johnwilker.com

Time Management SQL Script

Hope everyone had a good Turkey Day.

I finished the SQL for the TMC. Creates the tables and stored procs and creates an admin user.

Don’t be shy to ask questions.

Link to file.

Tags: ColdFusion, DTMC, Flex Development

Flex Project… Go!!

I was talking to a friend and he was saying he’s starting a flex project of his own. Get a more concrete grasp on the technology. Makes sense to me. While I wait for Roundpeg to land some Flex work I can do I figure I should experiment on my own.

So starting next week I will be devoting as much free time as I can to “flex-ifying” my Time Management Console app. This app is a CF app I wrote to track my time, and manage my invoicing. Seems like a good candidate for a Rich Internet App.

I’m also in the process of Scripting the Database (should be done by Monday) so that I can make that available for download should anybody be interested. In the meantime, I’ve made some minor improvements to the code, added some MX functionality and gotten jiggy with the CFdocument tag. More to come but if you’re interested here’s a link to the zip.

Tags: DTMC, Flex Development

Zip proximity search

Gotta love the internet and the fates, those sly greek chicas.

A few days ago I came across some one’s blog posting about his articles in the Oct CFDJ. I can’t remember where I saw that, but I did download the PDF version. I didn’t read it at that time, but I scanned the cover.

Jump a few hours into the day, one of my clients is talking about an unscoped feature on the site I’m building for him. A search based on zip code proximity, didn’t I just see that somewhere? I did, the Oct CFDJ had an article by Troy Pullis on his implementation of a proximity search.

I read his article and he points to his source of inspiration, an article on webmonkey by none other than my new Pal Rob Capili. I met Rob at Flex training a few weeks ago. I had him send me his code (I couldn’t get webmonkey to load for whatever reason) and away I went. Thanks to his code and article, and Troy’s article in the CFDJ, my un-spec’ed search page was done in an hour or so, including my 5$ zipcode database.

Gotta love the CF Community.

Tags: ColdFusion

CSS

I’ve never been a big fan of CSS. No real reason, it just seemed like such a PITA. And it is really, let’s be honest.

BUT

I’m working on a site for a client and they want it mostly CSS. More search engine friendly and all. I know enough CSS to fill a shot glass. Prefer other things in my shot glasses, but my CSS knowledge will if needed fit there.

My buddy Tom used one of our co-workers’ books on CSS, and said it had helped him with his immediate need. So.. off to the local B&N I went.

The local B&N actually has a really good section for computer books, I was impressed, and had I not been in a hurry to get back to the house and get working, I woulda stuck around a while.Seeing as I was at a book store I couldn’t come away with just one book, especially if the one ended up not be the one I need. So I picked up the O’Reilly offering on CSS as well. They tend to be pretty good books.

I am well on my way to really digging CSS. It certainly takes some getting used to but it sure is nice once you get going. This site I’m working on is pretty easy to tweak when I need to change a color or nudge something to the left. I’ve really been missing out.

Tags: ColdFusion, CSS

Search Engine Friendliness

A client of my client recently had me make their site Search Engine friendly. Was quite an interesting project. I had never really looked into SEO, and SES stuff before. Gave me a chance to get a little insight into how the search engines work in relation to dynamic sites.

We used <cf_fake_url> to accomplish the ses conversion. It actually made the transition quite easy. A few pages required some tweaking with how they pass variables but otherwise it was a simple matter of changing all <A href> tags to use page.cfm/var/value/var/value. Worked rather well I must say.

Tags: ColdFusion

CF AJAX

Stumbled across this on the listservs. CF_AJAX (or CFAJAX) brings the coolness and buzzwordiness of AJAX (think Googlemaps, Gmail) to CF. I haven’t explored much yet, been pretty busy with work that pays money :) but I’m thinking AJAX wouls be a cool addition to my TIme and billing app. It looks pretty damn cool. THere are some simple examples on the site and another CF Developer provided a great resource on the return types from CF_AJAX. functionality.

Stay tuned. I’ll try to post some of my AJAX attempts.

Tags: AJAX

Time Management & Invoicing

Long ago in a galaxy far, far away I worked on a project for an employer. They wanted some way for us developers (and eventually QA, and such) to track our time. The reason was two fold; see what we were spending our time on, and capitalize any new development in order to manage costs.

Well as resident CF Guru the application we needed fell to me. Not only was I the sole developer, I was the technical architect, before such titles existed. Long story short I came up with a pretty damn robust time tracking app, with lots of reporting features. When I left there and the company folded, I modified the application (which I somehow accidentally left on a CD) to be my time tracking and invoicing app for my consulting business. The time entries I made, were then translatable to an invoice that I could print or email. This was all CF5, so none of the cool new features we have today.

A badly planned HD wipe and restore left me with a copy of my app that was 5 months old a few years ago and I never came back to it, since I was a full time employee. Well I’m getting back into consulting again so I’ve resurected the app and am bringing it up to 2005.

Once I get it back to mostly stable I’ll start posting Zips of it for download by anyone interested. Screen shots are available over at my other site.

Tags: ColdFusion, DTMC

My version of Captcha

Rob Brooks Bilson has an interesting post on how CFX_captcha is (or was at the time of his post) is proving to be tough to beat.

For those (are there any) that don’t know, captcha systems are those annoying little things that ask us to type in some random string of letters and numbers.

As Rob points out, for those of us that are color blind these systems are really hard to deal with. Hell I’m not color blind and I often have to refresh until I get a legible string.

So this brings us to my version. I could have used cfx_captcha, but I’m cheap and it woulda cost like $10/month for CrystalTech to host the CFX for me. Pass!

I launched my blog with no spammer protection initially. That, as you can imagine didn’t go well. My comments were flooded with Spam almost immediately. Short of disabling comments I needed a solution, so I came up with something pretty elegant IMO.

On the surface it’s a Checkbox with a label of “I am human”

under the covers, I create a random number and save it to session scope. That number becomes the name of the form field for the checkbox. On the processing end of  the comment processor, I look for a form field that matches my random number. If I have it, the comment passes. If not, I quietly disregard the comment.

On the processing page it’s pretty simple.

If it passes then the post is put into the database, if not the form says thanks and moves on.

I’m not sure how foolproof it is, but since I launched it. it’s never failed me. And it doesn’t offend the color blind.

Tags: ColdFusion

Upgrades

Going dark. Should be back up by tomorrow but maybe later tomorrow. New Blog version, gotta integrate with my DB, and re-do some of my improvements.

Tags: BlogCFC

How to go nowhere fast

or… How do I always manage to be the employee that does his job, works hard, keeps abreast of business and technology, steps up to manage projects and architect solutions, yet still not be the employee that is a) given the position with responsibility. b) Treated like he knows anything at all about 1-the business, and 2-The technology.

The answer is I don’t know. Believe me, if I did know, I’d stop doing whatever I am doing that puts me in that position. You think I like this?

I like the place I work. It’s largely evil, and only cares about money, not people (customers or employees), but the people are (mostly) good, They know their stuff, and the money is not too bad. That said. I’ve been overlooked recently in favor of other employees that, while not incompetent by any stretch, know a fraction of what I do, as far as the company and it’s people, and the applications we support.

My team has two System Architects… one of which can’t architect a thing. One manages to take a single project and “architect” it into a ginormous project that only he can work on, excluding all else. THe other does about as much architecting as I do flipping hamburgers at McDonalds.

And here I am, wanted to get into the architecture field, having the knowledge of our systems, having good relationships with people on all teams, having a reputation as a developer who can deliver and make the customer happy. And I get the run around. I get, “It’s 50% trainging and 50% experience” fuck that! I have the experience. We’ve got architects at our company that weren’t any good at coding, yet I’m not qualified? WTF

Then I talk to a good friend of mine at another company. Same business. He’s got a web architect, who doesn’t want to use Flash because it will lock them into a single technology, but some, no name .NET component that sucks for UI, that’s a great choice. It makes my head hurt that this bozo is doing the job I want, and sounds like he couldn’t program or architect his way out of a paper sack!!!

For Crying out loud!

Tags: Work