Monday, December 10, 2007

dove

I know that Dove is trying to advertise themselves here, but none the less, these are very powerful videos:
As the father of a little girl, this is something that I worry about. Hopefully, at some point in the near future, we will stop letting corporate America tell us what beauty is...

Friday, December 07, 2007

Adobe's New Site

Adobe has redesigned their website. Wow. I'm very impressed with the seamless integration of Flash and AJAX. Adobe has often preached that Flash is AJAX, since you can access the entire DOM from the Flash player, and the Flash player via JavaScript. The new site really does prove the point.

The site also shows that Adobe practices what it preaches. I'm looking forward to exploring the new features. My favorite at the moment is the Flash On section.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

projectId != projectid


Any ActionScript, JavaScript, Java, etc. programmer knows about case-sensitivity. The languages are very picky, thus projectId is not the same as projectid. However, ColdFusion and T-SQL aren't picky. SELECT is the same as select -- is the same as . After moving a demo from my local development environment to a staging server I discovered the hard way that Flex treats returned column names as case sensitive variables. When I created the view on the staging server, I made the mistake of not properly camel casing projectId. Hopefully, this is a mistake that I will not make often.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Big Gotta in Flex/AIR


So you have a datagrid in Flex (or AIR) and you got a nice little query that is delivered to the application via a ColdFusion CFC and in your Flex app, you've got a text field that triggers a filter function on the arraycollection. Nothing special, one of the first things that many CF developers learn how to do in Flex.

While I was working on a demo application the other day I built this out, just to discover that my filter functions weren't working. Stranger yet, the filter functions worked perfectly when datasource was a xml file with the same data. After hours or cursing, blog reading, etc., I figured out what the issue was. For whatever reason, when you have a query that uses GROUP BY Flex filter functions do not work. In the end I made a view out of the query and the filter functions work perfectly now.

Fun stuff.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Holy Crap!



The whole story is pretty wild. I love the way the military used to address problems head-on, with very little concern about how crazy it might seem.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

2 and 4

At 2 and 4, the Bears don't look to be able to go very far this year. And, maybe that is OK. After all, while the Bears were one hell of a team in many ways last year, the poor performance of the offense really made for an embarrassing Super Bowl loss.

Perhaps, the Bears will finally get a real quarterback next year. While I realize that would go against the entire history of the Bears, why not? If we had a better offense (read: quarterback) we wouldn't have to relie on the D. So, when we have players out with injures, it wouldn't be the end of our ability as a team to win.

The rest of the season looks ulgy -- but maybe with some luck we will see the Bears do what needs to be done. A focus on O for a change...

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Quinn Mailey


DSCN3854
Originally uploaded by dah007.
Yesterday, my wife gave birth to our second child, and our first son, Quinn Mailey! Both mother and son are doing very well! It is such an incredible experience, that I can't even begin to explain it. So new we have both a boy and a girl, a complete set! Woohoo! Welcome to the world Mr. Quinn, you are already loved. :-)