Viewing by month: June 2008

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 - Categories: 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

6 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 2:24 PM - Categories: 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 - Categories: 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 - Categories:

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 - Categories: 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 - Categories: ColdFusion | Development | Transfer