Saturday, March 26, 2005

CFForm.com

Mike Nimer has launched a new site CFForm.com. The site serves two purposes, as a place for tips and tricks from the community and as an exchange of skins and rules for the XML forms.

Thursday, March 24, 2005

CF7 Wack

The Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Web Application Construction Kit
is out! The latest edition of Ben Forta's ColdFusion bible is well worth getting for anyone who is making the jump into CF or just wants to sharpen the skills. Of course, I am a bit bias because I was the technical editor for the book.

To show just how strong the CF community is, check out the Amazon Early Adopters list, at the time of this writing, CFWACK is #2 and the Advanced book (Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Application Development) is #13!

New Bugs Bunny

This just isn't ok. I understand the desire of Warner Brothers to update its image for a new generation, but Bugs isn't supposed to be scary looking! WTF!

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

CF7 Forms Goodness

asfusion.com has a very inventive and slick use for the new Flash forms in CF7. It takes a real thinker to imagine using cfform to create PowerPoint like presentations. I'm dying to see the source code, it should be pretty easy - this opens all sorts of possibilities, imagine on-the-fly, dynamically produced presentations that met specific customer demands!

Add that to the list of reasons that the upgrade is worth it!!

Friday, March 18, 2005

Incredibles

I finally saw Pixar's The Incredibles last night. In a word, it is Incredible! The art and animation was top notch, the water especially caught my eye. Most of the computer animated movies to date have been children’s movies with adult overtones in the plot, The Incredibles was the opposite, an adult plot (without be kid unfriendly) with enough simple jokes and visual cues to keep children completely entertained. When I saw Robots last weekend, I was struck by the number of times that my wife and I laughed out loud; with The Incredibles there was an every larger number. Once again, Pixar has proven they can do no wrong (with an office space like this, how can they not!) - Lets just hope the next Pixar project, Cars isn't a mistake (I'm a bit worried).

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Happy St. Patricks Day!

Happy St. Patricks Day!

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Amazon Web Services

This may be the coolest use of web services ever: amaztype

More Proof

For those who need it, here is more proof that ColdFusion 7 is the a major upgrade from MX.

Using the built-in event-gateways and Jabber, Boyzoid show a way to use CF7 to send and receive IM messages on all of the major networks. On a personal level, I can imagine a whole slew of things I might want to IM myself from my home server to me when I'm away from the house. However, this has major "real-world" business uses as well. The ability to communicate in an automated two-way fashion opens a lot of doors and IM services are getting more and more use these days by folks in the business sector.

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Robots

Yesterday, my father, wife and I went to see Robots, and I have to say it is one of the best animated movies that I have ever seen. The art and animation was completely top notch, if not the best I have seen. There is one scene that really comes to mind, a Mouse-Trap/Rollercoaster like transportation system that the main characters use to get around Robot City. In a word, wow. Other than the art and animation, the plot, acting, direction, were all right up there with any classic Disney or, the new standard, Pixar movie. Oh yeah, and with the voice talent Robin Williams, there are some truly enjoyable moments.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

<CFDump> Without Style

If you have ever experienced <cfdump> without style, and wondered what the cause is, Daemonite demostrates the cause and the fix.

Ice Wall

Having lived in Minneapolis for 8 years, I know how boring long winters can be... I heard about this on NPR last night on way home (I guess I know why they call it All Things Considered now, huh?). The environmentist in me doens't like the idea of using 6,000 gallons of water a day this way, however, I have to say, it's pretty cool.

Sunday, March 06, 2005

Cause we aren't fat enough, yet...

This is sad, like us Americans aren't fat enough yet.

Friday, March 04, 2005

Microsoft Creates Weasley Clock

Even though MS doesn't mention J.K. Rowling or Harry Potter directly, clearly this new clock is based on her Weasley's clock in Chamber of Secrets.

Stolen concept or not, super sweet!

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Knowlegde for those in need

If you are like me, you are always being asked by friends and family what different technology is, and how it works. Enter HowStuffWorks and What Is? These two sites are endlessly usefully for helping those who are less knowledgeable about the geekly world.

Happy Birthday Yahoo!

I can't believe that today is the tenth birthday of Yahoo! I remember the first time I ever used it, via a text-only browser, Lynx on Prairienet in Champaign. It was one of the first web pages I ever saw, and it really moviated me to learn HTML and get into web-page design. It seems amazing that was ten years ago... wow, congrats Yahoo!

CF 7, Gotta Love It...

So I'm at work yesterday, and the CTO asks me to make a ColdFusion report with many pages, many pictures and a need to print well. As any internet programmer knows, formatting HTML for printing knows that it is near impossible to make it look right. As advanced as web browsers are, they just can't provide a clean and simple way to print well structured reports (headers, footers, and page numbers). After spending the better part of 4 hours messing with it, I finally got it to look acceptable. Only about 15 minutes of that time was the queries, and the basic output.

With CF7, I could have finished that in less than 30 minutes. The new reporting features are, in a word, badass! The ability to output directly to PDF and FlashPaper, with advanced headers, footers, and page numbers is basically worth the price of upgrading, by itself.

Tim Buntel's blog highlights another kick ass feature, the ability to "skin" the new more powerful charts.