Well, after a year of being stuck in the city, Ciara and I finally bought a car today. We ended up going with the Volkswagen New Jetta – TDI Edition.
We pick it up tomorrow after we get all of the insurance set up. It’s a diesel, which means it gets really good gas mileage and we’re planning on running biodiesel in it.
I’m really excited about having a car, and the New Jetta is cool. I’ll be posting some pictures when we get it home.
TweetI hadn’t realized this but Ben Forta pointed out that The Economist Online uses ColdFusion to power its site.
Ben’s post has some cool quotes from people about The Economist. It really is a fantastic magazine. My in-laws gave it to Ciara for her birthday but I’ve since started taking it every week. Maybe we should get two copies.
TweetI had jury duty today for the first time in my life…..and it was really, really boring. I didn’t even get to go into the room and have the lawyers ask me questions. I was in the last group and they got all of the jurors they needed before they got to our group. Of course that didn’t happen until 4:00 anyway, so I just sat in a room from about 8:15 – 4:00 and read The Economist and Fortune. I got a lot of reading done, but it was really, really boring.
On a more exciting note (or not), I found out today that if you google Ryan Stewart Blog, this page comes up first. That may not seem like much, but for a while, when I googled it, I would other people’s blogs talking about Jon Stewart. Just googling Ryan Stewart brings up too many pages. I don’t show up until the third page.
TweetI added a dynamic query to my small CFAjax application that loads up my reading list. Originally, the list of books was stored within the CFAjax function. Now all of the book information is stored in a database and every time the selection changes, it queries the database to retrieve the new information.
I’m not sure if it’s a performance enhancement, but it’s much more maintainable this way.
TweetI’m starting an application at work that first has to be done entirely in ColdFusion and later will be redone or “prettied-up” in Flex. Because I don’t want to rewrite the whole thing in Flex when the time comes, I’m going to make my first foray into the world of Design Patterns. I’ve settled on the Model-View-Controller pattern because it seems to be a quasi-standard for ColdFusion/Flex programming and the way it separates the business logic and the presentation layer is perfect for when I want to port the application over to Flex.
I’ve been looking around the web for some good design pattern resources, and specifically ones that talk about ColdFusion. I found a great article over at the ColdFusion Developer’s Journal that gives an introduction on how to use CF and MVC. There’s also a good article over at builder.com by Brian Kotek that talks about the good and bad parts of MVC.
I have also started to look at the possiblity of using Model-Glue for this app. I’m not sure I’m quite at the point where using a framework would be helpful, but Model-Glue seems promising and might be cool to use down the road.
TweetI ran into a problem yesterday that I posted to CF-Talk and decided I would post here.
I have a table with a couple of columns that contain ColdFusion Variables stored within some text. When I query the database, I need the text to display and the ColdFusion variables to show their values.
When the code was written this way:
All that would be displayed on the screen was:
“This is some text, some more text, a #ColdFusion_Variable#, and even more text.”
By writing the code this way, I got what I needed:
The code outputted as:
All that would be displayed on the screen was:
“This is some text, some more text, a 500, and even more text.”
With #ColdFusion_Variable# being outputted as 500, its real value.
TweetI’ve always liked CSS Zen Garden as a playground for cool things you can do with CSS, but after reading this post over at wait-till-i.com, I can see it’s limitations.
I think a “CSS Factory” that presents a more real world approach to CSS Design would be a good start. I haven’t really been able to make use of CSS at work because we have tons of apps written by different people and no way style anything consistently.
If CSS Factory can create a dialog about the best way to build CSS into big, enterprise scale apps, then I would definitely be interested.
TweetYou have to look at this in Mozilla for it to work, but this design over at CSS Zen Garden is really cool (if a little freaky). It uses transparent PNGs for the effect.
TweetI read this post by Sho Kuwamoto, who has been working on Zorn, that really echos my feelings on the future of the web.
Because I have grown up with the internet and the world, I think it’s given me a skewed prospective on how big the leaps in technology really are. But I think that same prospective helps me see the potential of the web and Flex is a huge step in meeting that potential.
Broadband is getting more ubiquitious and our internet applications are looking more and more like regular desktop applications. With Rich Internet Apps, they’re getting closer and closer to each other. I can’t wait to see what happens 2-3 years from now.
TweetI’ve been wanting to post about Eclipse for a while, and now that Macromedia has joined the foundation, now is a good time.
I started using Eclipse about a month ago after seeing some breeze presentations about it and reading the blogs of the people that use it. It’s really a great tool, and even though I’m not a java programmer, I am really impressed with it. I have my ColdFusion, SQL and XML editors all in one place, with Source Safe working as well. I don’t even open Dreamweaver any more.
There are some things that could use some work, but the CFEclipse team has put together a great application and now that Macromedia has announced “Zorn”, it looks like the Flex/Flash experience will be on par with ColdFusion when it comes to Eclipse.
Tweet