You Can Call Me Al

A slightly quirky idea in Gmail labs, but I know it would of helped me in the past... Mail Goggles sets times that it will give you a maths quiz to confirm you're sure you want to send the email. E.g. late nights/weekends when you may be a little worse for wear and think it's a good idea to email the ex telling her of your undying love.  Fairly useless, but I like the thinking behind some of these widgets. 

Another, which I've always thought should be standard in every email client, is that if you mention "attached" or "attachment" in your email it should check that you have attached something. Very handy. 

To get to Gmail labs go to "Settings" then the "Labs" tab in your Gmail account.

...Blog-wise that is.

It's been a while since I posted but work's calming down a bit so I think I'll be on a bit of a blogging mission soon.  In the meantime I've migrated from BlogCFC to Mango Blog. 

I'm a fan of BlogCFC, it's served me well, although after having a quick play with Mango Blog I wanted to switch.  Coming from a design/CSS background, the chance to easily create themes for my blog was one of the deciders.  BlogCFC has always been a bit of a mission to style and more effort maintaining that style after updates.  I look forward to seeing what BlogCFC 6 brings in that respect.

Mango installation and migration is an absolute breeze, very much a "is that all I need to do?" kind of procedure.  Although, I did have a couple of teething problems while testing.  I started with version 1.2.2, but the BlogCFC import would throw an error.  A quick post to the Mango Blog Forums and within hours (including the time zone differences) Laura had 1.2.3 on RIAForge.  And the import was fixed.  But then I noticed all the imported comments (not that I have that many) had been given a date/time of the import, not their original.  Seems I was the first to spot it (doesn't look like Mark Drew did in his recently migration, oops).  But another quick post to the forums and Laura delivers the goods again this morning with 1.2.4.  So that was the decider and I put my blog live in Mango. And here it is :)

A big thanks to Laura Arguello for all her fantastic work and help!

Expect themes and plugins from me soon...

P.S. if you're migrating from BlogCFC don't forget to recreate the rss.cfm in the root pointing to the new feed file: <cfinclude template="feeds/rss.cfm" />.  To maintain any existing subscribers.

I just came across some existing code in a "revamping" project I'm working on that just didn't feel right. It was to produce a select dropdown of hourly time ranges in a day, in 24hr format: 00:00-00:59, 01:00-01:59, etc.

This was being achieived by using 2 loops. A first looping from 0-9 and building the times using 0#i#:00 - 0#i#:59. Then another loop from 10-23 and changing it slightly to be #i#:00 - #i#:59. Clunky, eh?

First thing that popped into my head was that it could easily be created with 1 loop from 0-23 using numberFormat() to include the leading 0 when required. But then I seemed to remember being told ColdFusion can loop over dates/times.

Not ever trying this before, I decided not to jump straight on Google but to open up my trusty play.cfm to have a try at it.

And strangley enough, it only took 2mins and worked first time.

<cfset fromTime = createTime(00,00,00) />
<cfset toTime = createTime(23,59,59) />
<cfset timeSpan = createTimeSpan(0,0,60,00) />
<select>
	<option value="">- Select Time -</option>
	<cfloop from="#fromTime#"to="#toTime#" index="i" step="#timeSpan#">
	<cfoutput>
	<option value="#LStimeFormat(i)# - #LStimeFormat(dateAdd('n',59,i))#">#LStimeFormat(i)# - #LStimeFormat(dateAdd('n',59,i))#</option>
	</cfoutput>
	</cfloop>
</select>

Pretty self explanitory really, create 2 proper timestamps and a timespan. Loop from and to the timestamps using the timespan as the step. Then just format the index variable as required. Job Done.

Mark Drew gave a few of us at the UKCFUG meeting a preview of his upcoming CFUnited presentation tonight, "CFEclipse Reloaded".

It revolved around the more advanced/lesser used parts of CFEclipse, we all know the code completion and basic shortcuts for a quick <cfoutput> or <cfdump>, etc. (well, you should do, it's surprising to hear when a CF developer doesn't use CFEclipse. No, Homesite isn't the best thing ever).

Parts such as Snippets/SnipEx, Frameworks Explorer, Dictionary editing/creation and even going beyond CFEclipse to show tools that just make a developers life easier (SVN, ANT, Etc.). Basically, all the things that just make sense. I can think of plenty of things I'm going to make snippets of tomorrow and hopefully my boss sets us up a nice SnipEx server to utilise common Snippets within our company.

For anyone attending CFUnited be sure to catch Mark's session. I'm looking forward to the sequel, "CFEclipse Revolutions" :)

And I got an Adobe Water Bottle out of it for the gym. Bargain.

Unix, Linux, any sort of *nix. I've always thought it was for the mega geeks, the ones like in the films, so deprived of sunlight their skin is almost transparent and talk like "Comic Book Guy" from The Simpsons.

When my parents first got a PC in '93 (a 486SX 25Mhz if you wondered) It was MS-DOS 5, and Windows 3.1. Command lines were a pain in the ass and I was happy to see less and less of them. But the *nix's seemed to want to stay black with a flashy cursor. Do people really want command lines, or does it just make them feel special because it does kind of make you like "cooler" in an odd nerdy type way? Anyway... enough my old *nix prejudice. On to Ubuntu.

I've heard bits and pieces about Ubuntu for a couple of years now, always coupled with the funky code names. But never really saw it in action. Then John B showed me it installed on an old Dell Latitude he had and I have to admit it looked pretty sweet.

I recently upgraded my PC and kept all the old components to use on a MAME cabinet (AMD Athon 2700+, nForce2 motherboard, 1GB RAM, old but still not too shabby). After seeing Ubuntu I thought it would be a perfect chance to try and it out and maybe use it permanently for my MAME project. So that's what I did tonight. Here's it at the login screen:

At first it wouldn't even boot into the OS, it kept freezing. That caused my first outburst "bloody open-source crap..." etc. But it wasn't Ubuntu's fault, the machine kept freezing after about a minute of being turned on, must be to do with it being naked and case-less. So I gave everything a wiggle and away it went.

It booted into the "Live" OS within 2 minutess, wow. From dead PC to GUI and everything in a couple of minutes. Impressive. Selected the install option and off it went, it found the HDD connected to the SATA controller which made me very happy. I was chuffed because it's a Sil3112 SATA/RAID controller, and that isn't part of XP's initial clean install drivers. So even though I don't use a floppy drive, every time I wanted a nice clean XP install, I would have to dig out the floppy (and even harder, find a disk) load it up with the drivers and catch Windows with an F6 at the very first moment or it wouldn't find a HDD. Effort. And Floppy was your only option (apart from slipstreaming them into the CD).

Anyway, the full install couldn't have been any longer than 20 minutes and it was done. Amazing. XP was a good 45mins at least.

One problem though, the mouse wouldn't work, but even though there was a little rant "poxy open-source rubbish...", I think now it might be a dead rodent, I'll get a new one tomorrow. I still managed to have a play with keyboard navigation and I liked what I saw, everything seemed to have drivers for it, the screen res was already the LCD's native, I had sound, FireFox was there as was OpenOffice, all on 1 CD (not DVD) and installed in no time. Again impressive.

But it's not all good. Ubuntu is marketed as linux for the masses, you don't need to be the clammy skinned nerd, but I think you at least need one as a friend. A couple of examples:

I want to use the S-Video out on my graphics card to run a TV (the TV that would be my MAME Cabinet display) so I downloaded ATI's linux drivers. Could I just run them? Nope. The file extension didn't even seem recognised. Looking to the net for help was a quite baffling too. Enabling restricted drivers or something, and then more command-line stuff, with cryptic commands (At least DOS seemed kind of readable, maybe it's just what you're used to).

So I'm undecided, I love the install doing everything, doing it well and doing it in minutes. I like the look and feel. The updates and upgrades seem easy to do which is nice. But there's still that underlying command line requirement which I just don't feel like I want to learn. But it was only a couple of hours of playing, I'll give it another go tomorrow when I have a mouse and report back how i get on.