Bug in CFDUMP tag - Doubling Your Output...
I discovered a small bug with CFMX today. It's certainly not a deal breaker and Macromedia is aware of the bug. (A birdy told me that they believe the bug has been fixed for Merrimack.)
When you have a UDF that writes to the output stream (using writeOutput() or <cfoutput>) and invoke the function directly from the <cfdump /> tag, the output is displayed twice. This had me pulling my hair out for about 30 minutes trying figure out why my output was being generated multiple times—I thought I had a bug in my code.
Anyway, to see the bug in action, run this code:
BlackDog - Portable USB-Powered Linux Server...
Came across this pretty cool little product called BlackDog. It's basic a 400Mhz PowerPC Processor with Debian-based Linux in a plug-n-play USB box. Could be very useful portable development server. Check it out.
BlackDog offers open source developers an exciting new platform for mobilizing software applications. BlackDog represents a new breed of device that redefines what a 'computer' is. It can be programmed to carry your applications, data, web sites, desktop look and feel, with you, wherever you may go.
Develop applications and deploy them on BlackDog then launch and automatically project them onto a Windows PC. Design an interface, spin and run a web site, run a video game.
Program It — Port It — Plug It — Pull It, throw it in your pocket and do what you will with it — With BlackDog you 'can' take it with you!
Firefox Tip: Use Multi-line URLs When Pasting Into The Address Bar
Andrei Zmievski posted a cool little blog entry on how to get Firefox to parse a mutli-line URL. This tip is very handy when cutting and pasting URLs from an e-mail or from a message board where the URL spans multiple lines.
Here's another Mozilla/Firefox tip: if you copy a URL wrapped over multiple lines from somewhere and try to paste it into the address bar, you will end up only with the first line of it. To fix it, go to about:config and change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines setting to 3 or add:
user_pref("editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines", 3);to your user.js file. Now all the line breaks will be removed upon pasting.
This has always been a big pain in the arse. In the past I've always ended up having to open up a text editor, paste the URL and then strip out the new lines. This will be a real time saver!
qForms Video - Creating A Selectable Checkbox Range
Ok, I actually did this work last week, but was waiting to ship the code to the client before posting the video. I recently had a qForms user ask if qForms could do selecting of a range of checkboxes—liked Google does in GMail (where you can click on a checkbox and then hold [SHIFT] and click on another checkbox to select the entire range.
Well, qForms doesn't offer this "out of the box," but it's really not that difficult to add custom hooks into the API. So, the user ask me to build an add-on library. After spending last Friday night messing around, this is what I came up with.
George R.R. Martin Finally Finishes A Feast For Crows...
It's about time! George R.R. Martin has finally finished A Feast For Crows. According to Martin's official web site, Bantam Spectra (US) will be publishing the book on November 8th and HarperCollins Voyager (UK) will publish the book on October 25th.
Here's the release banner on Martin's web site:
Jenn & I Bought A Sofa And Loveseat!
Well, Jenn & I bought a new sofa and loveseat tonight. We've been looking for awhile now and finally just bought the bullet and bought one tonight. We were really having problems deciding what we wanted. We liked the idea of reclining sofas, but we didn't like the looks of a lot of the models.
We finally went back to a sofa we'd seen several months ago at Kittles. I generally like the looks of traditional sofas better, but we finally found a reclining sofa we both liked and we both felt a reclining sofa would fit our lifestyles better.
The third picture below I think is the actual color of the fabric we choose, but it's hard to tell from these pictures. We didn't go with leather because of the dogs (although we both generally liked the look of leather couches better.) We also wanted to go with a fabric that would hide the dog hairs (having both a Yellow and Black Lab make for lots of dog hair!) The colors in the couch are similiar to our old couch, but it actually has all the colors in our carpet.
Heading to Pittsburgh/Steelers Training Camp...
Jenn and I are heading to Pittsburgh for the weekend. We're planning on spending Saturday afternoon over in Latrobe at the Pittsburgh Steelers Training Camp. We're meeting up with a bunch of fellow Steeler fans we know. Should be a good time. It's even supposed to cool off for the weekend, which is great news.
I booked us a hotel room at the Courtyard by Marriot in downtown Pittsburgh for Saturday night. There's Pirates game in town that night, so if we don't decide to do something different, we might go check out the game. We're not big baseball fans, but I don't mind going to see a game in person from time to time—especially since we'll be just blocks from the stadium.
Is This Really Mac OS X v10.4.1 Running On A PC?
Gizmodo posted a screen shot of someone supposedly running Mac OS X v10.4.1 via a VMWare session. While I'm hoping this news is true, I'm suspected this is probably a fake screenshot. I've looked through VMWare's web site and can't find anything about upcoming support for the Mac OS X. I suspect this is just a rumor based on the fact that Apple has announced their plans to move to Intel-based processors.
However, the fact that Apple is making this move, it would see feasible that you could write a virtual machine to emulate the Apple specific hardware. It sure would be nice to be able to open up an Mac OS VM to test sites on the Mac. ;)
Getting A Thread Dump From CFMX Using StackTrace...
Brandon Purcell spawned off a serious of interested blog posts today when he posted his Obtaining a Thread Dump with ColdFusion or JRun running as a Windows Service. He talks about called StackTrace which you can use to get a trace dump of any running Java process (including applets running in the browser.) I download the application, but have yet to install it.
Anyway, Brandon's post spawned off an interested post by Steven Erat in which he points to the Debugging Stack Traces in ColdFusion MX technote on Macromedia's web site.
Both of these posts are worth reading and will definitely be useful for debugging in those times were CF crashes unexpectedly.