Casual Rumblings

After using CFBuilder 1.x (yes I have the update) for sometime now, I'm this close to going back to Dreamweaver CS4 due to CFBuilder's poor poor performance.

After convincing my client to shell out for the IDE, I'm feeling kinda guilty.

I consistently get "(Not Responding)" in the application title bar. My curor goes into an infinite loop of circles and I just wait....and wait...and wait.

It's as if the more files you throw at a CF project, the more it gets bogged down.

I was working swimmingly with CFBuilder in the beginning, with a small project. No problems..everything was copacetic.

Now I had to go out and grab a live site and bring it down to my desktop. Get it working in my local dev environment, then check it into SVN.

First, the FTP client within the app is really slow and buggy. I ended up getting FileZilla and haven't looked back.

Now the project with close to 56gb of code and images to track feels like a tanker ship. I can't go between directories smoothly. The IDE constantly wants to update it's index or something. I have one directory with about 500 image files or more and CFBuilder takes forever to show me the content in it's tree structure. Very Very Very annoying and slow.

I'm going to give CFBuilder a little bit more time before I ask for my money back from Adobe for the sake of my client's bank account.

This is just ridiculous...argh!

Anyone else experiencing anything like this?

Check out this sweet hack of the iPhone running Android!

I wanted a reminder of why how I pay my rent, own a cellphone and can make a living.

320x480 (native Blackberry Storm resolution)

This was found by my co-worker. I had to pass it on. Can be seen at www.newtoyork.com

It's a slow day in a little east Texas town. The sun is beating down, and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

On this particular day a rich tourist from back east is driving through town. He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.

As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.

The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel.

The guy at the Farmer's Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit.

The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.

The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town.

No one produced anything. No one earned anything.

However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government is conducting business today.

I've done ajax before with jQuery with good results on all browsers...until

I used an XML return with IE (all IE's that is).

When returning XML from a CFC (or any other server-side script), IE doesn't treat the XML document as, well, XML.

It actually barfs on it unless you tell it to load up the ActiveX control to parse your XML doc. (psst..Thanks Microsoft).

Just look at this:

See that little blurb in the ajax call for "if ($.browser.msie)"? That's the call you'll need to do to make IE behave like 99% of the other browsers out there.

I've put together a short demo. I know the code is duplicated, but this is for demo purposes. Hope this helps you guys doing XML data returns.

Oh and once again "Thank you Microsoft" for making my web development career such a wild adventure.

XML data return demo

p.s. the data returned is from my blackberry bloggers site. If you're a blackberry fan, check it out (http://www.blackberrybloggers.org). It might look a bit familiar :)

Ok..here's the situation...

I'm creating an HTML email with tables and background colors.

Lo and behold, if you nest tables, Outlook 2007 will strip out the background color. Wait...what? Yeah, exactly.

But, when you open the email in outlook and then view message in browser, voila! the background color emerges!

Thank you MS for using 2 different HTML rendering engines. One of the best cases of, 'the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing'

::: waving finger gesture :::

When will restaurants realize that full flash websites suck for those of us on the go?

Situation: I'm out with friends wondering where we should go for lunch. Someone says, "Let's try XYZ restaurant". I pull out my blackberry. Other non-descript friends pull out their iPhones and we get to XYZ Restaurant's website. Guess what? It's a FULL FLASH site. None of us can render it and we all groan and go to some other directory like Yelp, CitySearch, menupages..etc.

How do we get the word to web designers/programmers who do restaurant websites that they need to do 2 versions of the website: Mobile and everything else.

How are they getting past the captcha? I wake up every few days to about 12-30 spam comments on various posts here.

Is there a way to curtail this?

Does anyone know if there's a way (even with an extension) to get DW CS4 to act like Eclipse when highlighting balanced braces?

I love this eclipse feature. Turns my braces red to show where I'm missing closing braces or have too many closing braces. I just wish there was a way to do this with DW CS4. I find Eclipse to be buggy. I get so many "java.lang" errors that it's driving me batty.

I have CFEclipse, Aptana, and SVN plugins installed in Eclipse Ganymede (3.4?), and I'm getting errors each time I switch tabs. Very annoying. I'm not a happy camper with Eclipse. (where is Bolt!!!?!?)