Mike Rankin's Blog

Retiring this blog

2012-01-03T16:21:00.001-05:00

I'm in the process of retiring this blog. It's been a while since the MX was part of ColdFusion, so an update is in order. I'll be migrating some of the content that makes sense to the new blog. I intend to broaden the content a bit while at the same time keeping it firmly in the technology camp. I'll probably just kill the off-topic content I posted on this blog. Don't worry, I'll be sure

cfdump style fix

2011-11-19T17:23:00.001-05:00

Sometimes when working with ColdFusion you just want to quickly dump out some variables into the page to see what's going wrong. Normally this works fine, but if you happen to be working with a site that has a dark theme with a light colored font on the body, it can sometimes be difficult to read the output. A simple solution is to add a class to your default stylesheet for the site. Include

Why null sucks. Reason 641.

2010-07-21T10:30:00.006-05:00

A little bit of sql code here:DECLARE @test DATETIMESET @test = NULLIF (@test <> '7/31/2010')SELECT '@test is not equal to 7/31/2010'ELSE SELECT '@test is equal to 7/31/2010'Amazing. We've just figured out that a null date is equal to 7/31/2010. Who would have guessed? The reason this is problematic is that there is no way in the current implementations of sql to express n-value logic results.

FW/1 Notes - fw.populate()

2010-03-28T09:52:00.003-05:00

If you've followed my blog for any period of time, you'll know that I have not been a big supporter of the various CF frameworks floating around. Until now. I've been working off and on for the past few months with FW/1 and I'm sold. Finally there is a lightweight framework that just seems to make sense to me. It's what is known as a framework by convention instead of configuration and it's

ColdFusion Builder installation frustration

2009-10-15T09:57:00.002-05:00

Ok, so on October 5th I downloaded and installed the Beta 2 plugin of ColdFusion Builder so I wouldn't have to deal with the timeout when it hit.Well, it hit anyway. Even though I had upgraded, it still threw the timeout message. Thinking that maybe I had done something wrong during the installation, I followed the uninstall instructions and installed it again.Now, there is no ColdFusion

RE: The Free Market Paradox

2009-09-24T12:35:00.003-05:00

This is comment I tried to make on the story linked in the title, but for some reason could not submit. Some day I'll make my response more coherent, but I'm out of time right now.WWJWD? What Would John Wayne Do? The best way to avoid mult-year contracts is to NOT SIGN MULTI-YEAR CONTRACTS. Lets say you were able to make multi-year phone contracts illegal. If I were a cell provider, the first

Workflow design with Balsamiq

2009-08-17T09:39:00.001-05:00

If you are responsible for designing application workflows and haven't heard about balsamiq, go there NOW and download the demo. Don't even bother reading to the end of this paragraph. Just go.I've been using this program now for a few months and it has been fantastic in getting those pesky requirements down on paper before you spend a ton of time doing markup and css.It takes a little practice

Flex Examples

2009-05-13T19:44:00.001-05:00

This site has been very helpful lately for working with flex. I think I'll start serching hereFlex Examplescookbook plugin

SnipEx

2009-04-29T10:36:00.002-05:00

Does the SnipEx server support trigger text in cfeclipse? Doesn't seem to be nearly as much help without that or the ability to at least copy the snipets locally.

Does the Services Browser work in Ganymede?

2009-04-22T08:58:00.003-05:00

I've written before that bits of the ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse seem to be a bit bugged in Ganymede. I've found that the issues I ran into generally had some sort of workaround to get the thing to work if not as good as in Europa.This one has me stumped though. If you open the services browser and expand your list of components, I can never drill into the tree below the component name.

WoW! - AdobeTV

2009-03-11T12:05:00.001-05:00

I'm sure most people know about this already. I know I've been aware of the Adobe TV site pretty much since MAX 2008, but I never really dug into it. Wow! What a mistake. There is a TON of information here to help you get up and running with an adobe technology that you haven't spent a lot of time with yet.Even stuff that you might think you already know can be a great refresher. I just got

ColdFusion Report Builder is a great tool, but...

2009-02-23T09:27:00.002-05:00

Man, does it need work. Lots and lots of little annoying bugs make it a chore to work with. The results are pretty good, though, if you muddle through.Here are a few things I find maddening:No easy way to temporarily release snap-to-gridConstantly re-appearing borders.Selecting NONE for borders does not necessarily remove borders.No double underline. Mandatory for financial

.NET is dead

2009-02-07T12:56:00.004-05:00

Windows - Losing market share fast to Mac and Linux and Microsoft is losing market shareOffice - Google eyes the enterprise marketInternet Explorer - Internet Explorer Loses Market ShareWith the continuing decline in market share of all things Microsoft it's becoming obvious that .NET is not long for this world. With current trends extended, OS X will reach parity with Windows in 2022. .NET

Dreamweaver CS4 & Subversion = suckage

2009-02-02T16:53:00.002-05:00

Somebody should really be fired for the implementation of Subversion in DWCS4. Besides releasing old versions of the subversion client library that totally hamstring you from installing other svn clients on your machine, it's completely unstable.First things first, if you had been using TortoiseSVN prior to the release of CS4, you'll be happy to hear that you will have to completely uninstall it

CF9 HUGE WISH

2008-10-15T15:46:00.003-05:00

Ok, here's a wish for the next ColdFusion feature set. This is something that happens every so often and is a HUGE pain in the ass. Yes, you guessed it, certificate management for ColdFusion on the server.It would be a HUGE bonus to have a nice little gui in the administrator that lets you manage all those certificates that you need to work with when using something like cfhttp.

Adobe Goodness with CS4 upgrade pricing

2008-09-25T09:50:00.002-05:00

When I purchased my personal copy of CS3, it was very painful because it was the first time I had purchased a suite for my mac. No upgrade pricing...grrrr. It was so expensive that I just couldn't justify the purchase of the package I actually wanted but new I wouldn't really use (everything) on a daily basis. I wound up missing photoshop, illustrator and acrobat. After the fact, I found that

Rel: Beyond SQL and OOP

2008-08-29T10:23:00.003-05:00

Don't get too excited yet! Rel is still in the early formative stages as a product. Currently it's only usable as a teaching aid. So, what is it? It's the first (only?) implementation of a relational database. Ignoring the ANSI SQL guidelines, which some scholars feel are inherently flawed, the project has as it's driving goal to implement relation theory in a software product.I have to

Strange Ant/Eclipse (Ganymede) error

2008-08-25T13:33:00.002-05:00

This had me going for a long time trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Any time I tried to run an ant task from inside eclipse I would get this "waiting for virtual machine to exit" message and ant would just hang. Nothing in the console at all to tell me what was wrong.If I ran the same thing from the command line, everything worked fine, so it must be some eclipse setup thing

CF9 Wish

2008-08-08T10:32:00.002-05:00

Ok, so I'm a little late to the game on this one. The cf9 wish lists were going around a few months ago, but I'll chime in anyway.I like that we're going to be seeing an expansion of cfscript to the point that you can write an entire cfc in script. A cfscript version of cfquery would be really nice. It'll be interesting to see how cfqueryparam gets handled because that tag is so important and

MXUnit 1.0

2008-08-08T09:32:00.003-05:00

I've been remiss in my blogging! I don't have a single entry about mxunit. The project seems to be going really well thanks to the dedicated work that (theguys at mxuint dot org) are doing (yours truly is probably the biggest slacker of the bunch).If you haven't looked into test driven development, here are a few links to get you started:A good readable book to get the juices flowing: Test

Enterprise Architect now supports Flex

2008-07-08T09:55:00.003-05:00

The new eclipse integration in Enterprise Architect now supports Flex through their Model Driven Generation feature. The latest release of the Eclipse integration brings advanced modeling capabilities right inside Eclipse. Several new enhancements and performance improvements are also included. Take a sneak peak @ http://www.sparxsystems.com/products/ea/history.html.

Getters/Setters Redux

2008-06-18T14:44:00.008-05:00

There has been a lot of news about some of the forthcoming additions to CF9 and they all sound great! All the SysCon media and OpenBlueDragon chatter has been really tiresome. I'm glad that we're getting to hear about "neat" and "cool" stuff from Adobe again.One of the features that I've heard is planned for cf9 is implicit getters and setters. I imagine those will be along similar lines to

coldfusion.runtime.AbortException

2008-06-13T07:15:00.000-05:00

Most of the time when I'm working, I like to have CF hit me with as much debugging information as possible. I'm familiar with it enough now that I know what to ignore generally. Back in the days of cf7 ;) there was a little problem with CF throwing an error on every cflocation tag it hit if you had implemented the OnError method in your Application.cfc file. It has since been corrected,

No more Republicans

2008-05-13T16:32:00.005-05:00

Since there are no more Republicans in the race for President now, is there a chance that a third party or independent candidate can make a decent showing this time? Former Congressman Bob Barr has thrown his hat into the ring. It's unfortunate that he couldn't run as a Republican, but the Republican party appears to be more concerned with big business and protecting it's own skin than with

First production Tesla Roadster rolls of the assembly line today

2008-03-17T17:28:00.003-05:00

While Wall Street is losing its mind today over the Bear-Stearns fiasco, some good news was to be had. The first production Tesla Roadster rolled off the assembly line today. It is my feeling that this is the birth of the true American electric car (although it's made in the UK, future models will be made here). While it's got a price tag of a cool 100Gs, it performs as well as cars costing