December 2006 Web Log Entries
Post-Christmas Raffle... Any Takers?
Posted: December 28, 2006 at 1:20 PM by Ben Nadel
As I posted earlier , I have a few extra, unclaimed Christmas presents lying around. So, I have created a simple ColdFusion raffling system that takes a list of entries and programmatically picks random winners. I figure I will let people enter for a few days and then pick winners next week. That being said, I have a few Kinky-Solutions-branded ... read more »
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Getting Ready For The ColdFusion Post-Christmas Raffle
Posted: December 27, 2006 at 4:57 PM by Ben Nadel
This Christmas, I tried to give away some little "Kinky Solutions" gifts to people. Some people accepted, others passed. As a result, I have a few surplus gifts lying around that I would like to raffle off. In preparation for this post-Christmas gift raffle, I wrote a small little raffling system in ColdFusion that will help me select the names of... read more »
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Leveraging FireFox's Restore Session Feature To Control RAM Usage
Posted: December 27, 2006 at 2:44 PM by Ben Nadel
I am running FireFox 2.0.0.1 and it rocks, but the RAM usage of it tends to climb really high during the day. Not too long ago, I found out by accident that if your FireFox crashes and then you start it up again it will ask you if you would like to restore the previous session. How bad-ass is that? I know, I know. But what's really cool that just ... read more »
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The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
Posted: December 27, 2006 at 2:32 PM by Ben Nadel
I finally finished reading the Pragmatic Programmer last night before going to bed. It's a good book. I didn't know what it was about before reading it and was a bit surprised at the content; it was more of a "best practices" for programming as a methodical job rather than a how-to of programming tips and tricks. I am used to reading more how-to... read more »
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ColdFusion File Explorer - Round One
Posted: December 27, 2006 at 9:16 AM by Ben Nadel
A while back, I promised that I would post the code I used for the ColdFusion file explorer used in Skin Spider. Things have been crazy here so I have been getting to my task list very slowly. Last night I sat down and started cleaning this thing up. I started from scratch to try out a new technique. So far, I am liking where this is going. It fun... read more »
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Writing Enormous Files Based On Massive Record Sets In ColdFusion
Posted: December 26, 2006 at 3:36 PM by Ben Nadel
Someone over on CF-Talk was asking about writing massive data files that are the result of several million records coming out of a database. One of the concerns expressed was that the problem was not only with the writing of the file, it was with the amount of memory that the massive record set would take up. Here is my stab at a solution that u... read more »
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Team Nylon : Interface Driven Architecture Proof Of Concept (Design File / Code / Demo Application)
Posted: December 26, 2006 at 2:42 PM by Ben Nadel
As I posted earlier, I am prototyping a small task management application (a glorified To-Do list in ColdFusion, if you will). I am doing all the design and prototyping up front as dictated by (what I understood to be the message of) Clark Valberg 's presentation at the last NY CFUG on Interface Driven Architecture. What I have below is the des... read more »
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Team Nylon : Interface Driven Architecture Proof Of Concept (POC)
Posted: December 26, 2006 at 8:57 AM by Ben Nadel
After listening to Clark Valberg at the last NY CFUG , I got all jazzed up about Interface Driven Architecture. I feel that it is definitely the way to go when it comes to successful project life cycles. Of course, right now this is all theory for me as my company's current development model is the more archaic, "develop now, show the client la... read more »
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How Do You People Deal With Holidays?
Posted: December 23, 2006 at 3:20 PM by Ben Nadel
I don't know how to do it. It just never seems to go well. I try to balance multiple families; I try to make both happy, but somehow, in the end, I seem to disappoint everyone. You know how they say that if you tell someone something long enough, they begin to believe it? Well, at this point in my life (as the sum of my feelings), I am fairly cert... read more »
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Does Anyone Else Get Confused By A Purposefully Slow RIAs?
Posted: December 21, 2006 at 11:23 AM by Ben Nadel
Minor rant here (sorry if this offends people). I find it very strange that in a time where people are really pushing for Rich Internet Applications with snappy desktop-app-like-response times, there is a good amount of purposeful slow-down being implemented. I am, of course, talking about things like the accordion effect, the fade in, the fade ou... read more »
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Creating An ASCII Ruler In ColdFusion
Posted: December 21, 2006 at 9:02 AM by Ben Nadel
I posted this as a solution to CF-Talk the other day and I thought I would post it here as well (for some reason, not everyone and their mother subscribes to CF-Talk??). Paul Vernon wanted to create an on-screen ASCII ruler that would fully display the powers of 10 (10, 20, 30... 150, 160, etc) but for each non-power-of-10, only display the ones... read more »
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Ask Ben: Looping From 'A' To 'Z' In ColdFusion
Posted: December 19, 2006 at 2:52 PM by Ben Nadel
Is there an easy way to list from a to z in the alphabet? There are few ways to loop over the letters A to Z using ColdFusion. Some are more complicated than others, but perhaps more useful. Let's start off by looking at traditional list loop. If you want, you could create a list of all letters between A and Z and loop over that: <!--- Loop... read more »
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Skin Spider : Live Demo No Longer Available
Posted: December 19, 2006 at 9:04 AM by Ben Nadel
To learn all about Skin Spider, click here . To view the current code base, click here . It feels like forever since I have worked on Skin Spider, but don't worry, the project is not dead; I have just been crazy busy at work and at home. However, the live demo is no longer available. Due to the size and number of video files and the frequency ... read more »
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Invoking My First Web Service With ColdFusion (Amazon Web Service)
Posted: December 16, 2006 at 11:45 AM by Ben Nadel
Not so long ago, I created my first web service . I figured it was time to see how the other half live (those that invoke web services, not create them). To test it out, I decided to invoke one of Amazon.com's web services. To start out, I had to register to use their eCommerce web service. Then, I had to dig through many many links to actually f... read more »
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Christopher Walken On ColdFusion
Posted: December 15, 2006 at 11:05 PM by Ben Nadel
Fellas, I'm telling you - you're gonna want that ColdFusion! ... read more »
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