Casual Rumblings - Rants/Raves

Coldfusion Builder 1.x performance is dreadful

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:39:00 -0700

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?

Have an iPhone? Wish you had an Android? Now you can have both!!

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:00:00 -0700

Check out this sweet hack of the iPhone running Android!

Blackberry Storm/iPhone/iTouch ColdFusion 9 wall paper

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:21:00 -0700

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

320x480 (native Blackberry Storm resolution)

Best web page footer...ever!

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:31:00 -0700

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

Simply Put....

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:14:00 -0700

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.

jquery ajax + xml + IE = hair loss

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:01:00 -0700

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:


$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "ajaxtest.cfc?method=getallblogs",
data: datastring,
success: function(data) {
var xml;
if ( $.browser.msie ) {
xml = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xml.async = false;
xml.loadXML(data);
} else {
xml = data;
}
$(xml).find('blog').each(function(){
var id = $(this).attr('id');
var title = $(this).find('name').text();
var url = $(this).find('url').text();
$('
').html(''+title+'').appendTo('#blogInfo');
});
}
});

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 :)

waving a one fingered gesture at Microsoft..wth?!

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:18:00 -0700

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 :::

Restaurants + flash website + mobile = FAIL!

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:43:00 -0700

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.

WoW Gold spammers...argh!

Thu, 28 May 2009 13:33:00 -0700

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?

Dreamweaver CS4 balance brace highlighting?

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:47:00 -0700

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!!!?!?)

Aptana + CFEclipse vs Eclipse + Aptana + CFEclipse

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:55:00 -0700

Can anyone tell me if there's any difference from using:

Aptana Studio with CFEclipse plugin
vs.
Eclipse with Aptana plugint + CFEclipse plugin

They both do the same thing. I'm using the latter and am wondering if I'm missing out on anything by using the former?

I'm having trouble with Aptana + CFEclipse. I can't open any CFM files after I install the CFEclipse plugin with Aptana Studio. I get a java.lang. error. But, using Eclipse/Aptana/CFEclipse, I can open my CFM files.

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling and cleaning up the registry on my WinXP Pro box, but the Aptana issue keeps cropping up.

Sooooo looking forward to going back to DW CS4....

Cold Fusion <-- really?

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:53:00 -0700

Anyone else find it gratingly annoying when they see people refer to CF as 2 words?
I see job postings with 'coldfusion' and 'cold fusion'. I've learned to look for jobs on CL and other job sites in this manner.

Argh!!

jQuery + ajax + logout form

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:17:00 -0700

I love jquery! Let me just say that now. I'm a true convert from prototype/scriptaculous. I love prototype for all it's pros. But, I can't deny the support from the jQuery community and the momentum it has in the web world.

With that said, I dove in and started playing around with the jQuery UI plugin (built by the jQuery guys of course). The dialog plug in is simply DOPE!! (is that a youngin' term?)

I was playing around with a logout confirmation dialog and here's what I've come up with. It's a bit verbose for my taste and by NO means the best way to do this. But, I do hope it points people in the right direction if they're looking to do something like this.


$('#logout').click(
		function(e){
		e.preventDefault();
		
        $('Are you sure you want to log out?').dialog(
			{
			modal: true,
			height: 100, 
			width:350,
			show:"blind",
			hide: "blind",
			buttons:{
				"Yes":function() {
					$.ajax({ 
						url: 'someActionCall.cfm', 
						complete: function() {
							$('#confirmLogout').html("See you next time!");
							$('.ui-dialog-buttonpane').css('display','none');
							var dlg = $("#confirmLogout").parents(".ui-dialog:first");
							dlg.animate({ width: 200},50);
							setTimeout(function(){$("#confirmLogout").dialog("close")},3000);
							setTimeout(function(){location.reload();},1500);	
							} 
						});
					},
				"No":function() {
					$("#confirmLogout").dialog("close");
					}
			},
			close:function(){
				 $("#confirmLogout").remove();
			}
			});

        return false; 
	});

The demo can be found here: Logout demo

Internet Explorer 8: Really?..why?

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:29:00 -0700

Ok, I just downloaded the latest and greatest Redmond browser. I have to say there are some good things and then of course, there are bad things. It's by far worlds better than IE 6, but it's still....Internet Explorer.

Here's a thought...Why doesn't M$ just stop making IE altogether? Seriously? They've made web development a headache since day one of IE. Tried to gain market share and control how to program for the web. That failed miserably.

Suggestion? Why not have M$ partner with FF to help distribute with their OS? MS won't partner with the other browsers (Safari? ha! Ballmer and Jobs partnering?, Chrome? ha! Didn't Ballmer want to eradicate google from the planet?) Just makes sense to me if M$ and FF partner. We'd be so much better off with web development and "standards" compliance.

Ok..time for me to get off the hookah heheheh

Oh...Bring Down IE6!

Overcoming IE's annoying "click" sounds

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:18:00 -0700

I was very intrigued at the new IE 8 so I went and downloaded it and installed it.

After 3mins of using it, I realized, "God this clicking sound with every link click is like a mosquito on your ear while you're trying to sleep". I haven't used IE in MONTHS (if it weren't so damn tied to the WinOS I'd have removed it eons ago), so I've been relieved of it's annoyances.

Then I used the greatest thing since sliced bread, and searched google for "annoying click sounds IE".

Found this: Remove Annoying Clicks IE

Nuff said....

no wait..."DIE IE!!!"

Now...Nuff said..