Andy Jarrett

Googles Closure Linter

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:21:00 +0100

Style guides are a nice way of maintaining good code, even ColdFusion has one laying around albeit a little neglected nowadays anyone interested in looking over it with me?). Recently Google shared their Javascript coding guide which although is not earth shatteringly new it proves to be a great developer resource especialy if you work in a team of any size.

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SOTR 2011 Speakers unleashed

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:37:00 +0100

With the topics not coming until later September/early October the speaker list for Scotch On The Rocks 2011 has been released
scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2010/9/1/SOTR2011-Speakers-Unleashed

The 2010 conference was a great 2-day ColdFusion overload of information and networking opportunities so if you haven't got your ticket for 2011 go now!

Uninstalling Flash in Chrome

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:56:00 +0100

Alternate heading for this is how to install Flash SDK in Chrome though either way I was stumped this morning as I just wanted to get in to learning Flex 4.

When developing Flex applications you need the SDK version of Flash for debugging which means uninstalling previous versions first. After digging around my Mac for a little while then hitting Google I was able to find out that this has to be achieved via a seperate, downloadable uninstaller (unlike all other apps I use).
I followed the 6 steps from Adobe then I opened Google Chrome and checked About Adobe Flash Player page only to see that its still installed. At this point Adobe's advice is quite simply repeat these steps to uninstall Flash Player - honest, that's what it says.
I did repeat the steps a couple of times for sanity sake then I remembered that Chrome integrated Flash recently so I fired up Firefox and found that indeed Flash was uninstalled!
Back to Chrome and I went to about:plugins and Disabled "Shockwave Flash". Fired up About Adobe Flash Player and now its gone!
Final step is installing Flash SDK and you're done

Fridays Joke: The Birthday Party

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:58:00 +0100

A lady is throwing a party for her granddaughter, and had gone all out..... a caterer, band, and a hired clown. Just before the party started, two bums showed up looking for a handout. Feeling sorry for the bums, the woman told them that she would give them a meal if they will help chop some wood for her out back. Gratefully, they headed to the rear of the house.

The guests arrived, and all was going well with the children having a wonderful time. But the clown hadn't shown up. After a half and hour, the clown finally called to report that he was stuck in traffic, and would probably not make the party at all.

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Thanks for following

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:19:00 +0100

There are a millon and one Twitter stat sites out there sometimes they are interesting like Klout others are not. On the other hand twitterbffs.com sits betweens these but it did highlight all the people I chat to & interact with via Twitter. This made me realise that not only should I point them out for others to follow but to also say cheers for putting up with nearly 7000 tweets!

_{tag cloud generated by twitterbffs.com and not me!} [More]

Fridays Joke: The Buffalo Theory

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:12:00 +0100

Its a good theory, enjoy!

A herd of buffalo can move only as fast as the slowest buffalo. When the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first.

This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.

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ColdFusion 9 caching example

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 02:00:00 +0100

Sometimes with the new/updated features you don't get a chance to implement them right away. Well today I was working on a pulling in feed when I figured I finally had a good use-case to check out the updated caching enhancements in ColdFusion 9.

For this site I was working on I needed to pull in an RSS feed but HTTP calls are slow as there are usually factors outside of your control. The ColdFusion caching functions allows some nice control over what is cached, how often the cached is refreshed, and even when to drop it completley via the following two parameters:

time span ( when we need to re-cache the item )
idle/drop time ( When to drop it from memory when it hasn't been accessed for X amount of time )

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Apache server alias wildcard

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:28:00 +0100

Something I've learnt recently that I might be the last to know but you can use wildcards (*) in the ServerAlias in Apache. In the past I've done something along the lines of



	ServerName example.com
	ServerAlias www.example.com www.example.co.uk example.co.uk

Really all you need to do is:



	ServerName example.com
	ServerAlias *.example.*

Hope this helps someone else

My desktop

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:57:00 +0100

After reading forgetfoo.com recent post he reminded me that it is always pretty cool to check out other peoples desktop and see their setup/apps they are using (check out the Homesite logo in forgetfoo.com's screen grab!). Anyway heres mine, whats yours like?

Twitter release "Tweet button"

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:43:00 +0100

Twitter have released there own Tweet Button now for users to implement in their web pages.

Very easy to setup and just a couple of lines to drop in to your HTML but does offer a host of advanced options such as: language that the button will render in and recommended Twitter accounts to follow after sharing content.

You can find me on Twitter at @andyj

Save Google Wave!

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:59:00 +0100

Google Wave is a great tool and it seem there are more people out there who think this too. If you want Google to hang on to this mis-understood service check out; SaveGoogleWave.com and join the cause.

Framework One and .cfm requests

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 09:03:00 +0100

If you have used FW/1 you'll probably know that it takes over all .cfm requests. So for example if you add the file "rss.cfm" to your web root before the template is called FW/1 will run and the .cfm template will never actually be processed.

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CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 12:59:00 +0100

IE over the versions is getting better with supporting CSS but it always seems to fall short or at very least doesn't try to push itself too much.

With that Microsoft have released a document stating which version of Internet Explorer (back to IE5) supports which rules, combinators, selectors, etc.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(VS.85).aspx

Detect IE8 Compatibility Mode

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:41:00 +0100

I have recently had a client who complained to me that the site was broken in IE8 even though I had already checked it out. It turns out the issue was M$'s great "Compatibility Mode"

I know my way around CSS well enough but it felt wrong making any changes to keep this IE only mode happy when all other browsers were not complaining. Bing! I had an idea and went to Google and found this document on Defining Document Compatibility.

Turns out I can force the users browser to IE8 mode with the following

Hopefully this will help some other developer with their designing woes.

Realisation

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:01:00 +0100

After all my years with computers this is still true

_{Created @ stripcreator.com}