Style guides are a nice way of maintaining good code, even ColdFusion has one laying around albeit a little neglected nowadays anyone interested in looking over it with me?). Recently Google shared their Javascript coding guide which although is not earth shatteringly new it proves to be a great developer resource especialy if you work in a team of any size.

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With the topics not coming until later September/early October the speaker list for Scotch On The Rocks 2011 has been released
scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2010/9/1/SOTR2011-Speakers-Unleashed

The 2010 conference was a great 2-day ColdFusion overload of information and networking opportunities so if you haven't got your ticket for 2011 go now!

Alternate heading for this is how to install Flash SDK in Chrome though either way I was stumped this morning as I just wanted to get in to learning Flex 4.

• When developing Flex applications you need the SDK version of Flash for debugging which means uninstalling previous versions first. After digging around my Mac for a little while then hitting Google I was able to find out that this has to be achieved via a seperate, downloadable uninstaller (unlike all other apps I use).
• I followed the 6 steps from Adobe then I opened Google Chrome and checked About Adobe Flash Player page only to see that its still installed. At this point Adobe's advice is quite simply repeat these steps to uninstall Flash Player - honest, that's what it says.
  I did repeat the steps a couple of times for sanity sake then I remembered that Chrome integrated Flash recently so I fired up Firefox and found that indeed Flash was uninstalled!
• Back to Chrome and I went to about:plugins and Disabled "Shockwave Flash". Fired up About Adobe Flash Player and now its gone!
• Final step is installing Flash SDK and you're done

A lady is throwing a party for her granddaughter, and had gone all out..... a caterer, band, and a hired clown. Just before the party started, two bums showed up looking for a handout. Feeling sorry for the bums, the woman told them that she would give them a meal if they will help chop some wood for her out back. Gratefully, they headed to the rear of the house.

The guests arrived, and all was going well with the children having a wonderful time. But the clown hadn't shown up. After a half and hour, the clown finally called to report that he was stuck in traffic, and would probably not make the party at all.

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There are a millon and one Twitter stat sites out there sometimes they are interesting like Klout others are not. On the other hand twitterbffs.com sits betweens these but it did highlight all the people I chat to & interact with via Twitter. This made me realise that not only should I point them out for others to follow but to also say cheers for putting up with nearly 7000 tweets!

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Its a good theory, enjoy!

A herd of buffalo can move only as fast as the slowest buffalo. When the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first.

This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.

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Sometimes with the new/updated features you don't get a chance to implement them right away. Well today I was working on a pulling in feed when I figured I finally had a good use-case to check out the updated caching enhancements in ColdFusion 9.

For this site I was working on I needed to pull in an RSS feed but HTTP calls are slow as there are usually factors outside of your control. The ColdFusion caching functions allows some nice control over what is cached, how often the cached is refreshed, and even when to drop it completley via the following two parameters:

1. time span ( when we need to re-cache the item )
2. idle/drop time ( When to drop it from memory when it hasn't been accessed for X amount of time )

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Something I've learnt recently that I might be the last to know but you can use wildcards (*) in the ServerAlias in Apache. In the past I've done something along the lines of

Really all you need to do is:

Hope this helps someone else

After reading forgetfoo.com recent post he reminded me that it is always pretty cool to check out other peoples desktop and see their setup/apps they are using (check out the Homesite logo in forgetfoo.com's screen grab!). Anyway heres mine, whats yours like?

Twitter have released there own Tweet Button now for users to implement in their web pages.

Very easy to setup and just a couple of lines to drop in to your HTML but does offer a host of advanced options such as: language that the button will render in and recommended Twitter accounts to follow after sharing content.

You can find me on Twitter at @andyj

Google Wave is a great tool and it seem there are more people out there who think this too. If you want Google to hang on to this mis-understood service check out; SaveGoogleWave.com and join the cause.

If you have used FW/1 you'll probably know that it takes over all .cfm requests. So for example if you add the file "rss.cfm" to your web root before the template is called FW/1 will run and the .cfm template will never actually be processed.

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IE over the versions is getting better with supporting CSS but it always seems to fall short or at very least doesn't try to push itself too much.

With that Microsoft have released a document stating which version of Internet Explorer (back to IE5) supports which rules, combinators, selectors, etc.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(VS.85).aspx

I have recently had a client who complained to me that the site was broken in IE8 even though I had already checked it out. It turns out the issue was M$'s great "Compatibility Mode"

I know my way around CSS well enough but it felt wrong making any changes to keep this IE only mode happy when all other browsers were not complaining. Bing! I had an idea and went to Google and found this document on Defining Document Compatibility.

Turns out I can force the users browser to IE8 mode with the following

Hopefully this will help some other developer with their designing woes.

After all my years with computers this is still true

From within the settings page of Gmail you can now create rich text signatures including changing font site, text align, style, colour, add images and links etc

Though this has been one (simple) feature missing from the product for a long time its not something I have missed. I know too many companies that abuse this feature and include un-needed images and just streams of multi-coloured text and links. Don't get me wrong, I am happy to see it, I am going to use it, but I am scared to see how some people will implement it.

I've been ill the last couple of days which meant I couldn't really focus on anything too heavy. So with being awake half the night I thought I should just play around CSS3 and it didn't take long till I came up with a pure CSS3 Post-it note made with no images. The only extra library I have used in this demo is Google Fonts for the script text. Code after the note:

Back soon!

Quick discaimer - I have no ideas which browsers this works in. All I can tell you is that it looks good in Chrome and Safari!

A thanks for @bigmadkev for this little on topic gem!

Man walking along kicks a tin can and out pops a genie.

"I will grant you one wish" says the genie.

"I want to live forever" says the man.

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Patrick O'Malley hoisted his beer and said: "Here's to spending the rest of me life between the legs of me wife!" - and he took home the top prize for the best toast of the night.

In bed later that night, he told his wife: "Mary, I won the prize for the best toast of the night." She said, "Aye, Paddy, what was your toast?"

So he told her: "Here's to spending the rest of me life sitting in church beside me wife."

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Get 'em while they are Super Cheap, Fairly Cheap, or Kinda Cheap ... but just get 'em! Scotch on the Rocks is Europe's Longest Running ColdFusion Conference and in 2011 its gone back home to Edinburgh for 2011!

Register now at: http://sotr2011.eventbrite.com/