Over this past week, I started using Coldspring in an application that I have been building at work; I love the fact that I don't have to call create object in every function, and it should save me mountains of time once I become used to writing the coldspring config files. However, I ran into a small problem yesterday that I haven't been able to figure out.
Last night at the Sacramento ColdFusion User Group, Seth Duffey presented on the topic of SCRUM. SCRUM is an iterative incremental framework for managing complex work (such as new product development). (Wiki) The presentation he gave was really great, and my place of work has decided to adopt this approach for managing our projects. There are lots of advantages to using SCRUM over traditional methods like the waterfall approach. Some of the advantages include: supporting project change throughout the development life cycle, keeping clients involved in the coarse of the development process so they understand failures and successes, and pointing out team or organizational weak points.
Lately at work I have been playing around a lot with ColdFusion Builder, and I decided to install the Flash Builder Plug-in to make my development a little bit easier. After installing the Flash Builder Plug-in, my Eclipse Environment kept crashing on me which started to become really frustrating. I did some research on the subject and found some pretty straight forward solutions that might be helpful for those who have just started with ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder.
I have been working on a site for a local realtor in Carson City, Nevada. In a sit down meeting we decided to purchase a list of domain names which all included the string Realtor, carsoncityrealtor.com, carsoncityrealtor.org etc... I have come to find out that Realtor is a trade marked name for the National Association of Realtors and cannot be used in conjuction with a location, which is reserved for local and state realtor boards. I am having trouble understanding how such a generic name can be Trade Marked, and I honestly had no idea that this might be a problem. Its seems wrong to me, but I wouldn't want to go through a legal battle over a $10 domain name. I just wanted to give the ColdFusion community a heads up in case someone else was in a similiar situation or thinking about purchasing domain names with the word realtor in them. After reading forums and blogs that talk about this, it seems like a lot of people have had this problem. Below is a email that I recieved from NAR:
I am posting this, because I created a blog/website for a local real estate agent in Carson City, Nevada. I am trying desperately to get Google to index the blog, but I have been unsuccessful in my efforts so far. I thought maybe this would help. If you have a chance, take a look at the modified template and let me know what you think.
http://www.realtorcarsoncity.com/
A couple months ago, I purchased a new computer which came with windows vista installed. After weeks of trying to install ColdFusion with the Apache Web Server, I finally got past a cryptic error that I kept receiving after every install. The error states that ColdFusion failed to configure the web connecters which may be caused by a firewall blocking port #51020 (etc).
Today I was trying to fix problem with a report that sums up hours, and I had a huge brain fart. What took me an hour to fix, should have only taken me about 5 minutes. I thought that it would make a good blog post, because I really don't want to make this same stupid mistake again.
This is some sample script that I used today to check if a position in an array exists. Basically, I was tasked with creating an email that showed hours from two separate datasources, and I needed to combine those side by side in an array to show the differences. I knew that the first set of hours would always exist, so I looped over the second set of hours with a nested loop matching up the dates. To check if the second position existed, I used a cfparam with set values of zero. I did this because ColdFusion doesn't seem to have clean way of checking for a missing element.
John Gagliardi(cftips.net) and I have been working on a new flex application that will be used as a project tracker for work related purposes. John is building the Flex or UI side of the application, while I am building the database and ColdFusion backend. We are trying to build the entire application using OOP design priciples; specifically MVC. After building the database and basically getting a great start on the project, I am starting to realize how powerful OOP can actually be. Today we created a task updater that is controlled by horizontal date slider, and I wanted to share some of my backend code which will hopefully show just how easy it is to update a simple CRUD app.
Last Month I purchased a new labtop which came with Windows Vista pre-installed. I haven't had any problems with the labtop or Vista; however, I couldn't get the screen saver to turn on automatically. After researching and troubleshooting, I realized that it stopped working when I plugged in my 'Microsoft' usb optical mouse. It seems absurd to me that a Microsoft hardware product wasn't tested on Windows Vista before being released (sarcasm).