in contrast to extinct by instinct.
Analysis paralysis on Wikipedia

I've got it and I've got it bad. How do you deal with a surplus of choices?

Javascript/AJAX

ExtJS
jQuery
prototype
Spry
YUI

ColdFusion MVC Framework

Coldbox
Fusebox 5.5
Mach-ii
Model-Glue

ColdFusion ORM

Transfer
Reactor

Thankfully, ColdSpring appears to be the standard for managing configuration and dependencies in ColdFusion applications. Finally, a choice that is easy to make. :)

Unfortunately, having been out of the loop on most of these frameworks over the past few years I'm not even certain what each can do for me, let alone why one might be better than the other. I wish there was a good way to get over this hurdle. Sometimes I eye the Ruby community with envy. It's Rails or the highway. While choice is good, sometimes I definitely feel that the lack of a "best in breed" standard holds ColdFusion back.

Ben Forta in C-AIR-Y

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:22:24 -0500

I had the pleasure of seeing Adobe's Director of Product Evangelism, Ben Forta, give a Flex 3/AIR presentation in Cary last night. First, I must mention that Ben has the best job title. Hands down. While the Flex 3 and Flex Builder portion of the presentation was very nice, I was there mainly to learn more about AIR.

AIR in one sentence can be described as a cross platform platform for creating desktop apps using HTML, JS, Flex and Flash. It doesn't sound particularly impressive until you view some of the AIR showcase apps. I was most impressed by the Anthropologie e-commerce catalog. I'm definitely looking forward to see what folks do with this technology. AIR looks to deliver "write once, run anyway" applications and it looks good while doing it.

I just finished installing Movable Type 4.01!

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:53:46 -0500

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!

LOL!

You just have to love the noob post for Movable Type. Unfortunately, Blogger wasn't getting the job done. Mainly because it only output Atom feeds with multiple URL's in the URL property. This was causing problems with the agregator at coldfusionbloggers and so it had to go.

Design Pattern n00b

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 07:36:00 -0500

I'm not really sure when it happened, but the folks in the Coldfusion community have begun speaking a completely different language. Brian Kotek has a post announcing his release of a Transfer Decorator Bean Injector Observer. Yikes! That's a mouthful, and it gets even worse as you read the post. Most of the concepts talk about a few different design patterns. Thanks to Head First Design Patterns, I have started down the track of learning about design patterns. However, there is still a lot in Brian's post to wrap my head around for a design pattern noob, like I.

There is one thing I've definitely learned lately, it hurts to try and expand your knowledge in an unfamiliar area, but it hurts even more if you don't.

See ya later Agregator

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:24:39 -0500

My site has been added to coldfusionbloggers.org, which is a fabulous aggregator of most of Coldfusion centric blogs. This is a must visit site for any serious Coldfusion programmer.

While you are at it, check out Coldfusion Community which is another great site! It's amazing how the CF community has grown in the past year or so. Perhaps I should say, it's amazing how much more of the CF community I have been exposed to over the past year or so.

Happy New Year and IE Fun

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 12:18:00 -0500

One of my 2008 resolutions is to restart my blog and focus it on software development. Mostly Coldfusion, javascript, AJAX and general web development.

To kick off the new year, I'll discuss something I learned about IE today that was making my life miserable. Actually, it's something IE did right and everyone else does wrong.

I had some javascript that would check a radio button or check box and enable (or disable) an "Other (Specify)" box on a survey. Being the smart guy I am, I figure I can use the onChange() function since I only care when the field has changed value. Works great in all the browsers I tested except IE. It turns out that IE has a slightly different implementation of onChange(). To make a long story short, in IE, onChange() doesn't fire until an INPUT element loses focus and has changed it's value. This means that the element firing the event is the old radio button or checkbox, not the new one that was just clicked! This is actually the correct behavior (as far as I can tell) and the other browsers have it wrong. My problem was easily corrected by using onClick() .