I installed the Eclipse DBEdit Plug-in today in order to try to save some development time. The plug-in looks pretty cool, but took some time to install. I first tried to see if I could use the Macromedia JDBC drivers that were on my box, since I already have CFMX 7 installed. Turns out you get an "Restricted Access" message when trying to use the Macromedia drivers when you're not using a Macromedia product. This lead me to installing the Microsoft SQL Server JDBC drivers.
Here's what I had to do to get DBEdit installed. I think many good open source projects go unused because often there's a complete lack of instructions for getting the project installed and getting it operational. So if you're using SQL Server 2000 and Eclipse and want to get DBEdit running, you've come to the right place!
NOTE:If using WinRAR, you should be able to open up "mssqlserver.tar" and then open up the "msjdbc.tar" and browse to the "./lib" folder without extracting all the .tar files.
NOTE:If you want to specify database other than the default database for the user you're logging into, you can specify the database to log into by default, by adding the databaseName argument to the URL string. (Where XXX is the name of the database.)
jdbc:microsoft:sqlserver://127.0.0.1:1433;databaseName=XXXX
Ever had an e-mail address that keeps popping up in your autocomplete field in Thunderbird? If you've used other e-mail clients in the past, usually you can select the entry using the keyboard and hit either [DELETE] ( or [SHIFT]+[DELETE] like you can in Firefox.)
Apparently Thunderbird compiles the autocomplete list not from a cache, but from e-mail addresses in your Address Book or by guessing for users in your domain. So why is that rogue invalid entry in there you ask? Well, perhaps it was added to your Address Book automatically under the "Collected Addresses" section. That's what happened to me.
All of the sudden a name started appearing in the drop down list that was invalid. It was causing me problems because it was always popping up as the first choice when trying to e-mail my boss. So, if you're seeing some invalid e-mail addresses showing up in your autocomplete list in Thunderbird, do the following:
The Mozilla group has released Thunderbird v1.0.5. This release is supposed to fix some stability issues and it also addresses a number of security issues.
The Mozilla group has released Firefox v1.0.5. This release is supposed to fix some stability issues (I've had Firefox crashing on occasion for me when opening a pop-up window, but I think this may be related to an Extension I have installed) and it also addresses a number of security issues.
I'm really digging Eclipse. There's very little I don't like about v3.1—about the only thing I don't like out of the box is the Find/Replace dialog box. I'd like to see something a little more like HomeSite+ Extended Find/Replace dialog box. The good news is, I'm sure I can probably find a plug-in that will do pretty much what I want.
Anyway, what I'm really digging is Subclipse, which is a SVN plug-in for Eclipse that plugs right in to the "Team" context menu. The one thing I didn't like about Subclipse out of the box was it's re-labelling in my Navigation Pane. It adds a bunch of information that some users will probably want (last user to edit a file, date/time it was edited, etc) but I really don't generally care. If I do, I can just view the document in the Resouce History pane and I'll get all the details I want about the file.
Fortunately, Subclipse allows you to edit the labelling. I really like the way TortoiseSVN labels things in Windows Explorer, so I set up Subeclipse to basic emulate that labelling (while as close as you can with just text.) Anyway, here's a screenshot of my setup:
After watching Rob Rohan's CFEclipse Intro Videos, I decided to give Eclipse another go around. I've played around w/Eclipse several times before, but I've always gone back to HomeSite+. Rob's video showed me a few key features (such as the Bookmarks and To-Do list) that are very intriguing to me. Following Rob's directions, install was simple and I was up and runing within minutes of downloading Eclipse.
One thing I ran into though, is I wanted to hide my .svn and .project entries from showing up in my Navigation bar. In order to hide those files/folders from showing up, you need to turn on the ".*" filter. Here are step-by-step instructions for turning on that filter.
Ok, so it's been a while since I've blogged anything useful—so I figure it's about time I do!
I've been using Thunderbird as my primary e-mail client for my new job. I figured I'd try making the switch away from Outlook to see how it goes. Overall there are a lot of things I really like about Thunderbird. It's definitely faster than Outlook and creating/sending e-mails definitely seems quicker. There are things I miss from Outlook—mainly the complete integration between tasks & e-mail. I've been using the Mozilla Calender project, but I'd like to see all the pieces integrated.
However, the biggest problem I've always had in every e-mail client I've used is that I hate, and I mean hate, HTML e-mail. I find it cumbersome and it's usually harder to read. It seems like everytime I get an e-mail in HTML there are several different fonts. I rarely get an HTML e-mail from someone that actually looks elegant. I also find creating inline responses (which is my preference) is much cleaner and easier to follow when done in Plain Text. That's why I always use Plain Text as my default send method.
I was watching a re-run of The Screen Savers today and they had a guest on who showed off a browser toolbar addon called SpoofStick.
The idea behind this toolbar is that it will resolve the actual website you're on and display the name of the server. Some of you may be thinking: "Why is this useful? When I go to a site I know what site I'm on." Or do you?
One of the most commonly used techniques by hackers attempting to gather person information about users (such as your credit card number or PayPal account,) is to send an e-mail address that looks official which provides a link to "update your personal information." These messages often look legit and the websites they take you too often look they way you'd expect them to—however, they're not actually the official website; it's a copy of the site on a hacker controlled server.
I just noticed that Microsoft is now providing Security Bulletins in a new RSS feed.
Since I use my RSS reader just about daily, this seems like a great way to stay up-to-date on new Security Bulletins. Microsoft is also offering a number of other RSS feeds you can monitor. I'll also be monitoring the Microsoft SQL Server RSS Feed.
Firefox v0.9 has just been released. The Release Candidate (RC) was just released on the 10th, so I suspect the RC they felt was pretty stable. Anyway, here's a peak at what's new:
I'm in the process of installing v0.9 as I type this. Hopefully all my extensions continue to work. I really love Firefox—it's become my primary browser, and I was beginning to think I'd be using IE forever.
Ok, I thought I'd compile a little list of Firefox extensions that are useful for any web developer (and a few that are good for any user of Firefox.) For those of you who read my blog, you'll know that I've switched to Firefox as my primary browser—it's just fantastic. Anyway, here's a list of the extensions you shouldn't be without.
Micah Dubinko has posted a response to the Ian Hickson's comments about the future of XForms. Micah says Ian "swings and misses", but I think that's more accurate of Micah's post than of Ians.
Dubinko has done a ton of great work and I admire what he's put together with XForms, but I just don't think his response does anything to discredit what Ian had to say. Until there's a large outcry from developers to support XForms, there's going to be no effort made to integrate within the browsers. I know there's a few diehard XForms fan, but we're a long ways away from the mass of developers being ready to use and understand XForms.
One point I really disagree with Micah on is the trusting of XForms to do server-side validation. There's no way using HTTP that I place any trust in an response received from the client. It's way to easy for someone to arbitrarily change the rules of the XForm when they submit the document back to the client. You really still need to do something on the server end of things to verify the "signature" of the XForms. After verifying the signature of the document, you'd still need to re-validate the data in the form. So, it's not as simple as he stated in his response.
Ironically enough, I was on Dean Edwards' site a couple of nights ago and completely missed this. Dean Edwards' has put together a neat little behavior for IE which attempt to correct IE's support for CSS2, called IE7.
The idea behind this behavior is that you can use IE's ability to dynamically alter a stylesheet in order to correctly display CSS statement currently not support by IE5+. It does this by changing the CSS statements to styles that IE does support and that will mimic the correct CSS behavior as per the W3C spec. This behavior will also attempt to correct a few other issues IE has with compliancy—such as PNG transparency. Make sure to check out his list of compatibility fixes.
It's a pretty cool idea that could help developers start writing W3C compliant code. I've been developing websites professionally since 1995 and always trying to hack code in order for it display correctly has gotten very old. Anyway, go applaud Dean and his affords.
I was reading the XForms Mailing List this morning and came across a message which pointed to a post on gmane.comp.mozilla.devel.layout newsgroup about the future of XForms and Mozilla.
The author of the newsgroup post, Ian Hickson, also works full time for Opera Software—the maker of the Opera Browser—so I'd imagine Opera shares a similiar path as Mozilla. Here's my favorite quote from the post:
> so I just don't buy that its so complex that that our weary little
> brains will melt.Many authors I have spoken to disagree. The entire concept that your form controls aren't what gets submitted is very difficult for many people to understand. You have to realise that for many people, even the concept of CSS is hard to understand. People ask "how do I make this text blue", not "how do I make all my headers blue". The former is answered by the WYSIWYG mentality, stick in a <font>. The latter is answered by the semantic/style divide mentality, mark up the text as being a header, then add a rule to your stylesheet that maps headers to a colour.
In XForms the problem is even worse -- "how do I disable this control?" has the answer "you tell your data model that the relevant subtree is no longer relevant, then you bind your subtree to the control". People's brains dont melt -- they just go elsewhere.
Ok, two blogs in a row—both courtesy of Rob. I was browsing through his archieves and found an entry about a cool extension for Firefox/Mozilla that does all sorts of really cool stuff for Web Developers. I can think of a number of times when a tool like this would have been useful in the past. Unfortunately, there's been an IE tool that's similiar that I never knew about. Geez! Anyway, check out the following tools that should be useful to any web developer.