just another ColdFusion Blog

Today I am old and I have an EVO

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:46:00 -0600

Today is the Summer Solstice and my birthday. Today I am 56 and in 4 days, Emerald wil be 22 months. Dang, I feel old. On another note, I stopped by BestBuy and picked up the EVO I ordered. So far, I am very impressed with it. In fact, I am very impressed with it. I connected it via bluetooth to my Nissan Pathfnder and it worked perfectly. Thank you HTC. Finally a model that works with a Nissan. Tomorrow, I root the phone and start working on my own custom ROM.

Four years Old

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:31:00 -0600

It has been exactly four years since my current notebook arrived at my doorstep from Toshiba. My first laptop was a Toshiba 405CDT and I've been a Toshiba 'Fanboy' ever since. The current system is a Satellite A100-S8111TD with 4GB of memory and 400 GB drive, running Windows 7. The battery only last about 20 minutes, and it is far from perfect. The power switch has problems. The Caps Lock LED will not turn on. One of the battery clips is broken. It shows a lot of wear but overall it runs great and I have grown to depend on this ancient technology. I almost hate to retire this machine, but in a couple of weeks, its replacement will be here and this unit will be used to run the Light-O-Rama light display.

Time for a new notebook

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:45:00 -0600

After a year of procrastination, today I order a new notebook. I usually wait no more than three years. This time almost four years has gone by with the same computer. That's darn good considering how tough I am on hardware. My current system is running so well I hadn't noticed how old this thing is. I don't have an exact count, but I think this is the 14th Toshiba laptop/notebook I have owned. Some have been replaced when only a year old and others at three years and they have all been Toshiba models. [More]

Time for a new phone

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 21:45:00 -0600

A few weeks ago, I broke my HTC Touch Pro. It was a great phone and I was very happy with it. But with all good things, it is no longer being offered. My wife has an iPhone and she is very happy with it. The big problem with the iPhone is it keeps dropping calls. I never dropped a call with the T9ouch Pro and in fact, you could call me a HTC fanboy. [More]

Translating from Roman to Decimal Numbers

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:30:00 -0600

Ray posted an entry on his blog dealing with converting Roman Numbers to decimal numbers. I ran his code and pointed out that IIX returned 10 instead of 8. A debate ensued on whether IIX is valid. Ray replied:

Now I'm going to ask you to put up or shut up! ;) If you can find me proof that IIX (or IIC, etc) is valid, I'll support it. ;)

It is still undecided if IIX is valid. I felt it should return the correct value or no value at all. But then I thought, if the number was ever used, the converter should convert it. So I took Ray's code, made some changes and now it should convert any Roman Numeral you throw at it. EDIT: I found a serious flaw in the logic. Here is the correct code, even though the other did work in most cases. The first code failed on MCCCIIIX. It returned 2107 instead of 1307.


/**
 * Converts Roman numerals to decimal.
 * 
 * @param input 	 Roman number input. (Required)
 * @return Returns a number. 
 * @author Raymond Camden (ray@camdenfamily.com) 
 * @version 1, February 2, 2010 
 */
function romantodec(input) {
	var romans = {};
	var result = 0;
	var pos = 1;
	var char = "";
	var thisSum = "";
	var subSum = 0;
	var nextchar = "";
		
	romans["I"] = 1;
	romans["V"] = 5;
	romans["X"] = 10;
	romans["L"] = 50;
	romans["C"] = 100;
	romans["D"] = 500;
	romans["M"] = 1000;

	while(pos lte len(input)) {
		char = mid(input, pos, 1);
		subSum += romans[char];
		if(pos != len(input)) {
			nextchar = mid(input, pos + 1, 1);
			if(romans[char] == romans[nextchar]) {
				pos++;
			} else if(romans[char] < romans[nextchar]) {
				result = result + romans[nextchar] - subSum;
				subSum = 0;
				pos += 2;
			} else {
				result = result + subSum;
				subSum = 0;
				pos++;
			}
		} else {
			result = result + subSum;
			pos++;
		}
	}	
	return result;
}

I am pretty sure there is a better way yo do this, so please feel free to leave suggestions and ideas.

Two great announcements

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:52:00 -0600

Today was a good day for developers. Adobe released AIR 2.0 beta 2 and Google will stop support for IE 6. I am excited for AIR 2.0 as it adds: enhanced support for interacting with printers, support for the detection of mass storage devices, multi-touch and gesture support and the webkit has been updated with HTML5/CSS3 support. And now for something completly different: [More]

Making MySQL 5.1 work with the old driver

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:46:00 -0600

An interesting problem at work that I forgot I knew the answer to. At the agency there is a set of very old Microsoft Access applications getting data from a very old MySQL 4.0 server. The server that the data base resides on is being replaced with a Dell 2950 and I want to upgrade all the software. With MySQL 5.1 installed the Access applications, using the 3.51 driver, could not connect to any of the databases. When checked against the DSN an error came back as: Client does not support authentication protocol. [More]

One month old

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:42:00 -0600

Today marks the one month anniversary since the rebirth of this blog. I had made the decision to write at least one entry each day. After a month of blogging, there are times when I don't have an entry worth blogging about. So I have decided to try Monday to Friday for the time. I will see how that goes and maybe I will spend less time on my laptop during the weekend.

Adobe Community Professionals: Denver

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:55:00 -0600

Two weeks ago Adobe released the latest list of community experts, at the same time, rebranding the program. Denver is the home to 7 of these professional experts. I have met most of them and look forward to meeting the rest. Congratulations to all of them. David Hassoun, RealEyes Media, Rich Internet Applications RJ Owen, EffectiveUI, Flex Brian Reyman, , InDesign Rob Rusher, On3, Flex Juan Sanchez, EffectiveUI, Flex Paul Trani, Starz Entertainment, Web Design John Wilker, 360|Conferences, Flex

Potential ColdFusion information Solr disclosure issue

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:05:00 -0600

Adobe released a securitry bulletin for ColdFusion 9 today. ColdFusion by default allows collections created by the Solr Service to be accessed from any external machine using a URL. This allows users to access information about the collections as well as search and index them. Adobe recommends affected ColdFusion customers update their installation using the instructions below: Follow the instructions below to disable external access to the Solr collections: 1.Open the file jetty.xml located at {ColdFusion-home}/solr/etc for Server install or {Solr-Home}/etc directory for other type of installs. 2.Look for the following property. There are two occurances of the property in the jetty.xml file. Locate the uncommented property. 3.Add the following property just below the above property This will set the access to the Solr collections from the browser to localhost only 4.Restart Solr Service.

Read the Book, watch the Videos

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:43:00 -0600

In 2008, Adobe Flex Evangelist James Ward and MindView President Bruce Eckel published First Steps in Flex, a short, hands-on learning aid to get you started in Flex. Now they have taken the learning process one step further. They have created screencasts for each chapter in the book. You can now watch over 6 hours of video on the 20 chapters. Check out the videos, buy the book and hget started today.

0000-00-00 00:00:00 to TIMESTAMP

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:26:00 -0600

I read ColdFusion Bloggers every day to learn what is going on in the ColdFusion community. Today I came across a blog entry that solved an old problem with MySQL and the zero timestamp. In MySQL, if a timestamp is blank, it is set to 0000-00-00 00:00:00 and this causes a problem for ColdFusion, which will return an error of: Cannot convert value '0000-00-00 00:00:00? from column X to TIMESTAMP. Thanks to John Sieber at Thoughts from the mountains we have the simple answer. IN the ColdFusion Administrator, go to Data Sources, edit the MySQL (4/5) data source, click on Show Advanced Settings and enter noDatetimeStringSync=true&zeroDateTimeBehavior=convertToNull in the Connection String dialog box. This will make my job a little easier. Thanks John.

Learning Mura

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:25:00 -0600

Early this month Charlie Arehaert announced a series of online meetings dealing with converting his site to Mura CMS. I had never heard of Mura, but I know what a CMS is. I have been looking for a solution for three websites that I maintain and took a look at what Mura could do. I downloaded Mura, installed it and had a basic site up in less than 10 minutes. There are configuration options for nearly everything one would want to do. There seems to be a lot of support offered by several websites and blogs. A great source of information is The Mura Show, which has shows recorded in Acrobat. I intend to follow along with Charlie and learn while he converts his site to Mura. It looks like Mura can be used to solve many website problems and I look forward to learning how to use it. Now I just have to convince Ray Camden to make BlogCFC a plugin for Mura.

Dynamic forms, jQuery and IE: bummer

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:27:00 -0600

I have been working on a form for work that uses jQuery and allows dynamically adding field sets. I took the base code from an example that Ray Camden wrote, made changes and tested it. It worked just as it was designed to, except not in IE. Not using IE is not an option. We are a .gov shop and it is the only browser supported. After spending several hours over several days, I came across a post on How to deal with cloning or dynamically loading new form elements (like radio buttons) in Internet Explorer (IE) using jQuery that simply states it won't work in IE the way it is written. [More]

ColdFusion and LCDS

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:20:00 -0600

Things I need to know about ColdFusion and LCDS. This is so I can keep track of some links. http://gregsramblings.com/2010/01/15/lcds-2-5-rtmp-mxconsumer-not-able-to-resubscribe-after-disconnect-coldfusion-8/ http://justjoshn.com/entry/integrating-coldfusion-8-01-with-livecycle-ds-2-6-beta http://www.dcooper.org/blog/client/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=B1400F9C-4E22-1671-59487184325DD3C5 http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/Developing/WS24F7B531-FE69-4fdb-8B85-9F5EFBF3692A.html http://slidesix.com/view/LCDS-Data-Management-for-Mere-Mortals