cftopper.com

I found this on Keith's link log (I should get me one of those) and it's absolutely brilliant. Required viewing.

• Dance, Monkey, Dance

The site I've been tipping away at for the last 2 weeks is just about ready to go live. Still a good few things to fix such as the actual ability to purchase stuff, ahem *cough*.

Anyhow, check-it-out at www.digitalwarehouse.ie - comments welcome.

Project Notes:

1. The site owner bases delivery cost on the destination and the weight. I had to come up with a way to group countries into regions and assign costs to weights and regions... design the database, the CMS pages etc. You get that, no? doesn't matter, it works.
2. I like the way I did the specifications. The content editor just enters specs in the format SPEC:DESCRIPTION into a free text range and gets its interpreted and displayed nicely.
3. I finally added the overdue, remember me option to the CMS. The remember me uses a cookie encrypted with APPLICATION.secretKey - a new standard variable that I am going to use in all future sites. I was getting well sick of logging in InfinityCMS about 10 times a day.
4. As with all our sites, as much work if not more has gone into the CMS for the site - the bit nobody but ourselves and the owner will ever see. I think it's pretty slick. In fact, I'm thinking of putting a few demos of InfinityCMS online for people to view our work.
5. Adam did a great job with the design, logo, layout etc. I had to beat him repeatedly to improve some aspects he was a little lazy with such as the buttons but the end result is pretty good.
6. Component reuse - we have reusable components for the shopping cart, the search page, the contact form, FAQs, newsletter sign-up, RSS feeds etc. Our latest endeavour is to make what we call RAD components. The first time a RAD component such as RADFAQ is run in ColdFusion, it detects that it is missing the required tables in the database and then creates the tables and the CMS pages for managing the FAQs automagically... this is the way it should be. We must have saved weeks of development time during this project and time is money.

Can't think of anything else newsworthy about the project.

House Design Tool

Oh, another little thing I was working on for another project that has recently gone live is the House Design Tool for Freefoam - click "Customer Design Tool" on the home page of www.freefoam.com to see it.

I spent the bones of 8 hours working on this. It needs flash 8 but earlier today, Cormac coerced me into putting in a clever actionscript he found that will automatically upgrade the flash player for the user, if required. I had to get the tools to uninstall flash 8 and install old versions of flash for testing. It works nicely.

I need to detect the version of Flash being used as my movie required Flash 8 - so I downloaded Adobe's Flash Detection kit. 30 minutes later I decided the actionscipt they provided sucked - it wouldn't work in flash 8 and was 110 lines in length.

Here is my version:

function needUpgrade()
{
upgradeMsg._visible = true;

stop();
}

try{

runningVersion = $version.toString().split(" ")[1].split(",")[0];

if( runningVersion < requiredVersion ) needUpgrade();
}

catch(e){

needUpgrade();

}

It was Easter bank holiday weekend over here which meant once one thing; reunions and drinking. Friday and Saturday became hectic days of Olympian alcohol abuse... which is how, on Sunday morning, I found myself with a pounding headache lying on a cold living room floor in an unknown house, merely hours before I had to arrive sober and well dressed to my buddy's wedding.

Admittedly my wedding-fare experience is somewhat limited but I think this wedding would be a hard act to follow. It had all the right ingredients - an amazing couple devoted to each other and madly in love, a fun-loving crowd, great music, great atmosphere etc. I could go on but I won't. Ed/Catherine, if your reading this, congratulations again guys and enjoy your honeymoon.

But now I'm paying the piper, I have shit-loads to do. At least I've been working on some interesting Flash programming - a house design tool (I'll post the link when the site goes live). And I must have this e-commerce website launched for Friday. No stress.

Aside: I just purchased these Asics Gel Kayano XII runners which will hopefully get me out jogging more often (they are meant to have great cushioning) - I find jogging on concrete hurts the legs after a while. Which reminds me, I was scoffing at the ebay user experience - the programming of which once featured on theDailyWTF.

Aside 2: I lent Oblivion to my cousin on Thursday evening. He send me a text message on Monday morning, I quote:- "Stupid fucking game. Just spent all weekend playing it. Where did the weekend go?" Hahaha - I'm trying to stay away - once night last week I left the office at 4.30am with a sore ass after a 7 hour session!

Dan told me the other day that he stumbled upon an online WYSIWYG that is much better that FCKEditor which we use in UDI and in turn use in all our content management systems as the main editor.

I was a bit reluctant. Why?

1. When I went looking for the best editor a year ago, I thought I had found it in FCKEditor. I honesty thought FCKEditor was the best out there.
2. I had put so much effect into the integration of FCKEditor with UDI, hacking FCKEditor to death until it fit my needs, that the thought of change was dismaying.

But an hour ago I asked Dan to show me that Editor... the editor is TinyMCE.

TinyMCE Kicks FCKEditor about

Yip. I admit it, I was wrong, FCKEditor has been delivered a heart-stopping fist-of-death by TinyMCE. The loading seems faster. The integration seems better. The toolbars are easily modified (wasn't easy in FCK). But what really made me wet what the advanced image editing... images can be resized and clipped online! It's just what dummy clients need. Hell, even the documentation is better.

What really convinced me was when Cormac chipped in with a link to this excellent online WYSIWYG comparison which places TinyMCE above FCK and names it as the best open-source solution.

It remains to be seen if TinyMCE is flexible enough to allow me to do some advanced things; like allowing the user to easily link to existing web pages from a tree menu of available site pages when adding a link.

Anyhow, I've downloaded TinyMCE and all going well, I'm determined to have it an integral part of UDI by this day next week.

I heard it was coming and I heard it was going to be good... but I paid no heed. Then I stumbled across the Boomtown review in which the writer struggles to contain his joy:

Maybe it was the time I saw those two male mages climb into bed together. Or when the Imperial guard chased me for twenty minutes across Cyrodil before I even realised he was there. And what about that time my horse was prayed upon by a vicious wolf that was subsequently kicked to death by the beautiful steed?

Actually, no – it was the time I spotted something small moving in a nearby lake. Upon closer inspection I discovered a deer that was swimming away from a nearby hunter. And when the deer saw me standing there, fearing for its life it turned and swam in another direction. A safer direction.

That’s about the exact moment I truly realised the sort of game Oblivion is… A masterpiece. One of the best ever made.

So I rushed out to GameStop yesterday at lunch, even borrowing money because I had left my wallet at home and demanded the game... The guy in the shop laughed and warned me that it would totally consume my life. I grinned sheepishly and nodded. He also warned me that I need a crazy powerful PC to play this on as it's one of the most demanding games to date. Finally he said, good luck! 

He was right on both accounts. I loaded up the game for a quick look at about 1AM last night. It's suddenly 4.30AM, my quick look had turned into a 3 hour exploration. The game is just outstanding.

The graphics are awesome. I remember looking at the stars when my character emerged from subterranean passages for the first time and being blown away. Then statues, faces and even horses had me walking around them impressed with their quality. Later I realised that I had been playing the game at 640x480! I bumped up the graphics... shit, I'm running out of adjectives to describe this colossal game.

This really is the first completely immersive RPG I've ever played. I would have played all night if it wasn't for that pesky work thing. To quotes one of my favourite songs, "I wish the real world would just stop hassling me".

If you like your games (even slightly), get Oblivion.

I should be asleep - I've been bed-browsing for hours now. The Internet is just full of interesting shit! I just did some interesting tutorials over at Mozilla and was investigating XUL (pronounced ZOOL). XUL looks promising; the source code puts me in mind of Flex.

Anyway, with everybody trying hard to capture the imagination of the world by churning out Web2.0 apps, I been doing some thinking about a project I'd like to put out there that might impress the shit out of everybody. The problem at the moment is coming up with a good name. Look at all the new Web2.0 (I hate using that blasted term) applications out there; every name is strange and unrelated... Flickr,del.icio.us, Netvibes, Digg, Flickr, Openomy etc. ... with the exception of Writely which is somewhat related to what it does.

Aside: Earlier I watched a movie The Constant Gardener - it's now up there on my top 100 films of all times list. Go see it.

Right I'm off to sleep but bet I'll spend at least half the night thinking and then fade into an intoxicating dream of XUL and Web2.0.

Update

Myself and Dan have plotted and schemed and have registered a great domain for our secret project. So far I've only done the database design, stay tuned.

• http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/
  Check this ste out in Internet Explorer and then Firefox
• http://patrickhaney.com/
• http://www.lisamcmillan.com/journal/best-of-web-apps-edition

Check this out for a bizarre bug in MySQL (or else I'm way too tired). I have this setup, what do you think the query will return, 2 rows right?

Alas no - it returns NADA, nothing, blank, no data! No matter what I try the shippingcostWeight will not match any decimal value. See this screenshot of the results:

I've tried changing the float column to decimal and double but it makes no difference. I tried putting the float value in single quotes and no luck. I'm sure its either a bug in MySQL 5, a bug in the driver or that i'm being completely stupid. Anyhow i'm nearly finished the ecommerce site I'm working on so I think it's time to call it a night and play some CounterStrike - the best game ever made!! :)

It's taken years to realise... I'm unbelievably grumpy when i'm hungry... so next time I bark at you, just feed me. :D

I also find I get stressed out very easily when i'm hungry. Moral of the story, feed me.

Wow. I just read about a failed website project that although forecast to cost only (*cough*) €65M ended up costing €165M. From theDailyWTF.com:

German readers may be familiar with the story of Arbeitsagentur.de, the official website of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Federal Labour Office). It's a fairly typical "big business" story: government wants a job portal website, large consulting company (Accenture) bids €65.5M, government accepts, consultants start it but say they need another €100M to complete it, government becomes outraged, news stories are written (like this one), and eventually a horribly slow low-functionality website gets built.

But there's something I just can't wrap my mind around with stories like this. Why do people get outraged with a job portal website costing 160,000,000+ euros? Don't they realise how much enterprise is bundled with a price like that? Can't they understand that the slowness and poor usability is key part of enterpriseness and, that this is actually a good thing?

Well I hope that I can set the record straight today and give Accenture the credit they are due. It's impossible to explain the value behind a €160M+ website in such a small space, but I think that Wladimir Palant found the perfect example that you can actually check and see for yourself (view source on arbeitsagentur.de). It's a 714-byte session identifier that's unique enough to represent all sessions across all websites across all the Internets across all galaxies throughout all of time ... four times over. Now that's enterprisey ...

 

<a href="/berufe/search/alpha/index.jsp;jsessionid=000000000000001a49444c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_1CA157F9330F6E6F373F6BE19
C19812C" tabindex="600" class="mainmenu">

 

It pisses me off more that I can say. Look at the example code from the project above - obviously the developers at Accenture are a talented bunch. It's far from the first example of a hot-shot consulting company making a dogs balls of a project leading to massive overruns. If you gave our company, Digital Crew, this contract, we'd make a masterpiece of it for a lot less that €65M. I hope the day will come when the idiots awarding these contracts learn to look beyond the image and spiel dished out by these uber-consulting companies and award the job to a company who actually walk the talk.

FACT: ColdFusions built-in error reporting through <CFERROR> is a load of balls.

I got sick of trying to use the crummy limited CFERROR tag and just did my own error catching and reporting.

So far it's working very well; on all the latest Digital Crew websites, the new error reporting mechanism emails us a nice breakdown of any problems that occur on any of our live websites.

The code we use to send the error report is provided here for you. Just put a try...catch in your main file, either index.cfm or application.cfm and include the following file in the <cfcatch> block:

• SendErrorNotification.cfm

You probably don't want to do this when testing/developing a website so we use

<cfif NOT isdefined("REQUEST.developerMode") OR NOT REQUEST.developerMode>

before including this file.

I just had a packet of Hula-Hoops, probably one of most unhealthy, fattening but tasty snacks around and was surprised to see that on the back of the packet there advertise their website http://www.123healthybalance.com/.

It seems to me that the world had got obsessed about diet, health and fitness with even the most unlikely people having had at some point in the last few months discussed diet and nutrition with me. Not that this is a bad thing.

Groan. I feel like ...  maybe 'zombie' is the right word, today. Typical Sunday hangover. I'm sure whomever you are reading this, that you don't sympathise with my current circumstance, ya uncaring bastard.

Anyway... I just stumbled across this dancing dude throwing out crazy comments and it rocks. Check it out. The music is funky and he's throwing out some classics:

"It's odd but ever since I started wearing underwear I haven't had so much as a head-cold."

"I actually met Bush when he was in Prep-school and even then he was talking about invading Iraq. Of course he was shit-faced so I didn't think anything about it."

hahaha :p

p.s. I had great plans of installing a little something called HOG on the others guys laptops on April 1st but damn it I missed it. Will get 'em next year.