cftopper.com

I've spent the last 2 weeks working on the website for the new National Maritime College of Ireland (NMCI). It was a bit of a struggle to meet a tight deadline for their launch but we did it.

The website itself ain't bad but the CMS behind it is another evolution of our custom built InfinityCMS content management system and is pretty sweet (if I do say so myself).

One neat feature is this ability for the user to type [include:subnav] in the WYSIWYG and the website will automagically spit out an in-page navigation. Other options are [include:date], [include:datetime] etc.

Also an editor can choose up to 5 image and write [include:image1] in their text to get a nicely rounded captioned image on the page. The rounded edges are done using the nifty corners flash I showed here last week.

Then theres the right hand side items - editors can create and assign right hand side items for any page and the images are automatically scaled and rounded for them.

Oh and the site also uses the useful script I wrote to extract URL variables from the pathe path so the site is more search engine friendly with URLs like http://www.nmci.ie/index.cfm/page/undergraduatecourses as opposed to http://www.nmci.ie/index.cfm?page=undergraduatecourses

All in all, I think I did well to add all these features and still get the job done on-time.
Check out the site and hit me back, comments appreciated (Keith, this time round, please try to say something positive before you unleash hell's fury).

• National Maritime College of Ireland

Last week EA announced Battlefield 2142 and oh my good God it looks bloody amazing!

The year is 2142, and the dawn of a new Ice age has thrown the world into a panic. The math is simple and brutal: The soil not covered by ice can only feed a fraction of the Earth’s population. Some will live, most will die. In Battlefield 2142, players will choose to fight for one of two military superpowers in an epic battle for survival, the European Union or the newly formed Pan Asian Coalition.

Armed with a devastating arsenal of hi-tech assault rifles, cloaking devices and sentry guns, players will also do battle using some of the most imposing vehicles known to man. Massive battle Mechs wage fierce combat on the ground, while futuristic aircraft rule the skies. When facing one of these new behemoths, players will need to use their wits and an arsenal of new countermeasures like EMP grenades to level the playing field.

"Battlefield has long been synonymous with innovative, best-of-breed online multiplayer action," said Sean Decker, Executive Producer, DICE. "By stepping into the future with Battlefield 2142, the team at DICE has reinvented the rules of engagement for the next century.”

Team play features allow up to 64 players to enter the action on the front lines as part of a formal squad, or work behind the scenes in Commander Mode to direct the strategic assaults of their teammates. With in-game success, players increase their rank and unlock awards, including new weapons, medals and more, delivering the most comprehensive and flexible persistence in the Battlefield universe to date.

There is a video available from fileplanet that shows it off fairly well. The giant mechs are kick-ass and I can't wait to take one of those babys for a spin.

I think its due out this November.

• EA's Battlefield 2142 page

1. Copy the dcCom folder into the root of your application

(i.e. where your application.cfm file is).

2. Copy the "dcCom.cfm" to whereever you are calling cfx_jimage.

3. Change the syntax of the way you call JImage from

<cfx_jimage ...>

to

<cf_dccom component="jimage" ... ></cf_dccom>

<cfx_jimage file="#loc#z6.jpg" outfile="#loc#z_out.bmp"

action="resize" width="175" timeout="6" quickresize="yes">

use:

<cf_dccom component="JImage" file="#loc#z6.jpg" outfile="#loc#z_out.bmp"

action="resize" width="175" timeout="6" quickresize="yes"></cf_dccom>

Google videos now allow site owners to easily videos on thier sites. Works well don'tcha think? What the hell is wrong with these fish - :)

I just spent the last 40 minutes or so writing a reusable flash component for putting rounded edges on any image dynamically.

You just pass in the image you want the flash to load, the size you want the corners and a list of which corners you want a corner on. Something like:

flashVars="img=example.jpg&size=20&corners=1,1,1,1"

• Example
• Download

I'm really having "one of those days" today. First my laptop is acting the maggot. At any given time one of ColdFusion/IIS/Internet Explorer is screwed. Then I find out that because of the recent upgrade to CFMX7 from CFMX6 on a client's server, a CFX tag called CFX_WordTextExtractor that I wrote for an important application doesn't work anymore.

I have since spent the day trying in vain to get the tag to work on MX7. At the moment, the bloody thing won't compile. I screwed something. So I need to get the latest files from http://www.textmining.org/ again. Lo and behold, to complete my day, when I go there I am greeted with:

Hacked Fotolog ? ITALY owned .org ? HACKED BY ITALY

Update

After posting this I switched off my brain and went home. When I came in the next day, I poked around and found that the Lucene project had the TextMining files I needed in it's codebase. The CFX_WordTextExtractor component is now working perfectly.

And I Accidentally found that it was Dell's Quickset task bar program that was screwing my laptop up.

Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is take a break. :p

PS. looks like the www.textmining.org site is still screwed.

Hi John,
 
I just logged in. As a professional Internet application developer I
have to say that Group Worker is one of the worst web based programs
I have even seen.
 
Its smells of incompetence - for example the page titles are
"Untitled Document" and there is no style sheet. I would guess that
whomever wrote this doesn't have much HTML or JSP experience.
 
It seems apparent that O2 has completely useless developers working for them
and that their managers are blind enough to not see that. Is it not plain to see
how bad the "Group Worker" program is? I can't understand how this could pass
any quality control tests. Ye probably spent more on the Group Worker brochures
that the application development.
 
Complete Incompetence.
O2 should be ashamed. Somebody should be fired.
 
Regards,
Peter

(I'm an arrogant ass - but they deserve it)

Just found out what the shitty wireless router we have at our house has become absolutely useless. It seems there is a mixed-network issue - i.e. the more physical lines we plug in, the more the wireless performance degrades.

Just shows, I want against my own rule of using CNet reviews when buying new technology when I ran out to get that piece of s**t.

Just bored here in AREA51 doing my usual Friday night stint, browsing the web, considering doing some work. Was just filling out a form...

On just about every HTML sign-up form, when you make a mistake or something like your desired username is taken, you have to re-enter your desired password and password confirmation because writing out the users password in the HTML is a breech of security.

There is a better way.

Developers should ask the user if they want to use the password they already provided or supply another one i.e. the server should remember that the user put in the first time.

Grant it most of us just are too busy for that added effort. Guess I'm just a lazy idealist.

Ever notice the way some sites would write a URl like:

index.cfm?page=somepage&x=1

as something a little more URL friendly like:

index.cfm/page/somepage/x/1

To get this, simply include the following code in your application.cfm file!:

<cfif ListLast(CGI.PATH_INFO,".") NEQ "cfm">
  <cfif Find(".cfm",CGI.PATH_INFO)>
      <cfset lenRHSofDotCFM = Len(CGI.PATH_INFO) - (Find(".cfm",CGI.PATH_INFO)+4)>
  <cfelse>
      <cfset lenRHSofDotCFM = Len(CGI.PATH_INFO)>
  </cfif>
  <cfif lenRHSofDotCFM GT 0>
      <cfset RHSofDotCFM = Right( CGI.PATH_INFO, lenRHSofDotCFM )>
      <cfset numURLItems = listLen(RHSofDotCFM,'/')>
      <cfset numURLItems = numURLItems - (numURLItems mod 2)>
      <cfloop from="1" to="#numURLItems#" index="i" step="2">
          <cfset URL[ GetToken(RHSofDotCFM,i,'/') ] = GetToken(RHSofDotCFM,i+1,'/')>
      </cfloop>
  </cfif>
</cfif>

PS. I made this site wider since I figure that anybody reading this site must be working with at least a 1024x768 resolution and the text is easier to read this way, don'tcha think.  If the site looks a little odd, try deleting your browser cache - the flash headers on the blog posts are caching big time. I've deleted Internet Explorers cache a few times now and its still cached. Looks fine in Firefox though so I guess it'll sort itself out.

Here is a good tool I made eons ago that from time to time I find invaluable.

Next time your knocking out a regular expression for ColdFusion, load up this, paste in some sample code and keep tweaking your expression until you get it right.

• Try It!
• Download

Here is a simple tip I thought I'd share. Forgive me if you think this too obvious.

When in the middle of programming a file and you decide you want to copy a word, line or snippet code from some other part of the document... after copying the text, hit control-z, then shift-control-z to get back to exactly where you left off.

Your simply undoing then redoing the last bit of typing you did and the cursor should be back exactly where it was. This saves me precious seconds every day.

I know its a little thing but by accumulating as many tips and tricks as you can, you'll end up a much more efficient programmer.

This works in my editor of choice HomeSite+ (aside: I'm not willing to switch to cfeclipse until they get drap-drop of images into the CFHML/HTML working).

I finally got around to adding the comments engine to this blog. It took a little longer than it should have but then I was getting familiar with prototype.js at the same time. I must say prototype.js makes Ajax a piece of cake.

I love that way Foo has those sexy country flags on the comments section of his site so I'll be adding flag icons as soon as I find a good library of icons that match that ISO country codes I have in the database; if you know of any please let me know.

So go on, leave a comment or two!!

PS. Stay tuned, I'll be posting up the first of a series of ColdFusion tools soon.

This is bullshit - there is an angle-grinder wailing outside my office here at Digital Crew  (DCHQ) at the moment making it very hard to concentrate on anything.

For the last 4 years the City of Cork has been undergoing a transformation resulting in an endless barrage of noise from angle-grinders, pneumatic drills, trucks, diggers and dump trucks. I guess it'll be worth it in the end - time to crank up the music!

If like me, you don't want to wait ages for all the developer services such as IIS, ColdFusion, MySQL and MS SQL to start up when you simply want to check your email/browse the web; then you might appreciate these 2 simple batch files I keep handy  to start these services if and when I want them (assumes ColdFusion 7 on windows):

• Start Developer Services
• Stop Developer Services

Note: I appended ".txt" to these file names to allow them to download; batch files are blocked by IIS6. Just rename them and remove the ".txt" bit.

Armed with these you can set all the following services to manual in the services control so that they only start when you run the Start Developer Services batch file.

• w3svc (IIS Web Server)
• ColdFusion 7
  • ColdFusion MX 7 Application Server
    ColdFusion MX 7 ODBC Agent
    ColdFusion MX 7 ODBC Server
• MySQL
• MSSQLSERVER

PS. Didn't have a chance to work on the comments for this site over the weekend - coming soon I promise.

Got an email from my good buddy Keith pointing out all the defects of this site. From the top of my head it includes:

• Your feed looks a bit mangled.
• Where are the comments?
• What aren't the tags links?
• Where's the archive?
• The header should be reformatted:
  • Currently using an old style
  • Shouldn't have a keywords in the header
  • Should include a <link rel="stylesheet"...> tag in the header
• etc.

Damn it man, It's a work in progress!

:p I did mention in post #1 that there a list of things I'll gradually be adding to the site. Unfortunately post#1 can no longer be seen because I have no archive - lol!

It's a pretty big email, one I haven't fully read yet but Keith I appreciate your taking the time to slap me into getting things ship-shape on this site. In fairness, Keith also sent me an updated header for this site, which I've put in place now.

I joked in my reply that I'll try and get things Keith-Compliant over the next few days. At the moment, real work must take a priority. Stay tuned.

I am considering dropping AjaxRequest (which is excellent) and switching over to prototype.js for the comments part of this site (I will be loading both the comments and comment posts via Ajax).

Shit. I search and searched and can't see if prototype.js supports easy submitting of form data via Ajax like AjaxRequest does. You see I'm a lazy developer and like my frameworks to do this sort of form serialisation grudge-work for me. Hmmm... to use AjaxRequest which has easy form submission via Ajax or to oppose and suffer the slings and arrows of prototype.js making me do it for myself. I could use both but AjaxRequest is 9K and prototype.js is 46K and I'd rather stick with one. Decisions, decisions.

Update

Ok ok, I thoroughly examined prototype.js Ajax abilities and actually posting form data is absolutely simple. And so the winner is... prototype.js.