web developer’s blog

What Does the World Look Like When the Work of Government is Driven by the People? Gov 2.0 has a lot of definitions, but in observing the exciting breadth of projects currently being built, it feels a little like the Blind Men and the Elephant, where everyone defines it based on their first hand experience, but not from a holistic…

During the years, I have been faced to a lot of pressure from different sides. The most difficult task I ever had was to stay calm ,solve all the issues with projects, organize with coworkers and be available all the time to the client. Just few years ago,  I was falling apart because I was not able to handle it all. I looked myself where I am standing now and I can say I was pretty satisfied what I saw. This entry I simple that: advice.The client is always right. And I mean always. You wont get absolutely anything if

If you’re unfamiliar with what a namespace is then it may seem like a complex and abstract concept. At least it did to me when I first heard the term. But it’s really quite simple: a namespace is just a way of differentiating between names. Take the example of how people used to introduce themselves, “I [...]

One of the great things about 360|Flex are the parties. That’s not to say the content isn’t top notch, it’s way more than top notch. But, the parties are just fun! We don’t have several parties a night, we have one. Sponsored by an awesome company who wants to show the Flex community some love. (See below) The parties are onsite, right at Ebay. We bust out the Rock Band, the beer, the appetizers, and just geek out. The parties are a a great place to unwind after having insane amounts of knowledge pushing into your head all day. You

It has been a while since my last post, but I thought this was worth mentioning, as 360 Flex is fast approaching (March 7-10th in San Jose.) Flex 360 is BY FAR the best conference you will ever attend as it relates to Adobe Flex. Unfortunately this time around I will not have a [...]

Here are two applications that perform the same task. They layout 9 custom button components in a grid. One is Flex 3 and the other is Flex 4. Main Application (Flex 3): 123456789101112131415161718<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"                 layout="absolute"                   xmlns:local="*">         [...]

I wonder if it’s even possible to create a chart that includes all the considerations involved in carving out a solution within the Flash Mobile space? OK, now I know…

It appears one can actually write one in under XX minutes with almost no knowledge of SWF format and complicated parsing process. I have uploaded proof of concept to wonderfl (under unrestrictive WTFPLv2 license :). Processed with its default settings, my away3d SWF looks like this in Sothink decompiler: Such a code would not even compile, obviously :) To [...]

If you’re running ColdFusion 8 or 9 servers, I would encourage you to upgrade to the latest JDK 1.6.0_18. There have been several notices from Sun and others regarding vulnerabilities in older versions of Java. As an fyi, the default version on CF 9 is 1.6.0_14 so even it is pretty old now. http://www.us-cert.gov/current/archive/2009/12/04/archive.html#sun_releases_update_17_for http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/bulletins/pdf/SB09-320.pdf None of these vulnerabilities directly seem to affect ColdFusion, but I prefer to avoid problems whenever possible. I’ve started upgrading servers and haven’t experienced any problems. I’ve ping others in the community that have also made this upgrade and no one has run into any

As a general rule, I don’t post things here that are ROK Technologies specific. Yes, I do post on occasional demo or recently released site if I think it merits a mention. I usually stick to tips and tricks that I find when using ESRI based product…

Rob Tarkoff reports back on his recent trip to Davos

A demo of the creation and running of a load test script for LiveCycle Workspace ES using Neotys NeoLoad.

Issue 300 of A List Apart for people who make websites solves password-related usability problems with a dash of JavaScript, and employs content strategy to help your site do the right thing at the right time: The Problem with Passwords by LYLE MULLICAN Abandoning password masking as Jakob Nielsen suggests could present serious problems, undermining a user’s trust [...]

Digital Media Minute recently did a list post evaluating seven website uptime monitoring services; here’s a nice tutorial from catswhocode.com on creating a website uptime monitor script using PHP, which will also send you an email or sms if it’s down.

FONT MANAGEMENT GETS BETTER, STRONGER, AND FASTER A year ago this past June, Extensis released version 1 of Universal Type Server (UTS)—and now version 2 is hot on its heels with some nice new features that are going to be of special interest to larger companies with many users. While both …

Even if the iPad is not a success, media producers are understanding the implications of using a technology that could be rendered lame almost overnight. It is as if in an instant the world saw what has been taking place for years; HTML/CSS/Javascript has been catching up to Flash – pushing it closer to [...]

Last week I made a flippant comment regarding the noose that TeraTech have round the fusebox framework. Regarding boycotting CFUnited, this was a jokey comment and as someone who has helped run a conference it’s hard enough to run a conference without the community backlash (Which to be fair I have had my fair share, if only people really knew how much hard work and personal time and money goes into putting on a conference)ﾠ There is no way I condone the mass boycott of a conference, as this will only damage the community on a whole. ﾠ2010 will be

I’ve just completed my first week as Contracting Scum, in one way it’s a step down from what I have been doing of late, but in another it’s actually a step forward. I’m doing stuff that I haven’t done for years, or have relied on others to do over the years, like cutting up a PSD and creating the HTML and CSS. So if your in the luxury of having a Graphic designer / Front End Dev team that currently does this for you. Make sure you touch base with them for the current best practice on how to do

Making sure that your ColdFusion applications are uniquely named is crucial to proper application performance. If you have two ColdFusion applications that accidentally have the same name on the same instance, you’ll get all kinds of weird, unexpected problems - variables not existing, wrong file paths, missing components, seemingly nonsensical settings. As such, it is very important that you pick unique application names. To make this decision easy (coming up with unique names requires too m … Read More »

"We believe, will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering." On Cnet

Registration for Flashbelt, a Flash conference for the midwest, is open!  Also, a brief overview of Robotlegs, a new MVCS application framework. Mentioned links: Flashbelt Robotlegs SmartyPants IoC Guice Spring DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself Beers Hopslam Ale 1554 Black Ale

When I travel through Africa, the high piracy rate is often something we address. Not necessarily from a commercial perspective but much more from a security angle. We know that pirated software is often infected with malware and therefore used for criminal activities. However, the discussion is …

As we approach Global Ignite Week, a collection of Ignite events around the world during the first week of March, I can’t help but think about the future of conferences, one of O’Reilly’s major businesses. Here are some of the things we’re learning from Ignite. People love the rapid-fire format. Steven Levy once said that Foo Camp is the wiki…

n open triangle on a line from a child class to the parent class indicates the inheritance symbol in Design Pattern class diagrams. In the Participant Relations diagram above, you can see symbols for both single and multiple inheritance in red. Inheritance in design patterns is so common, pointing out which designs do not use [...] Related posts:ActionsScript 3.0 Design Pattern Relations Part I: Acquaintances ActionsScript 3.0 Design Pattern Relations Part II: Aggregation Design Pattern Principles for ActionScript 3.0: Favor Object Composition Over Class Inheritance

Recently, reports of an old bug in the Flash Player surfaced again. Claiming this bug, that enabled a developer to crash the player, were already reported 16 months ago and still hasn’t been fixed. I remember this bug from when it first surfaced and was surprised that it wasn’t fixed yet. I had also written about [...]

Yesterday, I explored the use of the ThrowOnTimeout attribute of ColdFusion’s CFLock tag . I had always assumed that settings this attribute to False would cause ColdFusion to skip over the CFLock tag body upon timeout; it was nice to finally confirm that this assumption was accurate. In the closing notes to that post, I had mentioned that one place that … Read More »

Via Nokia Labs, the Nokia Messaging for Social Networks Beta has been updated. Alessandro

Every day I use ColdFusion Builder I like it a bit more. Last night I built out a new extension. Before I describe how it works, let me demonstrate with a video (and once again I apologize for the size - my 30 inch monitor spoils me): [More]

Today’s challenge is in SQL. So what’s wrong with this SQL statement? We’ll assume it’s running on SQL Server, but I suspect this is bad across most if not all database engines SELECT Persons.LastName, Persons.FirstName, Orders.OrderNo FROM Persons INNER JOIN Orders ON Persons.P_Id=Orders.P_Id WHERE Persons.PhoneNumber like ‘404%’ or Orders.Processed = 1 ORDER BY Persons.LastName

I’ve been using ColdFusion builder extensively at work recently. It is beta software, so my intentions for using it are at least in part to help ferret out bugs so that when it launches, it’s a stable product that we can all trust. Currently, it’s not quite there yet, and so I want to show you a quick and easy tip for helping the CFBuilder team diagnose problems related to stability. This is in the spirit of “every little bit helps”. I have posted this bug, which contains a description of what I experience every time CFBuilder freezes/hangs. In addition,