Posted By : Dan Wilson     May 16, 2007 10:27 AM

I might be the last person to know about this but I thought I would blog it anyways.

I wrote a post about Flex 360 - yesterday and copy/pasted some of the speaker information from another blog. Oddly enough, when I viewed the post, there were little squares in place of some of the characters. Since I had work to do, I dismissed it as an oddity.

An hour later, when my post hadn't shown on MXNA yet, I looked into it further. Apparently, the little squares caused the RSS format to be invalid and MXNA didn't pick up my posting. Even after I manually pinged it!.

I now dub the squares "The Square Of Death". All Hail Valid RSS

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     May 15, 2007 2:19 PM

The next iteration of 360 Flex is coming in a few months. I saw the speaker/topic list was just posted and the sessions look incredible. If I go to another conference this year, I expect this to be it.

I am very interested in:

• Custom Flex component development. - Doug McCune
• Advanced Charting - Brendan Meutzner
• How to create a theme - Juan Sanchez
• Practical Patterns in Flex - Joe Berkovitz
• Deep Linking in Flex Apps - Sim Bateman
• Flex Framework nitty grity - Deepa Subramaniam
• Memory Management for Flex/Apollo Developers - Jun Heider
• Flex and Scorpio - Ben Forta
• Building Stunning Flex Apps with Flex Builder and CS3 - George Comninos

IAll of the talks are very interesting so I am saving my nickels for plane fare...

Hope to see you all at 360 Flex : Seattle

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     May 14, 2007 5:28 PM

The price of First Class mail went up to 41 cents today. In comparison of the previous price of 39 cents, this is a meager 5% increase. I do not begrudge the Post Office their fees. The mail almost always is delivered promptly and accurately. I am happy to pay 2 cents more.

The part that annoys me is I currently hold ~80 .39 stamps which are no longer valid. Sure I can make another trip to the post office and get a roll of 2 cent stamps. Of course, I now have to keep track of 2 different sets of stamps and REMEMBER to put one of each on each envelope. The remembering is more than a two cent aggravation in my book.

My Dad always said "Boy, Never complain unless you have a solution". Lucky for me, I do have a solution!

From now on, the Post Office should EXCHANGE old stamps for new ones. It would still be the burden of the stampholder to pay the difference, but I would be perfectly happy to pay the difference. I would even be happy to pay a premium for the exchange. I just don't want to be bothered with the pain of having 39 cent stamps in a 41 cent world.

Whaddya say Postmaster General? Can I trade in the Old for the New?

Consider this post an online petition. If I get enough signatures below, I'll print it and send it to John E. Potter Post Master General

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     May 13, 2007 3:42 PM

I was sitting on the porch today with the laptop and the excellent weather just enjoying myself.

As the breeze rustled the leaves and the birds sang, there was no place i'd rather be.

All of a sudden a car across the street began a Cacophonous Outburst awaking me from my midspring dream. Honk! Honk! Honk! Honk! I looked over in that direction looking for the Squad of Ski-Mask Clad Burglers in process of Grand Theft Auto.

Nothing but a squirrel. A very frightened squirrel.

The car in question is a very expensive German made luxury SUV no doubt outfitted with more sensors and microprocessors than the supercomputers of yesteryear. While I have no doubt the car felt it was in danger, try as I might, I could not identify the threat. If, in fact, the car was being stolen in another dimension, I see no reason for the alarm to extend into this dimension, the one where I was enjoying a nice spring day outside.

As a highly trained statistician, let me point out the following:

Rather than emit an ear piercing (and spring day shattering) noise, lets rewire all the car alarms to provide an electric shock to the bearer of the keys. This way, the owner would be instantaneously alerted to any perilous situation involving their automobile AND those enjoying a nice spring day outside could avoid senseless disturbance of the peace.

Granted, some of the car alarm incidents in the statistics table above were purposely activated by some selfish and ignorant car owner in hopes of locating their car in a parking lot.

My proposed solution does not address the 'I lost my car in a parking lot' problem. While perceived as a shortcoming of my innovation by some, I perceive it as a training issue, not one that needs a software solution. Rational adults can certainly agree that if the owner of a vehicle doesn't possess the mental capacity to remember where the automobile is parked, then the owner certainly has no business piloting a FIVE THOUSAND POUND cruise missile down busy streets

Obviously, this would be a disruptive technology and would require many hundreds of thousands of vehicles to be retrofitted with these new devices. The revenue generated by such activities would be enormous. Certainly more than I personally could spend in a lifetime. I have just received a patent from the United States Patent Office for my apparatus and am soliciting investors to bring it to market. If you would like to invest in this Ground Breaking Technology, and share in the immense returns from such a venture, please donate via the PayPal button on the left side of the page.

I look forward to many years of prosperity founded on this much needed technology.

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     May 12, 2007 4:30 PM

Recently on the Dalnet #Mach-II IRC channel, a user asked about including resources in a mach-II.xml file. As you probably know, the MVC Framework, Mach-II, recently added an include feature. This is an excellent feature to help break up large XML file, which has been one of my previous annoyances with Mach-II. The way the new include feature works is inside an 'includes' tag define a resource to include.

Note, the extra space I added in the xml tags. This is for BlogCFC formatting and your XML file should NOT look like that..

According to the documentation, the included resource MUST be a valid Mach-II.xml document. Which means a root <mach-ii version="1.5.0"> tag, an <event-handlers> tag around your event-handlers and all other details for a syntactically valid mach-II.xml file. Specifically, the user left out the <event-handlers> tag around the event-handler tags inside the include and received a terse error:

Wrapping the event-handler tags with <event-handlers> sorted him right out.

P.S. I am impressed with the new functionality in Mach-II 1.5. Go Team Mach-II

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     May 11, 2007 11:20 AM

I am currently working through a problem and at the point of pulling my hair out. I have an Ajax process that pops up a nice little div on success. In Firefox, predictably, I see the pop-up window and all is well. In IE, the ajax process runs and I do not get the pop-up window.

Maybe I am a little spoiled using Firebug because I can see the details of the request, the DOM and other important runtime bits. In IE I get nothing useful.

After writing the hundredth alert( ' yadda ' ); command, I thought I would ask the community for input. What do YOU use to debug javascript and ajax requests in IE?

P.S. Any one who write 'The Microsoft Script Debugger' will be taken out back and shot.

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     May 8, 2007 5:40 PM

The aggregators are filled with hundreds of posts extolling the virtues of CF.Objective. I wanted to live blog some of the sessions but I decided against it. Why? You may ask?

Initially, I didn't have wifi service and while Paul and Baz sorted that out, I just didn't want to divide my attention between the awesome content and correcting my terribly typed notes. There was too much to learn!

Even being a little sleep deprived, I didn't miss a single time slot. The content at this conference goes well beyond what can be found at such conferences as CFUnited and MAX and I highly recommend this conference for above average programmers.

Apart from the content, I met a lot of really cool people. Some I knew from their blog, some not, though we all had a really nice time. I hope to keep up the friendships from cf.objective. I wasn't so good at handing out my card so if we met at the conference and you would like my email address, just leave a comment and I'll send it right over.

A big THANK YOU to Jared, Steven and the crew for putting on a very well run conference. I wouldn't have changed a single detail.

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     May 7, 2007 11:42 AM

I just got back in from CfObjective ( A post on that later ) and found three errors in my inbox from my blog.

I NEVER get errors from my blog software, partly because Ray Camden runs his software projects really well and partly because no one reads my blog. So imagine my surprise when I found the following:

Let this be a lesson to those who don't use cfqueryparam. You can see the context of the error is that a 63k sized request came in where the software was expecting a 35 character string value. Cfqueryparam performed as expected and prevented the call.

Now why would I get a 63k request? I have no idea. Apparently, some request for my RSS feed was WAY overloaded. In place of the UUID in the request, 63k worth of junk came in. I wonder if an aggregator has gone wild?

Has anyone else seen this error in their blog?

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     May 3, 2007 10:21 AM

Sometimes I read too fast. I remember reading a post on Scorpio by Sean Corfield. I just don't remember the part about the ColdFusion Ajax Wizards for Eclipse.

Here is the section of the post that caught my eye on the second reading:

I've used the Flex Wizards before. The wizards are very easy to use and will create non-trivial applications, from the server-side. Since they are the same wizards, I imagine throwing together an Ajax enabled application is going to be a piece of cake.

Apart from the mention on Sean Corfield's blog, I haven't seen or read any other news about this feature. If anyone has a link or some information, please post a comment.

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Posted By : Dan Wilson     May 2, 2007 8:32 PM

I am no politico, please understand. I am writing about New Jersey Governor John Corzine who was recently involved in a high speed traffic accident.

The accident occurred when Mr. Corzine's driver, a New Jersey State Trooper. lost control of the State Owned SUV at 90 MPH. Mr. Corzine, seated in the front, was not wearing his seat belt and suffered terrible injury as would be expected in such a crash. Why am I blogging about this you may ask?

John Corzine has announced he will pay for his own medical bills resulting from the accident, rather than use the State Health Care benefits. Certainly his bills will be over the several hundred thousand dollar level and it is a very honest, responsible move for him to make. Choosing to pay out of his own pocket rather than push the costs on the State Health Care system, the same system that provides and pays for Health Care for Meter Readers, Sanitation workers and others is a very humane move. I, for one applaud his sense of personal responsibility. Still, that isn't what prompted me to write this post.

I read in the paper just today that John Corzine requested to be written a $48 dollar ticket for not wearing his seatbelt while in the front seat of a motor vehicle. He promptly received his ticket and paid it.

I know very little about his politics or his past accomplishments. I do know that few other politicians would have the backbone and the integrity to make these decisions. There were many, many ways of handling your circumstances Mr. Corzine, You chose the most honorable and my proverbial hat is off to you!

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