cf_space

Category: fun
Author: Charles

Crazy Car from Charles Kaufmann on Vimeo.

This is taken by a Motorola Droid taped to the top of a remote control car.

Just need to find a cool video conferencing app to load on the Droid so I can drive it remotely!

Category: Coldfusion,coreforms
Author: Charles

I have moved all the coreForms update posts to a different blog.  You can find it on the CompositeWeb's main blog.

Category: mac,tech notes
Author: Charles

I was looking for all the really large files on my Mac and couldn't figure out how to do it.  After searching the web, I found this easy solution. When you have no other windows open click on cmd and F. This should open the finder window.

Category: fun,nature
Author: Charles

Last weekend the family and I went for a walk in the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge.  It was snowy but nice.  We hadn't been there since the summer and were impressed by all the work on the road that has been completed (even though it was under snow).  We had always hoped that they were going to open up the roads to bike traffic and we checked the signs again, and they in fact did open it up.

You are now allowed to ride your bike on the roads!

 

Category: CompositeWeb,video
Author: Charles

I completed my first video for CompositeWeb this past weekend.  It is an overview of CompositeWeb's Hosted Intranet product.  I used Jing to record it and was happy with the results although it took a lot longer then I had expected it to.

If you have any feedback let me know in the comments.

 

Category: mac,Notes
Author: Charles

For most people this is probably not pertinent as you don't want to be deleting any of your hidden system files.  I had an issue the other day were I needed to delete some svn information off of my computer before being able to check it in.

I had copied a bunch of files from one subversion location to a new one using finder and caused a bunch of issues with the new subversion site.

In order to delete out the old subversion data, you need to enable the viewing of the hidden files, then delete all the .svn directories, then check everything in.

To view hidden files, open up terminal editor and type in this:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE killall Finder

To hide all the hidden files after you are done:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE killall Finder

Good luck.

Category: Coldfusion,tech notes
Author: Charles

Here's another item that I am note sure I knew before, but now I do.  When you are running a query of queries and trying to do a sort on it, the one thing you have to remember is that the field names are case sensitive.

So what you need to do is cfdump the query you are using in the query of queries and copy the field names that show up exactly as shown.  Then it should run just fine.

Category: Crazy Ideas
Author: Charles

I was surfing around YouTube and found this video of a personal airship!  How cool would that be.  Anyway, the blimp is so delicate you could not use it outside.  But then I got to thinking that this would be an awesome revenue generator for indoor stadiums.

I have no idea how much time stadiums are not used, but I bet they could get a bunch of people to pay $50 per 30 minutes to fly one of these blimps around.  I sure would.  And they would be doing this on the days that the stadiums are not generating any revenue.

So if anybody owns a stadium, please look into it and let me know where the reservation form is located so I can sign-up!

Category: Coldfusion,Notes,OpenID
Author: Charles

I was recently integrating OpenID into my SaaS Intranet offering over at CompositeWeb.  I started working with the opensource project OpenID at riaforge.  It worked great, but then I found the RPXnow site and thought it would provide a lot more flexibility in the future and provide for an easier to maintain interface.

I didn't find any information on how to implement it with coldfusion so I thought I would post what I figured out.

 

Category: Coldfusion,tech notes
Author: Charles

I was recently adding some features to my CMS system and came accross a feature of cfqueryparam that I had not used in a while but is really nice when you need it.  When doing an insert or update query for an integer field you can specify the Null attribute of the cfqueryparam tag.

Here is an example:

<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer" value="#form.duration#" NULL="#NOT len(form.duration)#">

So what this is doing is testing if there is any value in the form.duration field, and if there is nothing there, insert a NULL.  If there is something there is just inserts the field value normally.

 

Category: Coldfusion,tech notes
Author: Charles

I am currently redoing the help files for coreforms.  I have to totally redo them because I have added a bunch of new features, and I don't think the current version is that useful.  You kind of know that your documentation needs changing when the author of whatever you are trying to document has a hard time figuring them out.

So the solution I am working on needs a database so I can organize the documentation better.  The problem is that I do not want to require that people who want to view the documentation need to have a database connection and load a bunch of tables onto their server.  So I am trying some static ways to create coldfusion datasources.

The first way is to manually build out the query using coldfusion's queryNew, queryAddRow and querySetCell tags.

<cfset get_format = queryNew("name,description,status,attributes")>

<cfset queryAddRow(get_format)>
<cfset querySetCell(get_format,"name","text")>
<cfset querySetCell(get_format,"description","general text field, same features as an html text field")>
<cfset querySetCell(get_format,"status","A")>
<cfset querySetCell(get_format,"attributes","3")>

<cfset queryAddRow(get_format)>
<cfset querySetCell(get_format,"name","textarea")>
<cfset querySetCell(get_format,"description","general textarea field, same features as an html text field")>
<cfset querySetCell(get_format,"status","A")>
<cfset querySetCell(get_format,"attributes","4")>

This is ok for a small amount of rows, but I have another query that will hold all the attributes.  For this one I am going to use the basic concepts as the one above but build out a comma delimeted file first then loop through the data to create the query.

<cfsavecontent variable="theData">
1,fieldname,Yes,put the name of the query field,A,A
2,required,No,enter a Y if you need the field filled out,A,A
3,max,No,enter the total number of characters for a text field or a maximum date for a date field,A,S
4,cols,No,enter the number of columns for a textarea field just like the html attribute,A,S
</cfsavecontent>

<cfset theFields = "id,attributename,required,description,status,scope">

<cfset get_attributes = queryNew("#theFields#")>

<cfloop list="#theData#" delimiters="#chr(10)##chr(13)#" index="ii">
<cfset queryAddRow(get_attributes)>
    <cfset loopcounter = 1>
    <cfloop list="#thefields#" index="jj">
        <cfset querySetCell(get_attributes,"#jj#","#listgetat(ii,#loopcounter#)#")>
        <cfset loopcounter = loopcounter + 1>
    </cfloop>
</cfloop>

 Then all I have to do to get the query onto my page is to cfInclude the files that I put the above code on.

Category: Notes,wiki
Author: Charles

I have been using a mediaWiki at work for documenting projects and have come up with some essential commands that I am putting here so I can easily reference them.

Sections

== level 1 ==
=== level 2 ===
==== level 3 ====

Links

[[ name of page| name of link ]]

Bullets

* bullet 1
** sub bullet
# numbered bullet
## sub numbered bullet

Images

[[Image:NameOfFile.gif|thumb|200px|The little caption you want with the image]]

one of the cool things about the wiki is if you specify the image with the thumb attribute, it automatically puts it on the right and makes it clickable.

Misc

bold -    '''bold'''

 

Category: mac,Notes
Author: Charles

For all you out there who are running a Macbook Pro, using a Cisco VPN client and running into "Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem".

Here is what you have to do to fix it.  Go to Applications > Utilities then open Terminal.  Once you get to the prompt, type in:

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

You will be prompted to enter the password for your computer.  This procedure will restart the things that need to be restarted.  You should then be able to use your VPN client again.

Category: Coldfusion,coreforms
Author: Charles

I just posted an update to coreforms over at riaforge.  If you are interested in my forms solution, check it out.

I added a couple of new features.  The first is the ability to prepopulate a form that allows for multiple check box selects.  The data could be coming from another query of just supply a comma delimeted list of values.  So as an example, say you are building a weblog form and you want to pull all the data for the post with query1 and you want to pull in all your post categories with another data.  This will allow you to tie the two into the same form so you can update the main post and the categories on the same form.

I also added another customtag called "coredirections".  This allows you to add directions to a form at any point in the form if you are having the form build programatically (maketable = 'Y').

Hope you enjoy the changes.  If you have any suggestions let me know.

Category: Space
Author: Charles

In case you missed the news over at Space.com, SpaceShipTwo made its first flight today for one hour of air time. I have been following the Scaled Composites story for a long time and can't wait to see the first commercial flights.

Hopefully the ticket price will come down soon so I can go for a ride.

Category: Coldfusion,coreforms
Author: Charles

Just a quick introduction, I have been a coldfusion developer for the past 7 years.  I have mostly been focused on Intranets but also on internet sites as well.  I hope to share some of my interest in that to you.  I have an opensource coldfusion project called "coreforms".  It is a very simple set of custom tags that allows you to easily create web forms for creating and updating data.  If you are interested you can download it from coreforms.riaforge.com.