dans.blog

Simon Collison blogged a pretty cool CSS technique he called Image fades for overflow: auto. Essentially this technique allows you fade the text as it nears the edge of the box before it would hide from view. Here's the image Simon shows on his site:

This technique could probably use some improvement. It's probably something you could wrap up in a JS library to apply to elements automatically. Regardless, it's a cool looking effect. Kudos to Simon!

Posted by Dan on Jul 27, 2005 @ 8:31 PM

Spike Milligan posted on his blog today that CFEclipse has completely moved to CFEclipse.org. He's no longer going to be offering nightly builds/bleeding edge releases (BER) on his site. The good news is, you can now get the BERs directly from CFEclipse.org.

See the Downloads page for instructions on how to download stable and BER releases automatically using CFEclipse.

Posted by Dan on Jul 27, 2005 @ 8:27 PM

You learn new stuff every day. Thanks to Brendan Smith for pointing out to me that some creative web guys have come up with a solution for running multiple versions of IE on a PC without having to run anything in a virtual machine.

Ryan Parman over at skyzyx.com has been nice enough to encapsulate all the version in nice little zip files that you can just extract to a directory and run. It doesn't appear that people have 100% success using this hack, but it seems to work for most people. The only noticable issue is that the "Help > About" will always list the current version of IE installed, but apparently the user agent reports back the expected results.

Download Standalone Microsoft Internet Explorer v3 - v6

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Posted by Dan on Jul 26, 2005 @ 11:34 AM

Ok, this is I guess is old news, but it's news to me. Apparently Microsoft has changed their stance on releasing another version of Internet Explorer for their current OS line.

Originally, Microsoft had taken a stance that IE 7 would be a "Longhorn" (now officially named Windows Vista) product only and that v6 was going to be the last release for all current versions of the Microsoft OS. It's now looking like that stance has changed.

Building on those advancements, Gates announced Internet Explorer 7.0, designed to add new levels of security to Windows XP SP2 while maintaining the level of extensibility and compatibility that customers have come to expect. Internet Explorer 7.0 will also provide even stronger defenses against phishing, malicious software and spyware. The beta release is scheduled to be available this summer.

- Microsoft PressPass

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Posted by Dan on Jul 25, 2005 @ 9:58 AM

Wayne Graham has posted a nice blog entry on how to use XML entities to provide "dynamic" variables in your XML documents. The article is really geared towards users using the CFMX Model-Glue framework, but the technique of using XML entities will work with any XML document.

Posted by Dan on Jul 21, 2005 @ 6:45 PM

I ran across this a reference to Fiddler a couple of days ago and I downloaded it, but hadn't had a chance to install it and evaluate it. I just figured I'd play around with it the next time I needed an HTTP proxy/monitor. Well, this morning I finally had a need for one.

This morning a friend of mine pinged me over IM having a problem using cfform to generate a Flash-based form that was talking w/a CFC. He had a simple example that was working, but when plugged into the live content it wasn't.

Anyway, a quick look w/the Firefox Live HTTP Headers extension told me that his Flash form wasn't seeing his CFC. Easy enough fix—or so I thought. After changing the path to the CFC it still wasn't working, although I could tell the Flash form was now seeing the CFC because I could see the 200/OK responses. However, I couldn't actually see what data was coming back from the server.

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Posted by Dan on Jul 21, 2005 @ 10:15 AM

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!

1. You'll need to download Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 Driver for JDBC.
2. You'll want to download is the mssqlserver.tar file. You're only worried about the specific class files that Java needs, so no need to download the entire installer.
3. Create a folder to install the JDBC drivers to. I installed them into my "Microsoft SQL Server" folder into a directory called "jdbc".
4. You'll need to extract 3 files which are actually inside the msjdbc.tar file which are inside the mssqlserver.tar file. The files can be found in the "lib" folder of the msjdbc.tar file. The files are:
   • msbase.jar
   • mssqlserver.jar
   • msutil.jar

   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.

5. Extract those files into the JDBC folder you created in step 3.
6. Download the Eclipse DBEdit plug-in.
7. Unzip the contents of the into your Eclipse folder.
8. Start Eclipse.
9. Go to "Window > Open Perspective > Other".
10. Select the "DBEdit" perspective and click "Ok".
11. You'll know need to create a Connection.
12. Go to the "Classpath" tab and click the "Add Archive" button. You'll need to add each of the files you extracted to your JDBC folder one at a time.
13. Click back on the "Common" tab.
14. You should see a select of "JDBC Drivers" if you select the drop down. The driver you want to use is the "com.microsoft.jdbc.sqlserver.SQLServerDriver" driver.
15. Next enter the "Server URL". You'll want to enter:
    jdbc:microsoft:sqlserver://127.0.0.1:1433

    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

16. Now enter the log in creditials for the database.
17. You'll probably want to change the name of the Database Bookmark to something more useful. You can change this by editing the "Name" field above the tabs.
18. Finally, click "Connect" or "Reconnect" button, which ever is there.

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Posted by Dan on Jul 15, 2005 @ 12:44 PM

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:

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Posted by Dan on Jul 14, 2005 @ 4:11 PM

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.

Posted by Dan on Jul 14, 2005 @ 10:10 AM

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.

Posted by Dan on Jul 14, 2005 @ 10:07 AM

This piece of news seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the community—so thanks to Colin Moock for pointing it out. ECMA has announced, that a new extension for the 4th generation of ECMAScript has been agreed upon. The new standard, E4X (or ECMAScript for XML) will standardarized, vendor-neutral programming syntax for adding native XML support to the ECMAScript language.

I was pretty excited when I first read this news, but after reading the article by John Schneider, I'm not so sure I'm found of the idea. I think I like the idea of a generic DOM model much better. The new syntax looks clunky to me and doesn't feel like a natural extension to ECMAScript (which what JavaScript has become.) John claims the code is "simpler, more compact, and more familiar to the average programmer..." I don't know that I agree with that. It looks like a pretty strange, foreign syntax to me. However, that example may not be good example. I look forward to seeing more on this. Lord know I'd love the browsers to come up w/a standardized XML DOM API.

Posted by Dan on May 3, 2004 @ 11:23 PM

Jason, over at Terminal Fusion, has blogged some comments about qForms. Always keeping an eye out for what people have to say about qForms—good or bad.

Posted by Dan on Apr 30, 2004 @ 9:20 PM

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.

Firefox/Mozilla Web Developer Extension
Bookmarklets and other useful things for IE's Links bar

Posted by Dan on Apr 29, 2004 @ 10:19 PM

Rob Brooks-Bilson blogged about an issue he's seen when using qForms with Mach-II. Seems that Mach-II stores all it's generated content in a variable called "Request.content." However, when running in Debug mode, the Request.content code gets outputted a second time, thus causing errors in your template because of the duplicate output.

I'll try playing around w/the code to see if I can stop qForms from throwing a fit, but this is really more of a problem with the debug templates. I normally edit CF's debug templates to make sure that output is wrap in the htmlCodeFortmat() function—that way I see actual value of the string—and not what it's rendering. One of the comments on Rob's blog also mentions this point.

Posted by Dan on Apr 29, 2004 @ 10:06 PM

I've posted an update to the Mask JavaScript API over at PengoWorks.com. The new update fixes some bugs in Mozilla and also makes sure that the keyboard events are added to the existing event handlers (and they don't replace already defined key events.)

Posted by Dan on Apr 19, 2004 @ 5:22 PM