FireFox 3 has Infinet Loop Protection

I had to write a conversion utility to move an old database contained a few hundred thousand records from MySQL to MSSQL, making the structure more normalized and running some calculations, bla bla bla. In my need to bang this out quickly and since it was a one time throw it away app I wrote a quick ColdFusion script to do the transformation for me and save some time.

I decided to run in blocks and do a CFLOCATION at the bottom of the page, essentially creating on the fly pagination of my work.

Well as an FWI for developers, if FireFox redirects too many times you get a nice phat error... Not really a huge deal and nothing we ever have to worry about with a normal application; but this is something I had never run into before having always been an IE guy before FF3 beta...

1 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 3:16 PM : ColdFusion | Debugging | Development

Weather API? I need history...

I'm working on a side project that is racing related and I need to retrieve weather data for upwards of the last two years or at least all of 2007.

I don't want weather forcasts, thats easy to find. I'm looking for a weather report for what happened on dayX at zip code or lat/lon X/X. Even better would be if I could give more specific time information...

Does anyone have experience with a product that will allow me access to this information?

TIA

5 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 2:24 PM : Development

Al Gore is a Windbag

I dislike Al Gore for a number of reasons; his exploitation of environmental concerns to the tune of 10's of millions of dollars is just the tip of the iceberg, but last night I was cruising the dozens of world news RSS feeds in my beloved Google Reader when I ran across an article that joins the ever growing list of articles to again point a shadowing finger at Al Gore for his complete absurdness and do as I say don't do what I do persona.

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research is just one of the more recent publishers to point out Al Gore’s Hypocritical life style. Whether it's personal jets or using electricity at more than 20x the averge American Household rate, All Gore continues to give us reasons to call him a fraud!

"In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month." -CTPR

Now you could tell me that the evil empire (G Bush) was using 30 times the power and I could care less. Mr. Gore has decided to preach to me that I should decrease my footprint by ME changing MY life. He has told 10's of thousands of people here and abroad that we should drive a smaller cars and make personal concessions so we don't hurt the environment as much, bla bla bla. Yet it appears he hasn't made a single personal consession aside about $16k in window upgrades after getting 'caught'.

When will people see this man for the scam artist he is and stop fueling his retirement?

6 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 6:22 AM : Politics

FireFox Record Not Looking Good: Service Unavailable

Not even 40 minutes into their "record breaking" download period of 24 hours and FireFox.com and mozilla.com are down with a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" and as of this blog post, FireFox Version 2 is the only available final version.

I just know someone is going to ask for a chad recount after this!

3 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 1:51 PM :

Be a lemming; download FireFox 3 Today

If you want to join in on the heard of sheep downloading FireFox3 final today, the downloading will commence at 1pm East Coast time. Which if you ask me is an odd time to make something available; and yes I will be one of the sheep downloading.

Hopefully plugin makers will be updating semi-quickly to the new stable release.

0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 8:11 AM : Development | General News

Transfer: <property> and <manytoone> don't play well together

Last week I started a new project and I decided to use Transfer-ORM. So far I've been happy with it's offerings aside from one severe headach my limited knowledge on the product has created. In my database I have multiple depths of linking, I would like to leverage the <manytoone> ability of Transfer, howevere I also need to use these same fields in a readByPropertyMap call.

My goal is to be able to use eventId as a property while being able to "getEvent()" and get back a transfer object. The Issue: You can't have the same a column in your config as is the link column in a <manytoone>. Transfer is nice enough to create the supporting methods for your linked tables/objects, but fails to give you a convenient way to "filter" by them. I feel this is an utmost basic use of object based design but I could be wrong.

The "Solution":
<object name="ObjectName" table="tblName">
    <id name="sessionId" type="numeric" generate="false" />
    <property name="eventIdLink" column="eventId" type="numeric" ignore-insert="true" />

    <manytoone name="Event">
        <link to="events.Event" column="eventId"/>
    </manytoone>
</object>

1. I appended "Link" to my property name. This is how it needs to be referenced in the readByPropertyMap()
2. Added ignore-insert="true" to my properties
3. renamed my nodes to the Object of what is returned.

I really think that if I should be ably to have a <property> named eventId and a <manytoone> named event on column eventId and have the app just know not to try and build 2 setEventId methods. Hopefully this will save someone else a few minutes time in their playing with Transfer...

 

2 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 11:31 PM : ColdFusion | Development | Transfer

FireFox in Search of Guinness World Record

Thats right. When FireFox 3 goes live sometime in June they are hoping to declare a "download day" and set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours. You can check out their FireFox Download Day Headquarters where you can pledge your allegence to the rebel forces, I mean FF.

I have to say, I've been using FF3 since beta 2 and I think it is a huge improvment over FF2 and for the first time a huge improvement over IE7. I have to admit I couldn't get on the FireFox bandwagon until this release came out. Now I can't wait for it to go live so the rest of these small bugs can go away and more plugin developers update to the new version campatability.

0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 7:35 AM : Development

Motorcycle Road Racing Update

This past weekend brough fantasic weather to the Summit Point Motorsports Park in West Virginia. The holiday weekend race was 4 days long with 2 days of track practice and 2 days of racing. Unfortunently for team EmpireGP we showed up a bit too late for the absolutly jammed packed weekend and ended up getting a less than ideal pit spot in the paddock. On the plus side though, our area was much more relaxed.

Testing on Saturday went well but resulted in some so-so lap times maxing out in the upper 1:21's. However the bike was performing well and I wasn't feeling the need to destroy the machine before the weekend really kicked off. With a sold out event I was entered into 5 races: the GTU ,GTO, Unlimted GP (trophy dash), Middeweight GP and middleweight Superbike.

more details and pictures after the jump

Read more...

0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 7:39 PM : Motorcycles | Racing | General News

My new family addition (5wk old Boxer)

This past weekend I picked up a 5 week old Boxer puppy from a rescue (Ella). Her mom had stopped feeding the puppies, but she was already doing very well on her own anyway. We already have an almost 2 year old Lhasapoo (Buster) who up until the afternnon of the day when this video was shot, was being extremly snobish and doing his best to ignoring the new pup.

I'm not normally a guy to post pictures of my pets, or even take video... But last night I captured a couple really funny scenes on my pocket camera and thought this one was worth posting. Whats amazing is that the MIC on the camera was actualy on. These two will now play for 15-20 minutes like this all out and not make a SINGLE sound.... This is a welcome change from her hound-esque howl she can get going at night...

 

0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 3:22 PM : General News | Friends / Family

Running Multiple Versions of Firefox

Having recently switched to using Firefox and having always complained about Microsoft's PIA move by making it so difficult to run multiple version of IE at one, I was suprised to find that FireFox has the same stupid issue. Fire fox uses the same default non segrated profile path for every version.

The Fix (same idea for win and mac I believe):

Run c:\{your Firefox path}\firefox -profilemanager -no-remote

Create a 2 new profiles, I called mine FireFox3Rc1 and Firefox2. Use alpha-numeric and stay away from spaces. Once you've created them go ahead and exit.

Now you must modify the shortcuts for firefox, respectfully.

c:\{FF2 Path}firefox.exe -P FireFox3 -no-remote
c:\{FF3 Path}firefox.exe -P FireFox3RC1 -no-remote

Technically there is no need to change profiles for both FF version. But I'm assuming I'll even have a 3rd version here of FF3 soon and I hate using default profile paths...

Read more...

1 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 3:06 PM : Debugging | Development

Wow, sorry for the feed dump!

Due to server and software changes my blog paths were no longer the same and I stopped getting aggregated by Adobe Feed/MXNA. I ignored this aside from an email that didn't get me anywhere; until this afternoon. With the new feeds software the feeds list actualy worked and I found out what URL Adobe was looking for my feed at. A quick 301 error inside a cfif tag fixed my problems...

Unfortunetly the result was ALL of my posts showing up in Adobe feeds at the top all at once. For this I apologize, I had figuered it would go off my modified or posted date, not when it read it for the first time...

<cfif url.event EQ "showBlogRss">
    <cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved Permanently">
    <cfheader
          name="Location"
          value="http://www.EmpireGPServices.com/blog/feeds/rss.cfm"
    />
    <cfabort>
</cfif>

1 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 4:27 PM : ColdFusion | Debugging | Development | General News

Sitemap awareness from Robots.txt

In writig a plugin for Mango Blog, I found out that the big leaguers for search engines have gotten together and decided that sitemap awareness from robots.txt was a good idea. This was news to me despite that this has been out there for more than a year now.

To add your sitemaps to your robots.txt simply add this line:
Sitemap: http://www.YourWebsite.com/sitemap.xml

In my case i used:
Sitemap: http://www.empiregpservices.com/blog/sitemap.xml

Further information:
http://www.sitemaps.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000437.html

0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 2:03 PM : ColdFusion | Mango Blog

Site Map Generator: Mango Blog Plugin

I've created yet another plugin for the ColdFusion Mango Blog package. Last night I was suppose to be doing one thing and my ADD kicked in and I did this for some reason.

This new Site Map Generator Plugin will create a sitemap.xml document in your blog's root directory. Sitemaps are supported by search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask.com and Moreover.com and a few more I'm sure at least.

More info after the jump or
Download the ZIP file or view my SVN repository

Read more...

13 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 1:37 PM : ColdFusion | Mango Blog | My Projects

New Blackberry 9000 Details Confirmed

The new Blackberry 9000 Bold is no longer a rumor. Check out this in-depth review from crackberry.com.

0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 2:48 PM : Reviews | Blackberry

New Mango Blog Plugin: Sphere.com Module Plugin

This weekend I stumbled upon a link on CNN for "Sphere: Related Content". Intrigued I clicked the link to check it out and found the results interesting. After some investigation I found that the service was free and not too hard to impliment. To help keep me from working on things I should be, I wrote it as a plugin for Mango Blog. A blurb from their marketing information:

• Enhance your readers' experience by offering related content and connecting on-line conversations
• Enhance site interaction by establishing your site as an information hub for readers
• Acquire new readers by adding your content to the Sphere network of content

Screen shots after the jump
Download the ZIP file or view my SVN repository

Read more...

1 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 9:36 AM : ColdFusion | Mango Blog

ColdFusion 9 Feature Request: Drop Ajax/JS libraries

18 comments - ColdFusion | Development | YUI | JavaScript |

New Version of Feed Ping for Mango Blog

1 comments - ColdFusion | Development | Mango Blog |

Colin Edwards' Amazing Lowside Save (video)

0 comments - Motorcycles | Racing |

Download my Mango Theme

1 comments - ColdFusion | Development | Mango Blog |

New Mango Blog Plugin: Auto Ping

0 comments - ColdFusion | Development | Mango Blog |

Are all your CFC variables Scoped? Find Out!

1 comments - ColdFusion | Debugging | Reviews | Development |

Want an Amazon Gift Card? How can I get rid of this Excel 2007 Nag Screen

0 comments - Microsoft |

Review: 2004 Mark West Pinot Noir

0 comments - Reviews | Wine / Liquor |

Install a new SQL Server Instance from Command Prompt

0 comments - SQL | Windows XP | Development |

Review: 199 Lives (The Travis Pastrana Movie)

0 comments - Motorcycles | Racing | Reviews |