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Big Move to AZ Day 3

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 03:59:00 GMT

We're in Albuquerque New Mexico! Next Stop AZ.

Big Move to AZ Day 2

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 03:08:00 GMT

I need to find Jaime's USB cable so I can upload photos :)

We are in Fort Smith, Arkansas

MYSQL Slow Subquery using IN

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:24:00 GMT

Fix for MYSQL subqueries that take forever when used in an IN.

Mysql Joined Updates

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:39:00 GMT

Writing updates from more than one table.

Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2

Tue, 06 May 2008 13:43:00 GMT

EC2 is getting a persistent hard drive.

Once

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:07:00 GMT

The indie Irish movie that could.

Coldfusion Hates the New Macbook Pro

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:54:00 GMT

Please fix the Coldfusion Installer

Sleep through the Static

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:53:00 GMT

Jack Johnson's New Album out Today

Fun with Dabble, S3 and Coldfusion

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 16:00:43 GMT

Well another project done and set live today. We just released a new site for one of our furniture manufacturing clients: Solutions .

What's noteable and kinda fun is the technology behind this one. Our customer wanted a web presence quickly to showcase their products. The only information they had were EXCEL spreadsheets ( everything is always in excel :) ).

So what do you do?

We decided to try out some cool web based services to help them out.

Step 1: Imported all the product information into Dabbledb.

Step 2: Edited the products in Dabbledb and add any missing information.

Step 3: Used CFJSON and CFHTTP to pull the product information into MYSQL.

Step 4: Used the Amazon S3 component and a simple CF interface to resize images and store them in S3 based on product information.

STEP 5: Code the Screens using Coldfusion and Fusebox.

We decided to pull the information out of dabble and store it in MySQL to run the site so we could write the queries for the site in plain SQL. Dabbledb is really powerful for manipulating spread sheet data and saved us the time and our customers the cost of building a front end for marinating product information. We are using a custom script I wrote for ImageMagick for resizing the images. The java ones never seem to resize small thumbnails very well. Although i haven't played with the CF8 ones yet.

This project reminds me how great a community we have of CF developers. CFJSON,S3 and Fusebox are all thanks to them.

Our First Reactor Site

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:24:43 GMT

We'll we finished our first Reactor based website. It was a flat HTML site we upgraded to Coldfusion/Fusebox/Reactor/MYSQL with some basic CMS updates for links and content.

Before

After

It went pretty well. I wish the documentation for Reactor was more up to date. maybe if I have time this week I'll post about a few things I learned to help out others. I'm deep into my next reactor project already.

This project was the first one we used JQUERY on also. I have no idea how I got along so long without it. It is pretty fantastic and has really good documentation.

EDIT: For a test we used JQUERY for the Mouseovers on the main page. We were going from an premade FLASH design to HTML. So we made the Animated Gifs and swap them with the black and white images. The text on the main page is also swapped with JQUERY. Most of the JQUERY stuff is in the administrative section of the site to help manage the forms and links.

Since JQUERY lets you bind events to objects when pages load I have changed the architecture of our fusebox sites to include a dsp_jsp.cfm file for each page. This is included in the $(document).ready() section of the page via content variables. It's much better than all the JS cluttering up the HTML in our displays. In the future I might try and do something slick to have it as an include instead of stuck at the top of the page.

Music Slacker

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:49:04 GMT

As an avid fan of Pandora for a long time, I think I am finally converted to Slacker. Pandora is cool in theory. It lets everyone vote on a song and can select similar music for you. I can honestly say I listened to things I would have never chosen because of it. That's kind of it's downfall also. I HAD to listen to some weird stuff I didn't like.

With slacker you can create a station of things that you like. This has the same skip limitations, but I find I don't skip much. They have programmed stations, but they seem to repeat themselves a lot. I will probably still listen to Pandora when I am in the mood to be adventurous, but for my "coding" music I much prefer Slacker. Check it out.

Instantspot Style Editor

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:00:17 GMT

Thought I would try out the style editor today. How fun is this? My site now has a cool Arizona theme from a trip my girlfriend and I took a few years back.

The style editor is pretty fun. I just took a template from the template exchange uploaded it. Uploaded a trip photo to the header. Then used the Web Developer CSS editor in Firefox to change it a little to match my head logo (Well it matches to me).

And in a few minutes brand new site. Very cool.

Now I just need to track down a real photo of me to replace the batman.

Web Icons

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:49:31 GMT

I am forever doing admin utilities for our web projects. CMS, Link managers, Photo Uploaders etc. With my limited art/fireworks skills I could never make anything that looked right :P. The other day I found a great website for icons. There are a ton of them and they look really nice.

Check them out : FAMFAMFAM

Resetting Reactor

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:02:23 GMT

I've started playing around with Reactor on one of my new projects. So far it's pretty cool. The only thing I couldn't figure out was how to reset Reactor once it's in production mode. From asking the question on the list it appears you just need to delete the files in the /reactor/project/[Your Project] folder. So I wrote a little fuseaction to do this that I can call to reset it. Enjoy.

act_reactor_reset.cfm :

[codeshare jul588f3]

Yard of the Month for July

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:43:16 GMT

Here's an update related to my last blog post. Our home owners association picks one yard every month to be yard of the month. I know it's silly, but hey they picked my yard this month :).

So I guess all the work we've put into it is starting to really show. (Or it was just really bad before lol). Oh well my Mom, Dad, Jaime, and Bailey helped a lot.

Burn Notice: Watch it!

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:25:49 GMT

Bruce Campbell is back! if you don't know who Bruce Campbell is go watch Evil Dead or Army of Darkness immediately. He's back in a big way in a new show called Burn Notice on USA Network. It's actually a pretty funny and cool show. It's about a CIA agent who gets fired. Then he starts helping people A-Team style.

They have aired the Pilot a million times on USA so just set your DVR and you can catch up.

IGN Article with Bruce

BURN NOTICE website

After they cancelled the excellent Andy Barker P.I. people need to watch this one :)

Gardening Project 05-2007

Sat, 26 May 2007 21:12:47 GMT

Well today I got a ton done in the yard with a lot of help from my Dad and Jaime. (Ok it was mostly my Dad he likes projects ). He's great you just need to supply him with lots of Pepsi.

This is the giant stump my Dad got out of the yard in 40 minutes. Jaime and I timed it :). We helped with the sawing and the digging. Bailey kept an eye out for sticks.

Here is the newly sealed driveway Dad was very impressed with. The cool thing is it's kind of an optical illusion. It looks flatter than it did :)

Here is the new curb appeal.

What the backyard looked like before.

More Photos of the finished yard.

One Day Blog Silence

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:19:43 GMT

Blacksburg April 16

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 12:11:04 GMT

I live in Blacksburg Virginia. We work at the Virginia Tech Office park here. It's a great place with lots of wonderful people. I didn't go to VT I actually went to Radford University a few miles down the road, but I have and had many friends that went here. I have been to many a tailgate with them :).

After the tragic turn of events on Monday I hope everyone who lost someone or knows someone who lost someone know that the community here is behind them 100% in our thoughts and prayers.

Here is a great article in the Chicago Tribune about the tendency to place blame on horrible things. I for one am glad that the Local Lawenforcment worked so hard in a terrible time.

DigitalRewind.com Moved

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 12:56:49 GMT

Another win for the Instant Spot guys. I switched my domain settings Friday and as of today my Instant Spot is now www.digitalrewind.com.

Very cool.