November 27 2006 by
Andrew Powell
Since Spry and ColdFusion make a powerful combination, I decided to see if I could fuse some of CF's advanced functionality into the power of Spry. CFCHART is a powerful utility. It will generate graphs and charts for you inline on your CFM pages, but it will also allow you to store the results into a variable by simply using the "name" attribute. This variable can then be written to disk and used later at the developer's discretion. With this functionality in mind, I set forth to use this technique to dynamically update a graphical representation of data using Spry and CFCHART.
Read more...
Posted in ColdFusion | Spry | AJAX | 
3 comments
November 21 2006 by
Andrew Powell
While at MAX this year, SYS-CON interviewed
Jesse Warden (of Universal Mind) and myself. We gave our thoughts and feelings on MAX and where Adobe is going in the near future.
My Interview
Jesse Warden's Interview
Posted in General | Adobe | 0 comments
November 16 2006 by
Andrew Powell
IE has a problem with caching the results of a XMLHttpRequest call. It will not acknowledge the useCache: false argument in the constructor of the Spry Dataset. You have to use these two steps:
1. Disallow caching in the header of the page that makes the Spry call, not the XML doc itself.
<cfheader name="Cache-Control" value= "no-cache">
<cfheader name="Expires" value="0">
<cfheader name="Pragma" value="no-cache">
2. Setup sometype of dynamic url for your XML. i.e. add the current datetime object to the end of your url as a parameter.
<script type="text/javascript">
var ds1 = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet(null,null,{useCache:false});
function loadMyData()
{
var d = new Date();
ds1.setURL("http://myserver/myxml.xml?cacheBuster=" + d.now());
ds1.setXPath("root/element");
ds1.loadData()
}
</script>
<body onload="loadMyData()">
...
</body>
This is a known bug with IE and can bite you if you have some dynamic data in Spry that needs to be reloaded at any interval.
Posted in ColdFusion | Caching | Spry | AJAX | 1 comments
November 16 2006 by
Andrew Powell
I decided to switch from
Skype to
Vonage because, well, Skype was pretty much the highest amount of suckatude that I've seen in a VoIP solution.
So I get this nice nifty broadband phone for my Vonage account and hook it up to my network, go through the hoops of setting the account up and what-not. Turn the device on and it lights up green. Green is always a happy colour. We like green lights. It means stuff is working....most of the time. I soon found out that I could make calls out, but not receive them. Slight problem.
I had the device sitting behind my
NetScreen 5XP firewall. I tried all the suggestions to get it working to no avail. So I had to do what I like to call some "creative engineering". I like to think that
I know a few things about designing networks. I've done some wild and crazy setups in my time, but this is one of the most rigged.
I put the Vonage device as the first connection after my DSL modem. It is making the connection to my ISP. Behind it, in it's NAT range is the NetScreen. The NetScreen is doing NAT to my network. Basically, I'm doing double NAT. NAT from the Vonage device to the firewall and NAT from the firewall to my network. The Vonage device is set to send all ports (except the Vonage ports) through to the firewall.
I did this because I have a TON of ACLs set up in my firewall and I really didn't think that the security offered by the Vonage device is all that great. I feel a bit more secure now, but this is sure one hokey setup. We'll see how long it holds.
Posted in General | Vonage | 1 comments
November 15 2006 by
Andrew Powell
HA!
It appears that in the rush to get the Zune out the door for the holidays that MS forgot to make it compatible with their new OS which goes on sale to the masses in January. Whoopsie.
Full Article
Posted in Apple | 3 comments