Cozmo's Dev Blog - Tools

Seeking recommendations for a drop down menu (tabs)

Tue, 19 May 2009 20:22:00-0700

I have a very finicky and non trivial CSS based layout that I have finally worked all the kinks out of. Actually it is only finicky in IE. Now the powers that be want to add drop down menus (tabs) the top nav bar that use the sliding door rounded corner technique. I have tried a bunch of menuing systems: Dynamic Drive menus, Spry, some jQuery plugins, Massimo's hiermenu and a bunch of stuff I found off of the Google and all of them have problems of one sort or another. I can't position it correctly, it trows off other page elementsm the drop down columns are mis-aligned etc... forever and ever, world with out end. Amen. I posted this to CF_talk a few months back (the site got shelved since then and it is back in production) and though I would hit up the blogosphere.. Has anybody out there had any luck with this and can recommend a tabbed menu dropdown solution? The primary requirement are:

It can have sub menus
W3C XHTML compliant.
Allows for text based links

These are the Menus that I have tried so far:

(ot) Pleas leave a comment below. Many TIA!!!

The best part about FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is not that it is free.

Thu, 07 May 2009 02:00:00-0700

I used to look at FOSS as a means to get free software: MySQL, Apache, Eclipse etc... FOSS is part of my day to day affairs and I dare say the best thing to ever happen to software and software developers. But for me, FOSS is the best programming howto guide there is. It is like a living text book that is always getting better. I have learned more from reading other peoples source code than I have from any book, blog post or article. Being an autodidact, reading source code makes much sense than reading the English words used to describe the programming concepts. Just this week I was asked to R&D a bunch of stuff and I found solutions for all the CF stuff by going to either CFLib.org or RIAForge.org. (Mad props to Ray Camden for making those sites. You saved my ass twice this week dude! Rock On with your bad ass self!) Those sites are gold mines for CF programming knowledge. I have been turned on to so many new ideas and concepts by the folks that have shared their work that I want to give a shout out and thank you to y'all.

Thank you!!

A Quick and Dirty CSS Viewer.

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:28:00-0700

When I work on a site with CSS that I am not familiar with I find this little widget to be very handy. I simply took Shlomy Gantz's viewCSS() function from CFLib.org and pointed it to my CSS files and voila I have a visual representation of all the CSS styles for the included style sheets. It is far from perfect and works best with text related CSS but the only real problem so far is that it tends to barf on /* CSS comments*/. But that is a pretty minor issue. Here is a zip file with the code. Here are the Styles for this site The code is ridiculously simple

  function viewCSS(cssCode) {  var i ="";  var cssItem="";  var ret="";  for(i=1;i lte listlen(arguments.cssCode,'}');i=i+1) {   cssItem = listgetAt(arguments.cssCode,i,'}');   if(findNocase('{',cssItem)) ret = ret & '#trim(mid(cssItem,1,findNocase("{",cssItem)-1))#

';  }  return ret; }               #viewCSS(cssTxt)#

WTF? Errr... I mean What the Font?

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:12:00-0700

This is a handy tool for figuring out what font is used in a graphic. All you do is upload an image that contains the font and it asks you to identify some highlighted letters and it will give the closest matches. http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ It doesn't provide the font for download but if you Google the font name there is a good chance you can find a free version (or a free knock off version).

Google Chrome Portable (Win only)

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:56:00-0700

Download Google Chrome Portable Google Chrome has some AWESOME debugging features including my favorite, Right Click >> Inspect Element. I would seriously recommend taking a look at Chrome for CSS debugging. I looked at the user agent and it is nearly identical as Safari. It had almost the same build so (I would assume) they are essentially the same browser. HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.42 Safari/525.19

Portable version of the Safari Web Browser

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:51:00-0700

I am a huge fan of portable apps. I like being able to drop an app in a folder and not have to install it. You just put them on a portable or thumb drive and you are good to go. Actually I have a version of almost my *entire* dev environment (sans MSSQL, that is next) on a thumb drive. I can literally set up shop anywhere (on a Win box). Any who, I needed to test a design against the WebKit browser, the engine behind Chrome, Safari and (I think) it is used by DW for it's Live View feature. So here are links to versions for both Mac and Windows: "http://www.thindownload.com/app-download/47/Safari-Browser (Win) http://osxportableapps.sourceforge.net/p_safari/ (Mac)

Amazing Website To Build (CF) Eclipse installs

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 23:16:00-0700

One of the biggest pains in the arse when dealing with some FOSS apps (LAMP especially) is dependency hell. If the app you need is not part of the package manager you can get into a day(s) long hunt for dependencies. The same is true for Eclipse (to a lesser degree). Or rather it was. Someone on CF_talk was having problems with installing CFEclipse on the latest version of Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede). In the past a few people recommended Pulse (myself included) to deal with Eclipse's dependencies. Pulse is a great app that resolves dependencies (most of the time) when building Eclipse Distros. Pulse is an excellent product but has a bad habit of downloading a gig or more of files (in my case) to its plugin cache (depending on your builds). Another option, and in my opinion a better option, is yoxos.com's On Demand website. http://yoxos.com/ondemand/ Yoxos.com's On Demand website is an online tool for building custom Eclipse distros/installs. This site is one of the most amazing web based apps I have seen to in my life. The front end is damn near that of a desk top app, and the back end is even more impressive. It allows you to pick and choose from hundreds of plugins and automatically resolves dependencies so you can create custom Eclipse installs that you can save, merge and share. I started messing around with the various plugins and found some of the most amazing tools like editors for PHP, SQL, CSS, (X)HTML, JavaScript and XML with support for Adobe AIR apps, all the major JS/AJAX libraries with code assist and inline help; wussywig HTML editors, JavaScript debuggers, XML schema editors, JavaScript/CSS/html function/property browsers, Database development tools and editors, snippets etc. etc. Not to mention Eclipse is the defacto standard for Java development and supports most of it's tool kits as well as having plugins for just about every language under the sun. And keep in mind that a lot of the above editors are not just text editors with color coding and rudimentary code complete but first class, full featured tools/IDE's like the ones that we used to (and still do) pay hundreds of dollars for. Oh yeah. It is all FREE!!! FOSS, me love you long time!!

Mail Goggles - Beer Goggles for email.

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:55:00-0700

I have a 2 beer limit for sending email. This will help help enforce that limit. From the Google Blog: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html "When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind? By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings." Some times Google is too cool for words.

Running on Railo - Breaking Radio Silence

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 01:37:00-0700

I moved my blog to a new VPS and it is running on Railo 3.0 Community. Hell YEAH!!! I have a back log of blarg entries to get posted as well. I also posting a bunch of contributions to the community with more to come. Uploaded so far are - My CFEclipse Snippets
- Some UDFs
- CFC Generator Lite
CFC Generator Lite is a HTML front end for creating cfc's for an entire database in one shot using Brian Rinaldi's outstanding Illudium PU-36 Code Generator. In the pipe: A how-to on getting Railo 3 running in a shared hosting environment with IIS on 2003 server using a hosting Control panel (Plesk 8.3) including gotchas and their work arounds. A How-to on creating a simple ORM by abstracting your database using Brian Rinaldi's outstanding Illudium PU-36 Code Generator.

Hello Maxthon

Fri, 23 May 2008 21:56:00-0700

I have a love hate relationship with FireFox (FF). It has two plugins that are indespensible for web development: Firebug and The web developers tool bar. But as I have posted before, it all but renders my laptop useless. I had to tweak it to death to get it to run acceptibly on the workstation at work I don't like IE 7. No reason really. I just don't like it. IE 6 is ok by not having tabs or plugins sucks. On a friends advice I tried out Maxthon. It is basically IE 6 with FF like shell. It is not the greatest but I have tabs , all the tools I need for regular browsing and it is *only* eating up about 28 megs ram with 10 tabs open and hardley uses any processor. FF would be crawling under this sort of load, eating a couple hundred megs of ram and pegging the proccessor. So if you need an alternitive for regular browsing you should give it a try. http://www.maxthon.com/

FireFox - Just like a disfunctional relationship

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:05:00-0700

I loved firefox at one time. She had everything I wanted and needed, and more, from a browser. She was fast, nimble, extensible, she had and did everything I needed. And I do mean EVERYTHING. She was HOT!! Then we got married. She put on a lot of weight, she became very sluggish and started to really slow me down. She uses all of my resources and will sit there and do nothing for long periods of time so I cannot do anything else but wait for her. It is over baby. You are a fat, sluggish, resource hogging glutton that is taking more than you give. I still love you, but I have to move on. And even though I will be dating your red headed step sister I will still want to see you from time to time so I can use firebug. Open Source used to be so sexy. What happened to you? Are you becoming like Britteny Spears?

I don't know shit....

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 03:39:00-0700

If you are a CF developer (or web developer) and you are still using DreamWeaver or Homesite or CF studio and not using Eclipse or any other of the advanced IDE's like Komodo, Visual Studio, Aptana, NetBeans etc, *you literally have no idea what you are missing out on*. If you use F1 on DreamWeaver, Homesite or CF studio as a primary source of information about programming, CSS, HTML and your available options you are also missing a HUGE piece of information . I have been using Eclipse for about 9 months now and the one thing it has taught me is how little I know. When I first fired up CF studio some 10 odd years ago I looked at all the CF related buttons and the options and felt clueless. By using various Eclipse distros like the one provided by Pulse I feel even more clueless than I did 10 years ago. AND I have a working knowledge of web development and client and server side languages like JS, SQL, XML, XSL, HTML, XHTML, CSS, ASP, PHP, RegEx, CFML etc under my belt. As well as being exposed good doses of VB, ASP.NET, C#, ROR, Java, PERL, Python etc over the years. The one thing I am finding out that I don't know shit. At FSU the is an engraving on Dodd Hall that reads "The half of knowledge is to know where to find knowledge" Now I know the other half of knowledge is making sure that you are being exposed to *new* knowledge on a regular basis. If you explore Eclipse it will end up teaching you more than you can possibly imagine. Literally.

My new favorite things: Groovy and Grails

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:54:00-0700

I ran into it here.

http://www.barneyb.com/barneyblog/2008/02/11/barney-and-the-holy-grail/

Sean Corfield wrote on it

http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/Grails__a_first_look

I have been looking for a replacement for CF for some time now. I am not taking any chances and started learning Java. As you might know Java is huge and it is going to take a while to get up to speed with it. I have played with ROR and and Jruby I am not fond of the syntax or the development process

Enter Groovy and Grails. Grails makes some pretty complex and advanced techniques ridiculously easy to do. And the language is similar enough to CF and CF script to make the learning curve and barrier to entry not as steep as say Ruby or Java. And since it creates Java Byte code it should (in theory) run side by side with CF (That is this weekend’s science experiment). Basically to lets you write Java apps with out having to actually write Java.

http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2006/10/introduction-groovy-grails.html

http://groovy.codehaus.org/

http://grails.org/

CF 8 at work!!! YES!!!

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:39:00-0700

We pitched CF 8. Not really. The topic came up and our CTO looked at the specs and was all over the Exchange integration. His words "This is Huge". Cold fusion is the best web app server there is. Period.

Some of my favorite things: CF, PHP, Java, ROR all playing together. Literally.

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:16:00-0700

I am in search of the perfect application stack. There are many things about the above app stacks to love. I like them all. I have used all of the above to varying degrees. I have been on the Java train for some time and have been trying to get my head around it for the last few months. I wrote a couple POC apps in ROR to see what the hype is about and have been using PHP for years. And CF has been by my side for the last 10 years or so... A while back I was giving jRuby a spin using GlassFish and NetBeans and I really liked it. I liked it a lot. I also liked working with Java in NetBeans. The thing is, I can't get them to play together all under one roof. CF runs on Java so that is a given. PHP can play with Java a and ROR has been ported to Java via JRubyy. CF can talk to PHP and Ruby. I just wish I could get the all to run together, on the same machine, on the same web/app server, on the same port. So I tried to install CF 8 as a WAR file on GlassFish and it worked. But CF 8 Enterprise is $7500, so I tried installing Railo and that is running fine. I am about to see if I can get JRuby and php/Java bridge to run as well. If I can get all of these to run on the same server (on the same port) I will have the perfect platform. The RAD capabilities of CF and ROR, the bazillion OS PHP web apps out there and the power of Java (and bazillion prebuilt Java apps and tags as well).