Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Why the Opposition to Technology?

As always, a great article from the Mises Institute - Why the opposition to technology on the right?. Discusses the history behind some of the conservative opposition to technology, pointing to writings by Christopher Dawson.

From Jeffrey Tucker on the Mises blog:

From his first published work Progress and Religion (1929), to the lectures given during the twilight of his career in America, he was emphatic in the judgment that the chief enemy of culture is not liberalism or the other secular religions of progress, but technology...

A feature of Jesus's life that is particularly compelling is that he never reminisced of the glories of the days gone by. He didn't express regret that he was born in 1A.D. instead of 300B.C.. He never drew attention to an economic advance of his time and said: this tool has corrupted us! No, he took it as a given that he was born in his time for a reason.


Absolutely, well put.

Tony

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Questions for new hires

Posted questions from Jimbo for new hires. Pretty funny.

1) Do you drink?

2) Do you know more than 10 cute single girls aged less than 30?

3) Do you live in Surrey?

4) Should developers have super-user access to the database?

5) What is better Google or Microsoft?

6) Canucks or Oilers?

7) Do you have allegiance to her majesty queen Elizabeth the second?

8) Is crashing the database at 3pm on a Friday:

  1. A sack able offense

  2. Bad form

  3. Funny



9) Should women be allowed to work in IT?

10) Is commenting your code a great method to vent frustration on personal problems, co-worker peeves, manager mistakes and make amusing references to dragons and snakes?

***Please note your answers will be recorded in our database MERELY for statistical purposes, we assure you they will not be read, studied or laughed at and will definately not have any significant impact on your employability.

Friday, October 13, 2006

Macromedia Codfusion



My brother told me about this great new product CodFusion.

*grin* Happy Friday the 13th.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Wife's Celebrity Look Alikes

My Celebrity Look Alikes

Well, what can I say. Nathan Lane?



T

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

CFTHREAD vs Event Gateways



Interesting... I was reading on a BlueDragon blog about CFTHREAD.
It allows you to get your CF script to spawn a new separate thread that runs separate from the thread your script is already on. It can wait for the other thread to finish (using CFJOIN), or can just go about it's merry way (asynchronous).

This blog post talks about how it is an effective way to emulate event handlers

Sample discussion and pseudo code.


It turns out that Adobe/Macr has also been working on it:
Dcooper Blog post about CFTHREAD proof of concept in CF 7

Adobe Engineer's post about CFTHREAD


I'm quite excited about this idea, especially since I've been a little slow to jump onto the Event Gateway bandwagon. This seems like a great way to accomplish event gateways (or similar) and more by simply coding in CF.

Google updates office programs - Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Logged into my Google Spreadsheets today and I was presented with docs.google.com, a rebranded front end for spreadsheets and word documents. It looks great, and I love the integration.

They took the My Active Documents look of Writely, and added my spreadsheets, calling it 'Browse Docs and Spreadsheets'. The look is clean and very blue, like most Google stuff.

I should have guessed they were going to do something like this. When I logged into Writely yesterday they had a big warning about a big upgrade yesterday evening.

Thanks Google!

Just saw the Google Blog post about the integrated docs and spreadsheets.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Replacement for geocoder.us functionality in cfgooglemaps

I was playing with the cfgooglemaps CFC. It's a great CFC, but I was having a few small problems.

Since most of the addresses I needed to map were non-American, it was returning blank locations, and the non-commercial license bothered me (not that I'm doing anything commercial at this point).

So I rewrote it using the new Geocoding features in the Google Maps API.

There were two easy steps:

1. Replace the 'v' parameter in the main JavaScript include line to be version 2 instead of 1.

<cffunction name="getMapJS" access="public" returntype="string"
description="Get javascript include">
<cfset jsstring = "<script
src='http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2&key="
& this.key & "' type='text/javascript'></script>"
& chr(13) & chr(10) />
<cfreturn jsstring />
</cffunction>


2. Replace the geocode_address function as indicated below.

<cffunction name="geocode_address" access="private"
returntype="struct" description="Geocode address using
Google geocoding">
<cfargument name="address" required="true" type="string" />

<cfset newUrl = "http://maps.google.com/maps/geo">
<cfset newUrl = newUrl & "?q=#URLEncodedFormat(address)#">
<cfset newUrl = newUrl & "&key=#this.key#&output=csv">

<cfhttp method="get" url="#newUrl#" charset="UTF-8"></cfhttp>

<cfset geocode = StructNew() />

<cfif ListLen(Trim(cfhttp.fileContent)) EQ 4>
<cfset geocode.lat = ListGetAt(Trim(cfhttp.fileContent),3) />
<cfset geocode.lon = ListGetAt(Trim(cfhttp.fileContent),4) />
<cfelse>
<cfset geocode.lat = 0 />
<cfset geocode.lon = 0 />
</cfif>

<cfreturn geocode />
</cffunction>

Connection failure for CFHTTP and Google Maps Geocoding

Had a really tough time trying to connect to http://maps.google.com/maps/geo using CFHTTP in CFMX 7.

Lucky, I stumbed across this posting on Pete Freitag's Blog - Connection Failure with Yahoo Web Services and ColdFusion.

I want to add that this is exactly what happened for Google Maps as well, specifically the Geocoding web service at http://maps.google.com/maps/geo.

I had to update the charset attribute on the CFHTTP tag to 'utf-8'. Thanks for the blog post Pete!!

T

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Limiting Databases in Enterprise Manager

Wow, this was a cool tip. I hate when I connect to certain databases and I have to wait a few minutes for the list of databases to load up. The funny thing is, I don't even have access to most of them, so why even show them to me?

Did you ever connect to a an SQL server using Enterprise Manager where the server in question had a hundred or so databases installed? If you have you will know there is a significant delay when you expand the tree to find your database.
This KB Article from Microsoft includes a stored procedure that modifies the process of creating that browse list and shows the connecting EM only the databases they are entitled to see.


Article on ColdfusionMuse - Limiting the Databases Seen in MS SQL Enterprise Manager

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article

Friday, September 15, 2006

Six JavaScript features we do not need any longer - Wait till I come!

Nice post on a great JavaScript blog.

Six JavaScript features
we do not need any longer!


From the article:
You can use a screwdriver to screw in screws or to clean your ears, however, the latter needs real skill, determination and a lack of fear of injuring yourself. It is much the same with JavaScript, you can use it for great things, but you can also use it to make a product inaccessible, confusing and not usable.


I like his points, especially number 3 - avoiding the href=javascript: notation. Ick.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Getting Google Analytic stats for 404 pages


Another tech post. This was a great tip on the Google Analytics blog about getting stats for 404 pages:

I'll have to be sure to add this to our development plan at work, especially since I've done some cool work with handling 404 errors recently. Awesome idea.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Congrats to J and R

Congratulations guys on your wonderful wedding. It was fantastic and EVERYONE had a great time. Best wedding that most of us have EVER been to.

J's Wedding
Sep 2, 2006 - 14 Photos


I've posted a few pictures, most of them are non-professional. It's not my right to distribute the pictures on their behalf so we'll wait until they get back to see anymore.

You guys look great!

T

Context menu for IE links to 'Open In Firefox'



Obviously most of our development has to be done with an eye to how it works in Internet Explorer, but I get tired of pasting links into FireFox, my primary browser. This is especially annoying when I need to open links in Gmail or Google Reader from IE to FireFox.

So using information from the kunal.kundaje.net site , I created a new context menu entry for 'Open In Firefox'.

I created an HTML file in c:\windows\ie_open_in_firefox.html with this content:

<script language="JavaScript">
var foo = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
foo.Run("Firefox " + external.menuArguments.event.srcElement);
</script>


And added the entry to the registry as discussed.

  • Create entry:
    HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\Open In Firefox
  • Update Key '(Default)' to the string c:\windows\ie_open_in_firefox.html
  • Add new key 'Context' with the DWORDS value HEX 20


Photo from tdenham at SXC

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Making JS functions work like CF functions

Stumbled across a site that had some JavaScript functions that mimic some of ColdFusion's powerful string functions.

As ColdFusion developers, we are used to having function like Left(), Right(), UCase(), LCase and Trim() at our disposal. They are particularily handy for validation routines. Javascript does have support for some of these functions, but their syntax is not as straight forward.


Fixing Javascript To Match ColdFusion's String Functions

Cool, thanks! Now I have to look for similar things for ColdFusion's list functions. I use those all the time.

T

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Won the golf tournament!

So our team won the golf tournament today! Awesome. Five under par.

We get the coveted Calvary orange jackets. Expect pictures soon.

Some highlights
- A near hole in one by Curt by a matter of inches
- An awesome 25 foot putt by your truly
- Some amazing drives by Curt and Trevor, although they didn't get the longest drive
- Don had some amazing shots too

Vince took home the longest drive.

Lots of fun. Hot day, but a good time.

T

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Chocolate Party

This year I made a kinda funny resolution - I want to know more about chocolate! I love it! We decided that this year, to celebrate my birthday, we would have a chocolate tasting at our place.

So we had a few people over, and about 10 types of good dark chocolate and 10 types of milk chocolate. We had a chocolate and white chocolate fondue, and a giant 4 foot chocolate sculpture of an eagle. Actually, no, there was no eagle. But there was certainly a TON of chocolate.

It was fun, everyone had a good time, and we woke up with chocolate hangovers.

Thanks for coming everyone!

T.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and such

A belated happy holidays to everyone! Seems that everyone had a great 2005 year, and hopefully an even better year to come...

Here's some pics of me and the 'phew chillin' at xmas:



(on a side note, that's one awesome looking beard!)

Oh, and here's a picture where it seems I've had one two three too many drinks:


('tis the season of drunkedness!)

And lest we not forget the good news: Jennette's gettin' married! Ryan proposed to her on christmas morning... congrats and good luck!

Cheers,
K