From a Slashdot signature file:
“Information wants to be anthropomorphized.”
Here’s some related reading…
Author Archives: Brian Panulla
Adobe Flex Derby
Adobe just announced the winners of their Flex Developer Derby. There are some great entries, so check em out!
Flex has the potential to out-do Ajax as a platform for building expressive Web apps. I’ve been working pretty heavily on a Flex project for the last few weeks, and I like what I’ve seen. The entries in the Derby used the latest version of Flex (2.0), which has even better features than the previous version I’ve been working with.
Upgrading to BlogCFC 5
Lately several of us in my office have been trying to blog more at work. I realized that I’d pretty much let this blog go feral over the last few months, and thought I’d give it a little attention.
When I set this blog up, I decided to use BlogCFC. In the intervening months a new version had been released (BlogCFC 5), so I thought I’d take a whack at upgrading from the previous version I had installed.
All in all, the upgrade went okay. It was a little bumpy making sure I made the necessary mods to the database and tracking down a bug in the Captcha CFC that may be related to my environment.
Of course, if I’d actually *read* the README file, things would have gone a lot smoother!
Lorem Ipsum at your (middle) fingertips!
In testing out various CMS packages (including our own), I keep needing to get my hands on a block of text for some dummy page or other…. usually this text winds up being the body of the last email I happened to read in Thunderbird. 
In setting up a new Firefox install with my usual kit of extensions, I found another neat one — a one-click Lorem Ipsum inserter: Dummy Lipsum. This extension adds an option to “Insert Dummy Lipsum” under your right-click context menu. It apparently pulls measured amounts of the classic text from the now-even-more-handy Lipsum.com.
Right-clicking on the MacBook Pro
Apple brought two-finger-tap right clicking to the MacBook line with the 17″ MBP and new MacBooks, but the first gen was left out, or so I thought. It turns out the *hardware* is there in the 15″ MBP, but the driver didn’t include the functionality. The driver shipping with the newer MacBooks merely accesses capabilities what was already there in the hardware.
Stumbled on this yesterday… Someone has brought two-finger right clicking to the first-gen MacBook Pros:
Seems they managed to repackage the newer drivers and get them working on the older MBP!
Eolas JavaScript Fix for Flash Navigation
I think I finally have a workable solution to the Eolas IE issue with the Flash navigation on our college Web site. My hope is that we’ll be able to hit the largest audience possible with at least some measure of functionality, while simultaneously maintaining a semblance of Web Standard-itude. How’s that for ambitious?!?!
My solution is basically a three-tiered approach:
- Object tag-based embedding (a la the Flash Satay method) of the primary navigation bar .swf file
- Alternative content — an ordered list of images/links mimicking the links in the Flash swf with javascript mouseover effects. These two tiers are embedded in the page using a static JavaScript file that document.write()s the content into the page.
- A second set of images/links as an all-else-fails backup for users with no scripting support, served by <noscript> tags.
Some downsides:
- Users who have no scripting, or have it turned off, will never see the Flash version, whether they have the plugin or not
- Non-IE users will always have their navigation built with JavaScript. Seems inefficient, but without walking down the path of browser detection, I don’t see a way around this.
- Our current set of non-Flash alternative images are PNGs, which look really awful in IE6. Hopefully we can remedy this soon.
- With potentially two copies of the alternative content in the page (one in the JavaScript-generated object tag, the other in the <noscript> block), there may be difficulties that I’m not seeing.
I’m working on a more thorough writeup of this process to post somewhere, but that’s a summary. Feel free to poke around the code — if anyone has suggestions for improvements to the method, I’m all ears. I’m in the process of working up a solution for our QuickTime movies following a similar path, with some ideas pulled from unobtrusive JavaScript.
IE and Eolas Patent Woes
Well, I was really hoping Microsoft would find a way out of this, but the Eolas patent “fix” to Internet Explorer 6 for Windows XP/2003 has come home to roost. It apparently rolled out in this week’s updates, despite reports of a delay in its release.
We’re now starting to get reports of problems with the Flash navigation and QuickTime movies on our college Web site from internal users.
I was overjoyed a few weeks ago when we finally got our Flash and QuickTime content to load in pages using Web Standard markup, and now the “solution” to Microsoft’s fix is to either script all
If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, there’s some reading material in my del.icio.us bookmarks.
My Nerd Score
I stumbled on this in a blog I read and had to try it out. My Nerd Score:
I’m so ashamed. Maybe I’ll get a higher score if I take it again.
Blogging to MySQL
When I finally decided to go ahead with a BlogCFC/MySQL setup, I had to do some work to get ready for the deployment.
My first issue was the outdated version of MySQL installed on my server. I’m running an older version of RedHat Enterprise Linux (v3), so occasionally I encounter packages that lag significantly behind current development. After upgrading to a supported version of MySQL through a hail of broken RPM dependencies, I was able to run the install script without incident. Everything was cool.
Until I tried to run the blog in a browser! I was reminded that MySQL installs on Linux using case-sensitive table names by default! The BlogCFC MySQL install script created all the tables in all-lower case, but the CFML code uses easier-to-read mixedCase for all the table name references.
After discussing the issue with a knowledgeable friend, I decided that reconfiguring MySQL was the easiest solution. Since this is the only application using MySQL on my server, I wouldn’t have to worry about breaking any other apps. MySQL can be reconfigured by setting the variable lower_case_table_names=1 in /etc/my.cnf.
For more information, check out: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/name-case-sensitivity.html
Re-implementing CDBaby with Ruby On Rails
I happened upon a link to Migrating to Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL: An Interview with CD Baby buried at the bottom of a PostgreSQL newsletter.
I’ve tinkered with Ruby on Rails a bit and liked what I saw, though I have to admit to my own “struggling with some typical Not-Invented-Here” as Kemper said in the article. ColdFusion allows me to be extremely expressive in a simple, easy to read code, and Ruby certainly steps up to the plate in that regard. Parts of Rails just seem odd — particularly the need to follow the implementers’ style and naming techniques to really make the most of Rails’ speed of development.
Hopefully something will come up that will give me a reasonable project to give RoR a deeper look.