CAT | General
http://famfamfam.com/ have a royalty free icon set that looks very pleasant.
Joel
cfug.be is opening it’s doors.
22
A quick note to all the wheels people
0 Comments | Posted by Joel in Coldfusion, Development, General, Railo
Watch out for the gotcha with 2 things.
1 – don’t use request scoped variables in the init of controllers. Wont work when you change the mode to testing. At All.
2 – if your using PascalNotation for your controllers, don’t forget to put hyphens in your views
Joel - Smarticles
Over the past few weeks, some of the guys at Smarticles have been building some CFWheels on Railo applications.
We have had a few points that we have had problems with, and others that have easy solutions.
Positives
Multiplatform without thinking
Getting the Railo environment ready on Mac, PC and Linux is a doddle. It makes multi-disciplinary teams possible, and easy. I set up the environment on my Mac, and sent the code to a PC guy, it just worked. I forgot to put transition time into the project plan – so it’s luck that there wasn’t any.
Really Quick to develop in
Once the initial day of head-scratching is over, Wheels is really really quick to develop in.
I love the convention over configuration approach. Its liberating to work with.
Form Handlers
For one of our applications we havent got a page design. But we have build lots of pages using the standard form handlers. We know that the html will be sensible, usable and rational. All we have to do is tweak the css into place.
Negatives
Only a couple:
Redirects
I still haven’t got the redirects to work. I don’t need them on the development environment. So its a backburner issue for me; not really a problem. Also some of the solutions look quite easy.
Contexts
The railo site talks about setting up contexts for each app. For the first app, this isn’t really required, and actually slows down the time to get a developer happy in the environment.
Other Thoughts
Documentation on slow connections
Some of the team work on very slow connections. This means that browsing a website for documentation sometimes slows them down. The API documentation wasn’t available as a download. We have it as a chm if anyone feels the need.
Partials
When we started development; we didn’t know about partials. If you want connect blocks in your code – partials are what you need.
New Apple Slate
These are the most accurate pictures we have found on the internet about the new apple slate. In 12 hours we should see if our rumours were correct
My parents introduced me to global warming when I was 9 years old. For me it’s obvious, sensible and practical. As with all science; that could all be changed by one proof, one moment, or one idea that proves that it isn’t true. It’s easier to prove a negative.
Having said that. What are the upsides and downsides of going green without the global warming debate.
Upsides
Power of Positive Intention
People like positive things. By behaving in a sustainable way people will repect you for it and appreciate your passion.
Less Carbon Dioxide
For me this means less horrible fumes, smells and gases as I walk down the street. This also means people with asthma can breath more easily, and die less often.
People who drive stupid cars are perceived as stupid
When people drive a 5 litre V8 engine, in the modern world they should be embarrassed. Really Really embarrassed. Formula 1 cars go at 200 miles per hour, do 0-60 (0-100Kph) in 1.9 seconds, making your eyes pop out the back of your head. Formula 1 cars are 2.5 litre engined. 5 litre engines are *rightly* an embarrassment.
Less Consumption becomes a positive
I was born in the 80’s where the money-money-money culture fuelled a consumption culture. Now things are on there heads a little bit. Buying local, fuel efficient seasonal foods is being drilled into peoples heads. Where I got married this year, all the food came from within 50 miles. Proving your affinity with your locality is now positive. Although things cost more, you tend to buy less of them. Buying less, but quality things that last is one of the reasons the rich get richer.
Downsides
Price
Things that have the green label, “energy efficient” are given a premium. This could be marketing, or just technological. Green energy is more expensive.
Conclusion
What ever you think of the green debate I can’t see a downside, other than money, why we wouldn’t want to go lower-consumption even if Global Warming didn’t exist. As current evidence strongly suggests that it does, all the better.
What am I doing?
I dont drive for distances of less than 10 miles without a very good reason.
I travel by public transport everyday.
Smarticles a digital creative agency I founded with my friends, uses an environmentally aware datacentre.
I try to recycle as much as I can.
I know it’s not perfect, but hopefully, every little helps.
- Joel
I found some interesting blogs. One with an alternatives to the javascript forms library I linked to in my previous post. This one is written in jQuery, so if I’m building a jQuery app I know what to use.
jQuery plugin for html5forms, including browser support detection
http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/nmcformhelper
Styling post for html5forms
http://24ways.org/2009/have-a-field-day-with-html5-forms
If you find anything out there (prototype?) – let me know
Joel
I am in Belgium for my job, and sometimes searching the internet for stuff is annoying. If you search with English words, you are given a small fraction of the results that you would expect. I find myself translating, either in my head or on-line, the keywords into French and Dutch and then sorting through the results in the different languages until I find what I am looking for.
Therefore I was pretty happy when a new feature of Google search was announced. Google translated search was released this week, all you have to do is a normal search, click on Show Options and then choose Translated Search.
Search is then in multiple languages, interlaced by relevance.
I found it really useful, I wonder if I could use it as my default firefox search.
Joel
We were having a problem performance tuning an application. The reason, it seemed pretty quick.
It was a heavy Ajax app with YUI. But it loaded in under a second, and was nice. Refreshing the datatable with a hundred rows took 2 seconds. We worked on that took it to 0.4 seconds. The bug however remained on the bug tracker.
The solution (by way of finding the problem) was performance in IE. The solution, found by a colleague, was to specify the widths of the columns in the datatable.
Joel
So it turns out that American’s using Bings cashback service are being ripped off very-obviously.
The problem for Microsoft is not that Butterfly Photo have carefully studied the demographics, determined that Bing customers are morons, and have decided to charge them more. The problem is that the service is fledgling, it is trying to gain traction, and any small push could send it off the rails.
I really want a quality search engine to compete with Google. If all I am going to get is a money grabbing, murdoch sourced web. Microsoft can keep theirs. Ask is better.
update:
An article at the register announced
“Bing has boosted Microsoft’s retailer revenues by nearly 50 per cent, according to a new search-ad study.”
I wonder how that happened
