Dale Fraser's Blog

ColdFusion should ditch YES / NO defaults

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:52:00 +0000

Recently Michał Paluchowski ‏@mpaluchowski posted on twitter
I'd like to meet whoever thought "yes" and "no" in ColdFusion would be better than "true" and "false".

To which I responded

not better, equivalent, you can use either or

Well it turns out what he was referring to is the default set by Coldfusion when evaluating. He posted the following example

try an assignment, as in: var foo = x < y. Returns "yes/no".

I did try it and he is right it returns yes / no. I think the days of Coldfusion being cute are over and we are talking with other languages Java / Javascript etc and we need to be dealing in what everyone else is, and thats true / false.

I would like to see Adobe change this default behaviour and before they run out and say, can't do it breaks backward compatibility, I say you need to do it, even if its an Administrator option.

Time to go hard or go home Coldfusion, this type of 4GL behaviour only hurts adoption.

Skype Blocking Web Services with IIS, ColdFusion & Railo

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:21:00 +0000

I recently installed Railo and when I tried to set it to port 80 it failed and after asking around I found that Skype had a hold on that port, closing Skype and all was fine.

I recently installed a local version of ColdFusion. Setup a new website to run https on port 443 and got this message when IIS tried to start the website.

the proces cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070020)

I immediately thought of Skype again, I closed Skype and started the website fine after that, seems Skype had a hold on port 443 also.

So if your having issues starting up web servers on port 80 or 443 trying closing Skype first.

PS: Skype still works fine afterwards, it must find different ports to use.

ActionScript HTML 5 Compiler

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:43:00 +0000

What Adobe need to do if they aren't already is allow ActionScript code from either a flash or flex application to be complied into various output formats. Currently the allow you to compile.

Shockwave Flash SWF
iPhone
Android
Blackberry
Windows
Macintosh
Linux

But with all the uncertainty about their recent departure from flash in the browser on mobile devices and the big HTML 5 push, why not announce you will eventually also allow compilation to HTML 5. Now perhaps not everything that flash does is supported initially, but most probably can be.

What this will do is stop people jumping of the flash path and heading down the HTML 5 path, as I can then have one code base that will compile and run pretty much anywhere. It also allows developers to use a nice strongly typed language and have the compiler have the necessary html 5 / Java script libraries behind the scenes.

HTML 5 is going forward with or without this, Adobe is one of few tools that allow wide range of cross compilation and tying all this together, just makes sense.

I have a feeling they are already working on this, and if so great however they need to announce it so that people can talk about this direction and answer questions over the future of their ActionScript projects.

Good, Cheap, Quick!

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:29:00 +0000

One of my favourite old sayings, goes like this. Good Cheap Quick, pick any two you like.

I've used it often in software development, but it applies to everything in life, from having your house painted to organising a wedding.

You see its a simple concept, that people understand mostly, yet people still want all 3, well the all 3 doesn't really exist, if you think you have found the golden egg of technology that will deliver all 3, I'd love to know. Technologies are a strange and wonderful beast, they are combined to create a certain magic that enables the users to achieve things, automate things, create things. Whatever the application may be there generally is a technology that will facility the application.

I used to think that there would come a technology that would make everything good, cheap and quick. Yet the technology community loves to complicate things. Normally there is method to the madness of complicating things, but not always. Technology will not only set you free, but often lock you up. Its easy to get swept up in a technology trend, I once managed a software team, that was constantly we need, X, now we need Y, we should use this framework, now we should rewrite it using this framework and so it went on. Problem is nothing ever got done, so it was neither Good, Cheap or Quick. It was Bad, Expensive & Slow.

Lets take .NET as a technology example.

Good? Yes
Cheap? No
Quick? Yes

Well, you could debate that Good is No and Cheap is Yes (because its free right) and Quick could be a No also, especially if you don't know what your doing. But for the sake of the example, lets say.

Good: Clean typed language, great syntax and powerful framework
Cheap: Hell no, I need Visual Studio, MS SQL Server & MS Servers, its crazy expensive
Quick: Well it can be if you know what your doing.

But wait, that's the technology, that's really got nothing to do with the old Good Cheap Quick does it? Its the applications that you write using this technology that we want to evaluate? Well if your trying to sell a solution to a company, you can evaluate the tool, the development, the deployment, the maintenance in the good cheap quick.

Most just evaluate the application, but its not really fair to say .NET is free. Tool is free, if you use notepad. Database is free, if you use SQL Express. Deployment is free if you find a free .NET host, Maintenance is free if your .NET host is patching the servers for you and you don't change the app.

However in reality everything costs money. If you want a decent IDE you pay for it, if you want decent developers you pay for them, if you want good hosting / infrastructure you pay for it. And if you want your servers maintained you pay for that too.

So nothing is cheap then? Well in my opinion there is little real cost difference between most technologies. That means everything must be Good and Quick?

Don't be sucked into the ColdFusion is bad, Java is good, pick the right technology for the job.
Don't be sucked into the PHP is free, Oracle is expensive argument, pick the right technology for the job.
Don't be sucked into the Rails is fast and C++ is slow argument, pick the right technology for the job.

If your already lost and don't really understand the point I'm making, then your probably going to think that the Good Cheap Quick phase doesn't work in software development. I'd argue that it does, but technology is a small factor. Because these technologies don't do anything without one of these.

I have a Good Cheap programmer.
I have a Cheap Quick programmer.
I have a Good Quick programmer.

Which one would you hire :)

iPhone 5 Hardware Changes

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:33:00 +0000

Along with all the features announced in the 4S, there are some specific things the iPhone 5 needs in my opinion. Things that would take it to the next level, in my order of preference.

Larger Screen
The phone is too small, for games, reading books, mail etc, it could benefit from a larger screen like other new smart phones, how large? Not sure, but picking up an iPhone 4 after playing with a new Samsung, the iPhone seems really small.
Vibrate Switch
Get rid of it, its not needed, and is a pain. Its constantly changing from vibrate to ring in my pocket, even with a cover. This really isn't necessary, swapping to silent should be a software switch like a lot of other phones
4G Support
This phone has to support the new 4G networks, like Telstra's
HDMI Output
The ability to output from the iPhone to a projector / monitor / TV would be awesome. This kinda already exists, but a mini HDMI port would be better.
LED Light
How I miss my BlackBerry LED light, it flashed and told me when I had something to check, I didn't need to turn the phone on to see. One multi color LED on the iPhone 5 could do so many things, with different color / flashing combinations, and allow the user to configure if and when it displays and what color to use for what.
1080p Screen
At 326ppi that might make the device too big, but who says we can't improve on 326ppi. The 4S records in 1080p, but what's the point if you cant see it. There are already some other 342ppi screens, so getting to the right density isn't as far off as it seems. And the new dual core chip upgrades should be able to render them.

Now if the iPhone 5 had all that, it would be truly amazing, probably unlikely. Personally I'd be happy if I get 1-3, which might just happen. Hope I didn't miss anything obvious, if I did, let me know.

Disable Windows 8 Metro Interface

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 03:33:00 +0000

While there is no inbuilt way to disable the Metro aka Tablet interface of Windows 8 that is given to you by default, this is really necessary, especially if your trying Windows 8 on a laptop without multi touch support.

It however can be done, there are programs that allow you to switch it or if your like me and would rather just do it manually follow these steps

Hover your cursor bottom left, you will see a start menu, select Search
In the search box, type regedit, there will be one match click and run it
From regedit navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
Change the RPEnabled key to a 0 which is Metro off or 1 for Metro on

Windows 8 Desktop Interface

That's it your up and running, no reboot or anything required. Now to go and really test Windows 8

Windows 8 Not for the Desktop

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:43:00 +0000

We have been trying Windows 8 our, and it went pretty smoothly to start with, it installed on a laptop, booted and ran quickly and ran our software in some quick tests.

However, the UI has completely changed, it designed to be run on a Tablet, not a Windows type pen based tablet either, an iPad / Android type tablet. Firstly you cant close a program, you just hit the tablet button (wait I don't have one on the desktop) to return to the menu of applications. I eventually worked out that the Windows key will get you there, but the entire UI of running applications, multi tasking, switching between applications has changed.

Conceptually the ability to run the same operating system on a Desktop / Tablet is great, I can get my normal programs, files etc., from any device. But in reality at the moment the operating system has moved too far to the tablet arena at the expense of Desktop usability. I'm assuming or hoping that between now and the release the two models will improve and the ability to switch between the two will be more natural.

On another note, this operating system really needs a multi touch screen or device, I'm not at all keen to touch my laptop screen even if it was multi touch (which it isn't) so really new laptops & desktops are going to need a largish multi touch trackpad, like the ones in the Mac Books and the Magic Trackpad for apple desktops.

Its safe to assume that Microsoft's hardware partners are thinking through this and this type of hardware will present its self well ahead of the release of Windows 8. The down side, is your current laptop really doesn't support Windows 8. And your current desktop will need a bit of extra hardware to take advantage. What this translates to is more expense and a hardware investment.

If Microsoft do manage to meld the desktop / laptop version of Windows 8 to a more desktop centric operating system before release, perhaps the multi touch devices wont be needed, time will tell.

If you currently wish to hack the UI to revert back to desktop mode you can do this by changing a registry setting see here for the full details
http://dale.fraser.id.au/2011/09/disable-windows-8-metro-interface.html

Developer Shortage

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 11:08:00 +0000

Over the years in Melbourne Australia its been getting harder to get good developers. I spent over 10 years doing pure development, worked hard earned my promotions.

I always tried to do more or better than the guy at the next desk, while I was never worried about job security as I've never been unemployed, I wanted to prove my self to both management and peers. The situation is much different these days, there are more positions than developers, so developers are getting cold called for positions, can land a different job with more money often quite easily.

Advertising positions often finds a poor range of people / skills, a lot of people who have little or no work experience in Australia and looking for an opportunity, people from different states, long term out of work, and other various combinations of unsuitable people. There are good people out there, but how do you attract them?

Traditionally I've been a fan of getting young smart people and training them, I've had great success with this method for a long time, and will do it again, but it comes with a penalty of time and investment, this method isn't suitable if you want to replace a senior experienced person quickly.

I was wondering if less people look to move during difficult financial times as any move is risky and also subject to a probation, any new job you take may or may not be suitable, so perhaps less people are looking. I was also wondering has Seek had its day, are people sick of the volume of positions / emails that come through daily, they stop looking at them.

So perhaps its time to revisit recruitment agencies, which I am generally loathed to use due to an experience I had as an employee. An agency asked me how much I wanted, and when I told them, they said they could get me more, and they did. I of course was very happy with this at the time, but later reflected they are working for and paid by the employer, yet they are working against them, costing the employer more in salaries and in turn fees.

So what's the solution? More networking, more tweeting, more advertising, more time? There is no clear obvious solution, I think its going to be a combination of many things. I currently have 4 positions advertised received 40+ applications, and while there are some worthy of consideration, there are no stand out people. So I've spent $1,000 on seek, and while its not a lot of money in comparison to an agency, its not value for money.

I'm interested in what others are doing to find people, more so the good solid proven developers, how do you find them, how do you lure them away from the comfort of their existing positions.

How I got started in ColdFusion

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:44:00 +0000

In around 2000 I worked for a company who was basically a DOT.COM and there wasn't anything to do. I was in technical pre sales, which meant running around with the sales team answering all the technical questions. Problem was they weren't selling anything, which meant I spent many hours in the office with nothing to do.

So I did some self learning, did a Red Hat certification, played around with various other technologies also. A company in Australia called Firmware from memory was sending me info and CD's on ColdFusion every month. The first few months just went in the bin, I got a lot of junk. But one day, I popped in a CD and had a play, before I knew it I was writing a simple app that pulled data from an Access database. I immediately thought, wow that was easy, compared to some Perl work I had done in the couple years prior especially.

Needless to say, that 9 months of boredom in, I left and took up a CTO position within a division of one of Australia's largest public companies. I was in charge of delivering a $2mil web development which was very big back then. Unfortunately it had already been outsourced and signed and I just needed to get it delivered. It was a large complex ASP application (Pre .NET). And while it worked and did what the spec said it should do, it was a piece of rubbish. It was supposed to have an admin module which it did, but it was a VB app.

I convinced the CEO that we should hire some staff and rewrite the admin module internally. This was far more cost effective than the external company maintaining the existing system. So having recently discovered how easy and powerful ColdFusion was, I thought, we could do this in ColdFusion very fast. We hired two developers and 3 months later had rewritten and deployed the admin functionality, web based and 10x the functionality.

ColdFusion did what it does best, delivers a solution quickly. The business loved it and me for recommending it and the rest is history. Unfortunately it was another DOT.COM and didn't last too long.

I have been a CTO now for 12 years across 3 companies and always found a use for ColdFusion, it might be a small development, it might be something large, but ColdFusion still has a place.

I do use and recommend other technologies also, I don't think that ColdFusion is the only solution and its not for every application, but I don't think I'll stop using it any time soon.

Why Nintendo Will Fail

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 01:50:00 +0000

Nintendo are a great company with a great set of technology and games franchises. I have two kids, one 7 year old boy who loved Nintendo stuff, had a Nintendo DS since he was 3, had a Wii, loves Mario, Donkey Kong Country and lots of other games.

We have a lot of friends with kids of a similar age, all had Nintendo DS, and many also had Wii. But something changed in the last two years. My son didn't want the new Nintendo DSi or 3DS. He wanted an iPhone. I had an iPhone, my wife had an iPhone. Well he wasn't getting an iPhone, but I did say he could get an iPod touch.

He was only 5 at the time, and he was torn, he really wanted the new DS, but he also wanted the iPod touch. Ultimately he choose the iPod touch. He wanted more than just games, he wanted movies, YouTube, the camera and other things his DS didn't have at the time.

Now while Nintendo make some great games, there is so much rubbish released, you quickly get annoyed. I have purchased many $50 DS games that he played for 5 mins and never touched again. I looked at these games and they were rubbish, simple boring platform games but with a brand character like Sponge Bob that made him want it.

But the iPod was different, I gave him my password, disabled In-App purchases and said you can buy one game a week as long as its only $1. He loves this, he has an unlimited amount of free games / apps available that he can download and play instantly and then he can buy one a week. That one a week $52 yearly is about the cost of a single DS game, and I was buying around one a month.

What came next was unexpected. He completely ditched the Wii and the DS, never touched them again, never had any interest, I bring home an iPad from work, he plays it all weekend. But the DS and the Wii have been discarded. We have an Xbox also, and it wasn't ditched though it was played less, the advent of the Kinect and the nice online store helped there.

Now Nintendo are set to release a new console. It has a fancy touch screen controller and can play the entire game on the controller if someone wants to watch TV. Sounds good for families, until I saw the big cable out of the back of the controller. Now i'm not sure about everyone else, but wireless controllers are now required. Going back to a wired controller doesn't seem like a viable option to me. Also these controllers look big and expensive, when you have kids they want 4 to play with their friends, I'm not paying $100+ 4 times just for controllers.

What could Nintendo do? Well they could release their games on iPod / iPhone / iPad / Android, the SNES Zelda would sell millions of copies overnight alone. But this is unlikely, they are like apple and like to control everything.

What must Nintendo do? Well they must have a good online store with inexpensive and free games. And not just crappy ports from SNES, good quality independent games for free and $1. This is the only way I would consider going back. I will never pay $50 for another Nintendo game and I am seeing the same pattern from our group of friends with kids.

What might Nintendo do? They might come up with another must have device that everyone buys and is a major success. But the 3DS is NOT it and the Wii U is NOT it.

What will Nintendo do? I think they will scramble, try desperately to fix it, wait way too long before the realise the extent of the trouble they are in and then ultimately sell or collapse and suffer the fate of Atari, Sega and many others.

As a closing note, my 3 year old daughter plays our iPhones every single day, she has never played a Nintendo device and never shown any interest.

Flex 4.5 TextArea Enable Tab Key

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 23:33:00 +0000

I was working on a file editor in Flex and I needed to be able to tab within the edit pane without actually tabbing out of the TextArea.

Well there are many ways to achieve this, firstly you could subclass the TextArea or listen for the tab key, but here is the solution I came up with, I find it simple and clearly visible to developers as to what it's doing.

As you can see i'm preventing the default action of the tab key then inserting 4 spaces in its place. Using the insertText method inserts the text at the current cursor position, this is ideal for editing where you wish to insert a tab mid paragraph etc.

Of course if you wanted to actually insert a tab you can just replace the 4 spaces with "\t"

Flash Builder 4.5 Produce Native Installer

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 12:33:00 +0000

I discovered a new option in Flash Builder 4.5

Export as:

Signed native installer

This actually produces a native installer instead of the AIR installer. The application still requires AIR however as its still an AIR application. I haven't tested yet what happens if you attempt to install this without AIR installed, but I assume it will want you to install AIR first.

What I would really love to see is it produce a native application, and not just an installer, and bundle all required into a single standalone exe. There are other products out there that do this already, my favourite being MDM Zinc.

Code Signing Adobe AIR applications with DigiCert

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Tue, 31 May 2011 05:52:00 +0000

I'm posting this because the process of signing an Adobe AIR application should be simple, yet it isn't and the instructions on the DigiCert site doesn't really help.

First off I purchased a certificated from DigiCert. For under $200 a year, not too bad. After several days they eventually sent it, they have to verify your a real company and actually call you etc.

The certificate comes in the form of a link in an email. You click the link and it installs the certificate into your browser / system. From there DigiCert offer instructions for IE users and for Firefox users how to export it. I was using chrome, but with luck the ie instructions apply.

So it says to go into mmc add in the Certificates snap in, under personal, find the certificate, right click export. So that was easy enough, I did that generated it, plugged it into Flash Builder and made my AIR file.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Firstly you may get a weird warning when trying to install your AIR app about it being corrupt or similar, this really means that your application has changed but the id is the same and it cant compare the one you have to the one you want. Simple solution, uninstall any current version of your application.

With that done, I built it again, and it worked, except I still had the Not Trusted red X, no company name etc, whats going on? After looking around for a bit, I looked at my certificate and it's not valid. Its not valid because the root certificate couldn't be trusted.

Simple fix is to find the root certificate on the DigiCert website, and install it, make sure you pick to choose the location, it needs to go into Trusted Root Certification Authorities. If you go back and look at your certificate, you will see its now valid.

Root certificates for DigiCert are available here
The one I needed was DigiCert Assured ID Root CA which was visible from the certification path tab.

Rebuild the package and all is good.

Make sure that when exporting you tick Yes to export the private Key, and tick the Include all certificates in the certification path if possible. When you export it will ask for a password, use that same password when selecting your certificate from Flash Builder.

iPhone / iPad / iOS 5 Top 10 Wish List

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:13:00 +0000

Apple,

Your 95% there, just finish the job. The iPhone / iPad are great devices, but there are some key missing bits that annoy me daily. And these I believe are simple things, so they shouldn't pose any real challenge. Also in non conversation mode, it knows if your message is a reply, but there is no way to click anything to see the original.

1. Mail
Please give me the option to see all unread mail. I need to do this every day, many times a day, and scrolling through a list of 1000+ mail items is just bad user experience and slow.

2. Exchange Sync
The exchange sync is pretty good, however it's still not BlackBerry good. Couple things, notes dont sync over wireless, u need to sync through iTunes. And events dont properly sync. If I accept a meeting on my PC (yes I dont use a mac) it still shows on my phone with an accept option, it doesn't know I've accepted the meeting elsewhere.

3. Facebook Chat
The facebook app is ok, but the Facebook website is much better. And on the iPad specifically works great, but the chat isn't enabled. Enable this and my wife doesn't need a laptop she can survive with just an iPad.

4. Application Ripoff
I didn't realize until recently that many apps come in two versions iPhone and iPod versions. I think this is a con / ripoff. Its like buying Photoshop and then you upgrade your Airbook to a 27" iMac and you need to buy it again. They are getting away with this because its a HD version, better graphics etc. But Apple need to stop this, it should work on all iOS devices. The pricing is also very unfair. Take Angry Birds for example $1. But $5 for iPad, is it 5x better, was it 5x as much work to develop? No its priced like this, oh you can afford an iPad you can pay more.

5. Restrictions
If you have kids, they love to play with these devices, so disabling in app purchases and deletion of apps is a must. But you cant disable rearranging icons. Every time my 2yo daughter gets my iPhone she moves every icon into groups etc and I cant stop it.

6. Messages
When viewing Text (SMS) messages, if there are a group of messages the device considers related it shows the time for the first one only, I need to see the time of each message thanks, put a timestamp on every message.

7. Dashboard
I'd like a dashboard / home screen that shows you upcoming meetings new mail etc, customizable of course. Every other device has something like this.

8. Notifications
I had to turn off all reminders, why? Because the iPhone decides that the best time to notify you of recurring events that don't have a time, such as birthdays is midnight. So rather than being woken at midnight I'd like it to allow me to pick a time for notification of untimed events or disable notifications of untimed events.

9. App Purchases
If you purchase an app that you have already purchased it tells you and says you already purchased this and so you can download it again free, great. But it doesn't tell you that until after. So I recently knew I had purchased an $8 app, went to get it again. Waited for the you have already downloaded it, but I never got it. And got charged again for the app. So wouldn't it make more sense to just tell me before hand or have a way to determine this.

10. Flash Player
This is only 10 because I dont think its coming. However my wife does Facebook, Facebook Chat, Facebook Games. 1 works fine on an iPad, 2 & 3 don't thus im not going to buy her one. Add flash for things like games etc and you will sell more devices plain and simple. For those performance / battery issues, allow people to disable it if they choose. If you think you will sell less apps because of it, well thats no longer relevant now that Flash can be compiled to iPhone legally and I'd rather have an installed app than run an online app any time. But Apple a high of all sports websites that show live scores use flash and there are many more examples like this.

I know I wont get all of these in iOS 5, but I think they are all reasonable requests needed for a reason not for a passion of desire.

ColdFusion & Server Side ActionScript

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 04:02:00 +0000

Over 2 years ago, I posted why ColdFusion 9 Needs ActionScript Support

More recently Ben Forta has mentioned the idea again, and I'm still for it. We currently have two technologies that work well independently and talk together well, but there is no code sharing and a host of syntax / formatting issues.

We have a current requirement for some code that will run both on the server, and standalone, offline. So how can we do this exactly?

Well its currently ColdFusion code, this cant run standalone offline, not without a ColdFusion licence for every customer, thats not going to happen.

So we could rewrite the code in ActionScript, and run it offline in an AIR app, but that doesn't run on the server, not easily at least.

Thus what are we supposed to do, maintain two versions in different languages, thats just a bad idea, there needs to be a solution to this from Adobe, the lack of a solution will lead us to look at the other offerings.

I could use Microsoft C#, runs on the server under ASP.NET, runs standalone.
I could us Sun Java, runs on the server under tomcat etc, runs standalone.

In our case, Microsoft is off the list because it doesn't allow cross platform use. And Java has its own issues but at the moment the only solution.

But the solution I prefer is for Adobe to commit to having a server side version of ActionScript. And I care not if its called ColdFusion or part of ColdFusion, but having access to all the ColdFusion goodness would be great. But firstly I would like to see Adobe commit to it, it was demonstrated at Max several years ago. And I honestly don't think that many will wait another 2 years before they decide the future of the product.

Im sure some will disagree, but from my companies point of view, its needed.

ColdFusion 9 Script Based Queries

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 02:46:00 +0000

We are gradually migrating over to ColdFusion 9.

With any future development we will use script based code as much as possible.

I've gotten used to it, love the new keyword, love ternary operations and lots more.

Writing my first bit of query code using full script, I was loving it, until that is I got to addParam.

There are two problems with addParam that I have

1. You have to used named parameters, which makes the code overly verbose
2. You have to still prefix the types with cf_sql_ which again is overly verbose.

Here is an example.

So what you can see here is both the named parameters on line 6 and the cf_sql_ on the data type.

Luckily the Query component is written itself in ColdFusion, so you can just change it.

I considered just overwriting the method addParam but thought it might get me into trouble down the path, so I decided to add a new method setParam which is in Query.cfc and looks like this

So as you can see very simple, just has the same parameters, name, value cfsqltype in a specific order. It also prepends the cf_sql_ if it doesn't exist in the type. So my original code can now look like this

Now I'm sure that not everyone will agree, but I don't like writing unnecessarily long verbose code for no good reason

ColdFusion demise on Seek

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:56:00 +0000

ColdFusion and others seem to have fallen into a special category on Seek now.

It seems that if you search for something that isn’t significant enough, then it will give you what it thinks you are better off looking at.

So my daily seek ColdFusion email subscription, is now about 30 jobs, of which you would be lucky to find of those has ColdFusion at all.

Seek seems to think I should be moving to .NET most of the positions I get are .NET, but it’s a mix with Java & php & others.

Try it yourself, I think it’s a stupid decision of Seek, I just want it to find what I’m looking for not what you think I’m interested in. Now without going through all 30 adds someone looking can’t really tell if any of them have a ColdFusion requirement at all.

Try the link below

It’s a search for ColdFusion

2,750 jobs

See Seek Results Here

Searching for ASP.NET only returns 835

Hopefully if we make enough noise they might fix it.

ColdFusion Convert A Query Row to a Struct in 1 line?

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:18:00 +0000

I was writing a webservice today and part of what I wanted to return was a query.

However the query also returns things I don't want like the sql, which shows database table names etc.

Since this is a webservice for a 3rd party developer, I didn't want them to have this. I tried using convertQueryForGrid which dropped the sql but seems to break access to the query data also, or at least the rules are different.

So I looked around asked a few people and got the answer not possible. I asked Steve Onnis on Skype and he also said not possible. But a few hours later came back with this.

Now I couldn't write this, but understand (kinda) what its doing, its generating a long complex variable using regEx and evaluating it. Very scary, but very cool indeed.

Melbourne Australia Cheap Flex 4 for ColdFusion Developers Training

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:19:00 +0000

Kai Koenig is giving a talk on integrating Flex 4 for ColdFusion Developers
at cfobective ANZ in Melbourne this year.

This type of training is really expensive normally, and so $295 for a 1 day
course is excellent value.

Flex 4 for ColdFusion developers (and others) (Kai Koenig)
Price: AU$ 395 (early bird price until 31/08: AU$ 295)

A lot of server- and client-side web developers are interested in making the
leap towards using a Rich Client technology like Adobe's Flash or Flex. This
workshop will help you to get you up to speed with Flex and will put a
strong focus on integrating Flex applications with Adobe ColdFusion.

During the first half of the day we'll introduce the basics of Flex, discuss
MXML and ActionScript and certain elements of the Flex component library. We
will discuss event handling, basic skinning in Flex 4 and build a straight
forward Flex application following the Model-View-Controller pattern.

The second half of the day will focus on integrating with backends and data,
in particular ColdFusion. We are going to discuss HTTP and XML Web services
as well as AMF-based remoting and using CFCs as backend business and data
access logic. We're also going to have a look at the integrated BlazeDS
engine in CF 9 and will look into ways to speed up your development process
with using Flash Builder and its data wizards.

Also covered: XML configuration files for Flex in CF and setting up custom
channels and adapters to make your development and deployment processes
quicker and more flexible.

NOTE: You do not have to attend the conference to book a workshop.

http://www.cfobjective.com.au/go/program/workshops

Creating a new Gmail address took control of my Google account

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:58:00 +0000

I have been using Google Apps on my domain for a couple years now, and its great. I have the same username and domain linked to my main Google Account, from which I run groups, blogs, and lots of other stuff.

But I recently signed up for another gmail account, and I'm not sure how but it decided to link these two accounts, apparently it warned me somewhere along the line, but I don't remember it. I either was logged into my Google account when I signed up or nominated that email as a secondary email address.

Here is what it said

If you complete this form, you'll be adding Gmail to this account, and your Gmail address will become your primary account username.

If you would prefer, you can create a separate Google Account for Gmail. You'll be logged out of user@domain.com and then be able to create your new account.

Little did I realise but it took this new gmail email and made it the primary email address on my Google Account, which used to use my own domain. So i've gone from an owned domain primary email address to some crappy gmail address that I just created.

The worst thing was, you can't change it. I was locked into it, I searched high and low for a solution and there was none. You can't change the primary email address.

I removed the now secondary email (my domain one) and tried signing up again using this, that worked however all my groups, blog, addsense everything was still linked to the other account, (the gmail one).

So I deleted the one I just created and re linked it to the main account, I'm back where I started, still searching looking for a solution, nothing.

I'm getting really annoyed as it's just ruined my Google account. But being fairly technical I kept trying things and came up with the solution.

From your google account, you can edit services, one of these options is to remove gmail from the account. When I removed the new gmail service, it asked me what I wanted to use for the new primary email, I specified my original one and voila im back in business.

I seem to have lost the gmail address, when I log into it, its logging back to my domain account and listed as an other username. No idea how to get rid of them, but I'll keep trying.

I really hope this helps all the people that think there is no solution. I did loose the new gmail address

Using Adobe Flex 4 and spark.effects to create a cool star-field

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 04:59:00 +0000

Was working with the 3D features of Flex 4 and ActionScript specifically

spark.effects.move3D
spark.effects.rotate3D
spark.effects.scale3D

For a presentation at the Melbourne Flex User Group and decided to create a 3D star-field. This worked out well for my demo, it allowed me to demonstrate something real.

You can control the star-field, the controls, top-bottom are

Perspective Projection X
Perspective Projection Y
Speed of effect
Size of Star
Direction of Movement

Have a play, check out the source code, I have enabled View Source, so right click and view source from the star-field. All feedback welcome

View Star-Field In full window

Wake Up Steve Jobs

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:01:00 +0000

It seems you have regressed to the ways back when you were outed from Apple last time, that is you think you know better than everyone else and just want your own way.

Well have a look in the mirror, think about the thousands of users your annoying and wake up.

Of course I'm referring to your stance on the Flash player, but its not just this. You like to control everything and block everything and force people to do things the way you want them to.

Some of this I'm prepared to say, oh well that's you way of doing things, fair enough. But watching your video today, just reminded me of how arrogant you are. Your basic stance is that well if people don't like it they wont buy it and we are selling one every 3 seconds.

Congratulations, yes you do have a lot of Apple fan boys who will buy products that they cant even tell you what they will use them for, bravo. But you also make good products and people realise that it might be good and just buy it, and of recent times the products have been quite good.

Specifically the iPhone, which is the best portable device / phone I have ever had, and I've had my fair share. Nokia's, Windows Phones, Blackberry's and now an iPhone. So its a great device, and had the potential to really take over the market and be the number one phone.

But when things go well, Steve Jobs get cocky and looses the ability to think rationally. Rather than support Flash like every other device is planning, he comes up with lame excuses, lets have a look at some, and how they keep changing to suit the day.

Flash is too slow - Umm, the iPad has a powerful processor, no longer valid argument.
It wastes too much battery - Umm they have enhanced this in 10.1 next
It crashes a lot - Clearly thats why almost every video site uses it because they like sites that crash, Youtube find something else Youtube keeps crashing, lame
Its no longer needed or relevant - Steve name your top 10 sites and I bet half have flash.

When the whole world knows that its really about the the money, you don't want to loose control over apps and your share of the profits, you want to remain big brother. You could just be honest.

While the iPhone is a great device, the software is quite lame, if Microsoft released this they would be laughed at. Consider the following and I'm just picking on mail here I could go through each app like this.

There is no way to see unread mail, I have to scroll through hundreds of messages to find the one I haven't read, really a Nokia can do this?
The system often just crashes and looses everything, all mail etc and then just quietly starts syncing it, if we don't tell them we got an error its like it didn't happen. Microsoft were smart enough to actually capture it and display a message, aka Blue Screen of Death.
It doesn't remotely sync notes, Blackberry has done this for years.
It knows that I have replied to a message, but there is no way to see this message, I need to go find it, come on?
And lots of other little items.

So while your products are selling well, others will come along do what your doing, do it better and cheaper and you will again loose a dominance that you could have sealed. We all know Apple is no good at making products at a reasonable price point.

The HTC Desire android phone, already addresses most of the above issues and its brand new. But you don't care because your selling 1 every 3 seconds. Is it really a surprise to you now that Android is outselling the iPhone, wake up Steve Jobs and think about how many you could be selling if you weren't so inflexible.

WebDU 2010 Review

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Sun, 09 May 2010 10:45:00 +0000

WebDU 2010 was the first time I've managed to attend a WebDU, its always been a hard decision you need to consider the time, the cost and value of talks on offer. But this year it was easy, this is due to two things, there were a lot of topics I was interested in and there was also a Mini User Group summit the day after.

Cost and time wise its still a decent investment, is that investment worthwhile? Well for me yes. I actually enjoyed every session I attended, this was a 50/50 mix of technical / management type topics. Meeting the people you talk to on Twitter also has some value, I managed to end up sitting next to people that I follow and after talking to them realise who they were.

The event has a very different feel to MAX. Its much smaller, much more personal and has a more casual feel to the whole event. You don't book your topics, you just turn up on the day, which I was initially wondering how that would work if too many people wanted one topic, but it seemed to work, never struggled to find a seat. You got to walk away from the conference feeling like you knew a decent % of the people there.

The venue it's self was a bit dated, but it was clean and in a great location right on Bondi Beach. I really liked the close proximity of the rooms to the conference rooms, it meant you could sneak back to your room and do some work if you wanted to during lunch or other breaks. This suited me very well. The actual conference rooms were well equipped, with the mandatory water, mints and really good sound & video. I wasn't in a single session where the audio visual wasn't working.

The hidden treasure of WebDU that didn't really hit me before, is that it's not really an Adobe conference. While there is a large % of people doing Adobe stuff, other players were well represented. The final day speaker question panel consisted of Adobe, Microsoft, Yahoo & Atlassian. I really loved that they did that, and these guys like to jibe each other and have fun. Interestingly enough, 3 of the 4 people had actually worked for Adobe at one point.

The speakers were very good, and aside from the good quality topics the speakers were generally entertaining, I found Terrence Ryan's talks very good and Tim Buntell's Muppet was classic.

And finally the organisation of the event was top notch, Geoff Bowers and his team, seemed to be able to sit down calmly and let it all happen without raising an eye brow. Sessions started and finished on time and everything ran like clock work. There is nothing worse than missing the first 10 minutes of a talk.

I would like to see Twitter handle & perhaps avatar on the ID, some people wrote it on. The ID should also be printed on both sides, these things keep flipping to the blank side. For someone that doesn't attend many conferences it would make it easier for me to identify and connect with people.

The Mini User Group manager summit was also good, turned out to be different than I expected, we did probably 50/50 strategy / socialising. But there was defiantly a lot of passionate people there that are working hard to help the community.

Overall I was very impressed with the entire event, I actually preferred WebDU over MAX, the main 2 factors being the size and the mix of vendors. I will definitely be back or send others in following years, we will also be attending Remix2010 and cfobjective ANZ this year and perhaps others.

Open letter to Adobe Flash Player team.

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:16:00 +0000

Dear Adobe,

Please consider that every time you decide to limit what the flash player can do, you are really stopping people taking existing applications and converting them to Flash / Flex.

We have some software, that is very simple in concept, it displays some stimuli and asks you to respond and records your responses. Now without reading every spec and doc, flash seems like it would do this easily, and it does. Compared to our C++ version, the Flex version is less than 20% of the code.

But there are the gotchas.

First our application allows you to use a mouse,

Left Click = No
Right Click = Yes

But no, I can't use the Right mouse button in Flash, Adobe won't allow it, I have no idea why, thus my flash version can't support this type of input.

Well OK, I guess users will just have to use the keyboard. Because you can also press

D = No
K = Yes

Which seems simple enough, no way the flash player would stop that right? Wrong, once you go into full screen mode, you have no access to the keyboard. This is the most unusual security feature I have ever come across.

The only semi valid reason I have stumbled across, is that someone might emulate a desktop and try to get you to enter some personal details, passwords etc. But hey even if that is valid and it may be, I only want to use two keys, 4 actually.

K, D, Enter, Tab

Now the latest Flash player 10, they have relaxed the security and now allow

Tab, Space & Arrow keys. 6 keys

So a step in the right direction, perhaps people can now do full screen games.

But why adobe, do you decide the keys, why is left arrow safer than K, how is Tab better than Enter, the answer is they aren't. Adobe you have decided to take a guess at some keys that might be handy to some and allow them rather than think through the problem a bit more.

So I have a solution for you Adobe, rather than give me the 6 keys you predefined, allow me to use any 6 keys I wish. Let me register 6 key codes that will work with my application. Better yet let me use any 6 alpha keys and any 6 non alpha keys. People writing full screen 3D games in flash can then use the traditional wsad keys with the arrows, perhaps, ctrl to shoot, shift to jump.

So please consider Adobe, allow me to specify which keys I can use, and while your at it, consider why I can't decide to use the right mouse button if I so choose.

A visitor suggested I raise issues to allow people to vote and comment, so I have done this.

Allow programatic control of what keys are allowed
https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-4397

Allow programatic use of right click
https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-4398

Why webdu 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Dale Fraser) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:03:00 +0000

I'm finally going to go to WebDU, first time. And in the past I have been critical of both the price and the fact that it doesn't move.

I still think the price is a bit on the high side, but having spent a lot of time in the US of late, you come to realise that things in Australia are just more expensive, thus the cost of running WebDU in Australia is more expensive than something comparable overseas.

I would still like to see it roam, I like the MAX style conference, where not only do you get to go to a conference you get to see a different city. Vegas 2006 being my favourite. The other big reason for it to roam is to just get different people through the gates, but given this is an independantly run conference not run by Adobe it's unlikely. The good news is that, Mark Mandel now runs a Melbourne cfobjective.

So what compelled me to go this year, well it isn't the location or the surfing and i'm not getting a free ticket. Its the content. WebDU this year has so much good content that I'm actually going to have to miss a lot of good stuff.

We are moving prety rapidly to Flex and the entire Flash / Flex stream has lots of great topics that warrant my attention. The other main track that I really like is the Team / UX one, as a manager, there are some great topics in there i'm also interested in.

Its really hard for me to find a conference, where I look at the agenda and say, wow there is a lot of stuff in there for me, but there really is this year. And that to me makes it a worthwhile investment.

If you haven't already checked out the WebDU agenda, I would encourage you to do so.
http://www.webdu.com.au/agenda