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March 29, 2006

Best Laptop(s) Revealed: Lenovo Tapes

You have to check this out. I want one of these laptops!

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:36 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dreamweaver 8 & Flash 8 on Windows Vista

I had the darndest time getting these to install. Come to find out the old addage “Patience is a virtue” is true. Cody installed it fine on his system so I asked what he did which yielded no results because he installed it direct. :-( lol. He did inform me it took quite awhile to work though. I decided to just let it run for however long it needed.

Dreamweaver took about 30 minutes and Flash took about 40 minutes. The thing to note is it didn’t take this long to actually install but it took this long before the actual copying of files began. It just sits there with all buttons disabled for X minutes.

Patience is a virtue. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:02 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MiniMicrosoft Blog - Disloyal Outburst(s)

Ok…I had no idea there was so much drama surrounding Microsoft. For years I’ve been a Microsoft fan (for software) but never do I get involved deeply enough to know anything remotely close to what this blog reveals. I understand a lot of the rants. Some of them are pretty far fetched and irrational while others are more rational. Let me just point out what I don’t like.

Continue reading "MiniMicrosoft Blog - Disloyal Outburst(s)" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 2:05 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

IIS 7.0 on Windows Vista

I had a HORRIBLE time getting Vista up and running. It wasn’t hard to install but getting software properly installed was a problem. My issue came from the fact I didn’t format my harddrive, for good reasons. Without a fresh HD I still had old registry information, files, etc. I fought with it for a bit then searched online and found David Wang’s blog, from Microsoft, where he had a post showcasing an install script for installing IIS 7.0 Beta. I tried it but it just kept failing. You’ll see some of my trials in the comments. :-)

Continue reading "IIS 7.0 on Windows Vista" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 1:46 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 27, 2006

Visual Studio '05 Install Issues on Vista

I couldn’t get this thing installed to save my life! I’ve wasted several days toying with it and for whatever reason I finally decided to start debugging the install today after knowing Cody got it installed with ease. Well, there are several reasons.

  1. He upgraded. I did a fresh install.
  2. I did a fresh install because I was on 2000. Vista currently only upgrades from XP.

The problem was my system registry still has a lot of old information. One piece of that information is that .Net Framework 2.0 was already installed. The VS installer detected this reg key and wouldn’t install the .Net Framework again so the Document Explorer 2005 (which is the new help system, etc for Microsoft apps) failed at login which prevented VS from installing. Here is the key I deleted…actually I deleted the whole folder.

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v2.0.50727

I found this key information on Aaron Stebner’s blog post.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:19 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is IE 7 Rendering really new?

Yes and no. In talking to the IE developers at Mix I found out an interesting fax. IE 7 in fact still uses IE 6 rendering. The only time it does not use it is when the doctype is set to strict. Interesting huh? They wanted things to be backwards compatable. That was an interesting take for me. I thought the entire rendering engine was rewritten to conform to standards. In a sense it was but IE 6 rendering is still very much so still present.

Continue reading "Is IE 7 Rendering really new?" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 2:13 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Backbase Updates

I finally had a phone call with Backbase last Thursday and it turned out pretty interesting. I’ll highlight my questions/comments then below that will be the rep’s response.

Continue reading "Backbase Updates" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:09 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 26, 2006

.Net vs CF

As with my last post the same thing kind of applies here. Once I realized this it let me at ease a bit but made me wonder too. Microsoft has an uncanny ability of integrating their technologies. Most people knock Microsoft for this but I would classify them as strictly haters. :-) The integration Microsoft provides in the .Net framework is unmatched, in my opinion. So, let’s compare.

Continue reading ".Net vs CF" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 11:59 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

WPF vs Flash/Flex

I can end the argument right here. WPF and Flash are completely different products. WPF and Flex are completely different products. Although these are true some people don’t understand or believe it so I’ll give my opinions but mainly facts.

(read on at your own risk…I get long winded) :-)

Continue reading "WPF vs Flash/Flex" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 11:08 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mix '06 vs Max '05

A lot of people on lists, etc were wondering how Mix (by Microsoft) compares to Max (by Macromedia). Well, I was at Mix ‘06 and Max ‘05 so I’ll do a slight comparison. In my comparison I’ll remove any bias I may have as an Adobe Users Group manager. One other thing to note is when I say Macromedia I mean Macromedia..not Adobe. We have yet to see how Adobe will do things. Let’s get started.

Continue reading "Mix '06 vs Max '05" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 9:37 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 23, 2006

Back and Bloggin'

We are back and I am going to be bloggin’ like a mad man to get all of this information off of my brain. There are several key things I will be bloggin’ about.

  1. WPF & WPF/E vs Flash/Flex
  2. .Net vs All (CF, PHP, etc)
  3. Microsoft’s directions
  4. Thoughts on changes Adobe should consider

More may come up but that is a handful in and of itself. This will all happen over the next couple of days, probably Saturday. Check back soon for my Mix06 wrap-up.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:05 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 20, 2006

I am not alone...

I told my wife I felt a lil’ funny coming here because I seen as an “Adobe-head” rather than a Microsoft geek. Mainly I was thinking in terms of conversation with other developers who are well-emersed in Microsoft technologies blowing my mind with common dialog since I don’t know as much about .Net, etc as I do about Adobe (Macromedia) technologies. I am completely comfortable, don’t get me wrong, but it felt a little odd.

Continue reading "I am not alone..." »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:47 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mix '06: XAML/Expression

In a nutshell, XAML is MXML Microsoft’s way. The output is different but the same. What I mean by that is XAML can be used for desktop apps, mobile phones, web, etc. I’ve really noticed some things, and learned, by seeing how Microsoft does things in terms of integration and interactivity, more on this in a future post. Keeping in focus here, I finally have an idea as to what Expression is and how it relates directly for Flash/Flex.

Continue reading "Mix '06: XAML/Expression" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:03 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mix '06: Atlas

Consider this my intro email about my experience here at Mix ‘06. I’m going to keep this simple though so I don’t stray too far from Atlas. Just know Microsoft is working on some pretty phat things as well as some breakthroughs. Let’s stick with the topic of Atlas though.

Continue reading "Mix '06: Atlas" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 12:49 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 16, 2006

bauldoff.com

I thought I’d show some love to Bauldoff Creative. Bauldoff is a firm out of Pennsylvania headed by Joe Bauldoff, who is a SWEET designer. I love the simple interactivity of his site. Let me list the things I like.

  • background changes on refresh
  • quote changes on refresh (and they aren’t corny…kinda nice)
  • plop on button tween is very slick. Much better than the normal slide or jump. :-)
  • text animates in instead of just showing up
  • the portoflio (really some great work)

Checkout bauldoff.com to experience the simple sweetness. :-) Be sure to stop by the Work->Identity->Chronicles of Narnia section to see 2 images Joe did. VERY nicely done…

Posted by John C. Bland II at 2:11 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 15, 2006

Kode 2 Go Beta Launch

Katapult Media is beta launching Kode 2 Go. Kode 2 Go is a code generator which presently creates CRUDV (create, read, update, delete, view) code for you. Currently it only supports CFC’s based on SQL Server but will soon expand to PHP classes, etc. The page is forced to SSL so passwords are secure.

Continue reading "Kode 2 Go Beta Launch" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 11:58 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ajax + cross-domain.xml

I ran across a few posts today on google regarding the use of a cross-domain.xml within Ajax. There seemed to be several views here but one specifically stuck out. A guy, don’t remember the name and don’t really care, made the statement some people like to do cross-site data calls. Hrrrmmmmm…that’s understandable but for the vast majority who love to keep things secure it seems a cross-domain.xml would fit perfect.

Continue reading "Ajax + cross-domain.xml" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 9:32 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Mix '06

We’ll be heading out Sunday to Las Vegas, NV to enjoy Mix ‘06 by Microsoft. This will be my first Microsoft event or conference and I am looking forward to seeing how the giant does it. While I’m there they will no doubt wow me with some of the new toys they have and simply educate me more on the possibilities .Net, etc bring to the table.

I’ll be blogging from Vegas so keep reading. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:45 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 14, 2006

crapulous

I was on Gmail and this came across the wire.

crapulous: sick from, or marked by, excessive drinking.

I think that word is right on. :-) For whatever reason the word “crap” stands out which is what I assume crapulous folks feel like. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 2:59 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Adobe Products on Labs

I know this sounds odd since Adobe owns Macromedia now but what I mean is Adobe is putting their own products on labs not one’s acquired from Macromedia. This is a very big step, IMO, towards Adobe opening up to the community. They didn’t release Photoshop CS3 (or whatever it’ll be called) or anything but they did release something.

Checkout the XMP Toolkit on Labs.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 12:51 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

JSMX Testimony

Todd Kingham from AZCFUG created an Ajax wrapper called JSMX. As you know I recently posted about using Sajax and gave it MUCH praise. Well, I went last night to create an Ajax interface for another KM product and had serious trouble getting the ColdFusion version of Sajax working. I fought with that thing for about 5 hours and couldn’t get it to work to save my life.

The problem was I couldn’t return anything but simple values. If I returned a struct, array, or query (complex values) I wouldn’t get a result. It was terribly annoying. I even used 3 different versions of Sajax+CF and none of them would work. It was quite puzzling why this was working. I decided to move on.

Continue reading "JSMX Testimony" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 12:18 PM | | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

Adobe Pushing Flex

I was doing some JS research and the red Adobe and words Flex caught my eye then Beta peaked my interest. :-) Adobe seems to be pushing Flex 2.0 and it is only in Beta. That is an excellent thing.

Peep the ad here.

Note:
The above URL may not be available after X days (where X is determined by Adobe and/or Internet.com) so there is a possibility the above link could become dead.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:08 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 13, 2006

GoDaddy: Business Registration

It is kinda like “Duh?!?!?” The idea is instead of seeing normal WhoIs information you see a specialized page with your information on it. I checked with Network Solutions but didn’t see anything about it on their site. We only use GoDaddy and NetSol so no other registrar has any relevance to me right now. :-)

Checkout an example from GoDaddy here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 8:17 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AuthorizeNet.cfc & Card charging process

I built this for our Klients product launch and figured I’d share it. It only handles one transaction type but can easily be updated to handle multiple types and even used to authorize then later save. I’ve used the latter in a case where there might be a databsae issue you don’t want to just charge the credit card without making sure the order saves properly. You won’t want to, well I don’t, save the order then go back and update the transaction value either. I’ll explain a bit more as to what I mean here in a second.

Continue reading "AuthorizeNet.cfc & Card charging process" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:46 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Klients (tm) Alpha Launched

We launched our product Klients today. It isn’t the full product, no where close, but it does the basics of what we need right now.

Feature set:
* Process credit card payments via Authorize.net
* Link to project portal

That’s about it. :-) This product is one of our larger products in terms of dev time but we didn’t want to wait until everything was done to start collecting payments from our custom dev clients online so we launchd this portion only. I’ll give a full feature set once as we get those pieces launched. We’re sure it will be a high demand for such a product.

To clarify, it may not look like much of a product right now but it no doubt is. We will be releasing it to the public for a small fee. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:38 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 11, 2006

Backbase Forums

I got an email follow-up from Backbase and they gave a link to their forum. My reason for posting is to showcase how sweet it is. It has to be one of the best forums I’ve seen yet.

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:08 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

March 9, 2006

echo vs niceEcho

Since I’m in the PHP world tonight I figured I’d post one of my favorite custom functions I use in every PHP site I build.

function niceEcho($data){
 	print("
 
 <pre>" . print_r($data, true) . "</pre>
 
 ");
}

What does this do? It prints anything you give it in a nice, vertical layout for ease of reading. It is very simple and allows you to look into arrays (of any depth), objects, etc. I love this function. :-)

To see some sample output see this post. At the bottom of the post you’ll see a nice looking array. Enjoy!

Posted by John C. Bland II at 11:41 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

PHP + ODBC (specifically Access)

Let’s just face it PHP bites when it comes to ODBC. I’m just being real. With MySQL it is manageable and very usable but with ODBC it is horrible.

We have a project I’m working on which involves PHP connecting to a Microsoft Access database. I thought it was simply telling it which db file and doing normal query stuff. Well, it kinda is but in a way definitely is not. Let me list my problems.

Continue reading "PHP + ODBC (specifically Access)" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 11:14 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 8, 2006

cfcontent reset="yes"

I posted about a month or so ago about CF and whitespace. Well, Dave (@ jamwerx) has answered my prayers. Apparently cfcontent will do the trick.

cfcontent reset="yes"

Put that in your page (with brackets though; it wouldn’t show up for me so I had to take them out) on the same line as the doctype and you’re good. It is NOT a mistake by having both on the same line. In Dave’s post he stated they need to go on the same line. Fine with me. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:55 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

March 7, 2006

Sajax 0.12 and the Admin

I just finished the admin for a client and it turned out SWEET! I wish I could open it up as is for everyone but I can’t. What I am planning on doing is duplicating it, changing graphics, and opening it up to the public for viewing/testing.

So, what makes it so sweet? Sajax! Sajax is nothing but an Ajax engine but it is very simple to implement, after you figure a couple things out. This isn’t my first stab at Ajax stuff. I did a portion of a site in Ajax for a big client about a year ago. It was quite the slick process but Sajax seems to be a bit better here. Let me go ahead and give a brief overview of how to implement Sajax (with PHP).

Continue reading "Sajax 0.12 and the Admin" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 9:36 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sajax 0.12 and the Admin

I just finished the admin for a client and it turned out SWEET! I wish I could open it up as is for everyone but I can’t. What I am planning on doing is duplicating it, changing graphics, and opening it up to the public for viewing/testing.

So, what makes it so sweet? Sajax! Sajax is nothing but an Ajax engine but it is very simple to implement, after you figure a couple things out. This isn’t my first stab at Ajax stuff. I did a portion of a site in Ajax for a big client about a year ago. It was quite the slick process but Sajax seems to be a bit better here. Let me go ahead and give a brief overview of how to implement Sajax (with PHP).

Continue reading "Sajax 0.12 and the Admin" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 9:36 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Adobe Photoshop CS2

Maybe I’m easily amused but I LOVE how it will hyphenate the words for you on paragraph text. That was quite the slick feature when I saw it; kinda jaw draopping. :-)

Keep in perspective I’m coming from Fireworks and trying to move more to Photoshop. I’ve toyed with PS previously but never did an actual image from start to finish. Tonight I semi did a whole project. I already had a png that I needed to size down from 8.5×11 to 2.125×3.75. Needless to say a lot had to go which meant I did have to make some pretty big modifications to the overall design, ultimately turning it into a completely different setup.

Continue reading "Adobe Photoshop CS2" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 2:30 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 6, 2006

FFmpeg GUI & View Source

Sonke Rohde posted to Flexcoders today with a Flex-based FFmpeg GUI (his blog entry) he built. My initial thoughts were more related to it actually doing the video encoding, etc for you but realizing it was a web-based app I soon found it only created the command string for you.

The tool is nicely done but it is lacking in some areas, namely Video Size. Things like qcif/sqcif were all left out which wouldn’t have worked in our last FFmpeg project. The majority of the (general) settings were there though. It definitely would have helped with the learning curve on FFmpeg.

On a side note, I saw first-hand the new View Source in Flex. Using this same app you can right click (anywhere) and click View Source to see his source code. This feature is pretty slick and very thoughtful by Adobe to include it. I truly think this will help the community learn Flex faster and become more involved in Flex dev.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:32 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tabs 1.1

On CF-Talk Massimo Foti announced new a ColdFusion tag for tabs. It seems to be pretty slick and very usable. You can use Images or just plain box outlines for the tabs.

It is a very simple concept to show/hide a new tab based on the current/previous selection but it is nice to have it wrapped into a package for CF folks. As long as you aren’t against Javascript I’m sure you can find this tab tag useful.

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:07 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 5, 2006

Backbase: Examples Review + Mini-Synopsis

Well, the examples they provide are quite nice. Several of them have a real Flash feel to them. Looking at the examples makes you want to start implementing pieces into your own sites. They all work in IE 6 too so that is a plus. With that said, there are some downfalls I see.

  1. Speed
  2. A new “language”
  3. XML data (not 100% sure here but xml is used a lot)

Continue reading "Backbase: Examples Review + Mini-Synopsis" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 11:32 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Backbase: Follow-up

I saw an ad in Gmail about Backbase so I figured I would try it again. This time it still had a problem but after my second try the site worked fine and I was able to validate my email address. I downloaded the community edition0 of their software and will be reviewing it.

So far it seems like it is a whole new language you have to learn. Instead of relying on your present skills/abilities you have to learn a whole new “language” tailored to backbase. It may be worth it…maybe not. Look for more information as I go through the docs and toy with examples.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 11:10 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 2, 2006

Where do you stand?

I’m not the one to get political or take sides but I’d like to see your thoughts. I’m an avid believer in prosperity. I truly believe the wealth is available for anyone to take. People that are crazy paid will never hear me gripe about them making that kind of money because if one can do it another can. So, let’s get into my gripes with prejudice in this arena.

Continue reading "Where do you stand?" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 9:04 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm Hungry!

I don’t know what it is but as of lately I have been super hungry for knowledge. Currently I’m reading books on C#, Ruby, and Delphi, in that order, with a Perl book in the wing. The funny thing is I’m soaking all of this stuff up like a sponge where normally I’d have to re-read it or do examples for it to sink it.

Either I’m stepping into my prime as a developer or I’m having a mid-career crisis and these new challenges are my Harley. :-) Regardless of the reason, I’m loving my job right now and all of the new things I’m learning. As I improve or do more in Delphi I’ll create a category and post about my experiences.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:16 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Backbase: Are you serious?

What’s up with Backbase’s pricing for their Ajax solution? I’m sure it is high quality but I can’t even get to the point of reviewing their product because their site isn’t working. I’ve heard of Backbase and have previewed their demos in the past, and present, but I have a few gripes.

Continue reading "Backbase: Are you serious?" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 2:41 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)