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Recent Blog Comments By PaulH

• Finding The Distance Between Latitude / Longitude Locations In ColdFusion

  Posted on Mar 15, 2010 at 1:26 PM

  as i said, "routing". googlemaps work well enough, even here in thailand. if that's not good enough & you have better transport infrastructure data (which is probably the only reason it's not "good enough") have a look at postGIS/pgRouting. if you're lighting cigars w/ben franklins,... read more »

• Ask Ben: Formatting A Date Span In ColdFusion

  Posted on Jun 25, 2009 at 1:40 PM

  @ciaran that's pretty funny, "if" i looked at the implementation examples. actually it's no more than what ben's done with his function but w/out all the brain sweat (it's really only 3-4 lines of code). while ben's only written a few lines of code, i imagine quite a bit of thought went int... read more »

• Ask Ben: Formatting A Date Span In ColdFusion

  Posted on Jun 25, 2009 at 12:30 PM

  too many cool java libs to ignore, might as well try to stop a freight train by winking at it.... read more »

• Ask Ben: Formatting A Date Span In ColdFusion

  Posted on Jun 25, 2009 at 12:11 PM

  or you know, use icu4j's dateIntervalFormat class: http://icu-project.org/apiref/icu4j/com/ibm/icu/text/DateIntervalFormat.html... read more »

• Converting To GMT And From GMT In ColdFusion For Use With HTTP Time Stamps

  Posted on Jun 2, 2009 at 1:25 PM

  @kinky ben not "getting" tz & DST is a bad habit & *will* come back to bite your ankles off eventually. kind of like not var scoping your variables in a CFC. DST is also a moving target controlled by knucklehead politicians, it can come & go on a whim (or major sporting event, ask the ozzie... read more »

• Converting To GMT And From GMT In ColdFusion For Use With HTTP Time Stamps

  Posted on Jun 2, 2009 at 8:08 AM

  @kinky ben "GMT is used simply to allow a standardized time storage format" uh, no (but nice try sweeping away 200+ years of history & culture). it was originally used to help maritime brits (you know "iron men, wooden ships") calculate longitude. greenwich (the "G" in GMT) was zero degrees... read more »

• Converting To GMT And From GMT In ColdFusion For Use With HTTP Time Stamps

  Posted on May 27, 2009 at 9:36 AM

  @ben look around the room, red fellow w/horns & a pitchfork? man you've fallen into tz hell for sure. the offset should handle the direction. here in bangkok we're UTC+7 (ICT), so to get back to UTC i'd subtract 7. for tz America/Dawson_Creek (UTC-7) i'd still subtract but since the UTC of... read more »

• Converting To GMT And From GMT In ColdFusion For Use With HTTP Time Stamps

  Posted on May 26, 2009 at 1:58 PM

  ben on cf8 & above it will automagically rollover to DST (ie 3:01 AM) even if your intention is that it's UTC or whatever non-DST tz. if you let cf mess w/your datetimes (dateAdd, etc.) it will chomp them into its own tz. and maybe because i've been dealing with tz & offsets all day... read more »

• Converting To GMT And From GMT In ColdFusion For Use With HTTP Time Stamps

  Posted on May 26, 2009 at 11:16 AM

  assuming your server's tz has DST what does this give you? <cfscript> t=createDateTime(2006,4,2,2,1,0); writeoutput("#t#"); </cfscript> if i remember rightly, cf7 (on a server w/DST) would just barf.... read more »

• Converting To GMT And From GMT In ColdFusion For Use With HTTP Time Stamps

  Posted on May 26, 2009 at 10:27 AM

  ben you're going to fall into tz hell if the server's tz has DST & you get datetimes that are on the cusp of DST--these datestimes will *never* exist on the server.... read more »

• Finding The Distance Between Latitude / Longitude Locations In ColdFusion

  Posted on Feb 9, 2009 at 12:42 PM

  @ben depending on the end use, 90% of the time a bounding box is "good enough". you're looking at a point representing a polygon anyway (if your use case is zipcodes) which makes all the distance calculations more or less a sham. to be done "right", for some kind of consumer application, you're p... read more »

• Finding The Distance Between Latitude / Longitude Locations In ColdFusion

  Posted on Feb 9, 2009 at 12:22 PM

  ...and in general this is a good google recommended reference for calculations w/geographic coords: http://econym.googlepages.com/epoly.htm... read more »

• Finding The Distance Between Latitude / Longitude Locations In ColdFusion

  Posted on Feb 9, 2009 at 12:03 PM

  if you're just trying to isolate points within a certain distance of a given point, a simple bounding box search will save you tons of work. take your search point add/subtract the distance you're looking for to build up 2 pairs of points that will make up your bounding box. use the bounding box... read more »

• Seeding SQL RAND() Method With NEWID() For Per-Row Random Values (Thanks Joshua Cyr)

  Posted on Jan 27, 2009 at 8:42 PM

  just in case you don't already know you can also use NEWID() to return random records from a table by using it in the ORDER BY clause: ORDER BY NEWID()... read more »

• Project HUGE: Adding Caffeine For Health And Performance Benefits

  Posted on Dec 27, 2008 at 7:02 PM

  sports medicine studies from toledo, spain & univ of illinois (urbana-champaign) has shown that giving caffeine to "dehydrated bicycle racers helps them ride faster, longer and with more power in hot weather" & that "caffeine helps to reduce muscle pain in riders pedaling as hard and as long as... read more »

• Babylon A.D., Vin Diesel, And The Sad State Of Badassery

  Posted on Sep 3, 2008 at 8:40 AM

  @ben a directors cut DVD? speaking of which, any idea if wimmer released one for ultraviolet? i understand that the studio hacked that up as well.... read more »

• Babylon A.D., Vin Diesel, And The Sad State Of Badassery

  Posted on Sep 1, 2008 at 2:53 PM

  the director said the studio just chopped 30 minutes off the film & kicked him to the curb & he 'has expressed outright disgust with the distributors, 20th Century Fox, for removing the movie from his control and altering it significantly. He described the film as "pure violence and stupidity" an... read more »

• Ewwww - Watching Olympics On NBC.com Requires Microsoft Silverlight

  Posted on Aug 19, 2008 at 11:05 PM

  i especially liked how NBC makes you install silverlight then tells you're too foreign to watch. ripped it out immediately. sheesh.... read more »

• Content Is Not Allowed In Prolog - ColdFusion XML And The Byte-Order-Mark (BOM)

  Posted on May 3, 2008 at 8:21 PM

  1) xmlParse() still has to be able to handle BOMs ie. you can pass it a file name, maybe you forgot about that option? i'm still arguing that this is a bug in xmlParse(). 3) as far as "clarifying my statement", it doesn't--many s/w still use a BOM as an encoding hint no matter your opinion.... read more »

• Content Is Not Allowed In Prolog - ColdFusion XML And The Byte-Order-Mark (BOM)

  Posted on May 3, 2008 at 11:42 AM

  1) if an xml stream has a BOM, xmlParse() or whatever is supposed to be able to handle it (as far as i can tell). doesn't matter where it's created. according to the unicode standard, a BOM is not part of the text. 2) can you cite references for your opinion? 3) oops, you're right, re... read more »