Bill Garoutte, just made a great blog post about using JSON with Coldfusion, as a faster and more light weight alternative to using WDDX to serialize data. If you use Coldfusion at all, I highly suggest you read it, and download his code sample.
Category Archives: Tech
A man and his devices
I have known about the tv-b-gone for some time now. If you don’t, its basically a small device that will turn off any tv in a matter of seconds, from over 200 feet away.
Earlier this week I saw one of the coolest/most screwed up things I have seen in a while. One of the guys form gizmodo took a tv-b-gone device into CES (consumer electronics show in las vegas)and wrecked the place. Here is the video http://youtube.com/watch?v=ICpM3ItIhI0
After seeing it, I had to build one for myself. $20 and 4 days later I had the kit in hand. It took me a bit to make it, as I have never soldered anything this small. I got it put together, and it works. All the TVs die the second i press the on button and aim this thing.
I have a feeling that this is going to be one of my new best friends. Just holding it makes me want to go play some pranks! I will be posting some pictures and videos later on for sure.
UPDATE!
My favorite web comic, toothpaste for dinner recently ran this…
The GmailThis! bookmarklet
I use GMail as my main email client. Often I’m at work and I see something online that I think is useful, and I want to remind myself of it. I have tried righting down URLS on scraps of paper in the past, but sending an email to myself works as a good reminder for me. As a bonus, I can pick up my GMail form anywhere, including my iPhone.
I’m a programmer, so I am lazy by nature. It’s kind of a pain to open a new browser, and navigate to GMail.com and then copy and paste the URL of the site, and text into GMail and then send it.
Enter the GmailThis! bookmarklet by Doug Ward. Bookmarklets are bits of javascript that you save as bookmarks in your browser. When you click that bookmark the javascript runs. Basically bookmarklets are little javascript plugins that work in almost any browser.
The GmailThis! bookmarklet will open up a new Gmail window in a little popup. The body will have the URL of the page you are currently on, and any text you happen to have highlighted at the moment. All you have to do is enter the recipients name.
You can get the GmailThis! bookmarklet from Doug Wards site, http://contrapants.org/blog/2005/07/gmailthis.html
Doug also made a cool video showing how simple the bookmarklet is to use.
If you are a heavy GMail user like I am, this is a must have.
“CodeIgniter lets you write kick ass PHP programs”
At work, I have been lucky enough to work directly with Luis Majano, the author of an awesome Object Oriented Framework for ColdFusuion, ColdBox (I have blogged about it before)
Using the Coldbox Frame work really took my CF coding to the next level.
At home, I am not lucky enough to have access to a Coldfusion server. I run everything off of a dedicated PHP machine that I have had for some time now. Mostly due to the cost of the CF licenses, and the investments I have already made in the running so many sites in PHP.
After using ColdBox, I wanted to find something similar that would really help me write better code, and do it more quickly. I first looked at cake and wasn’t that excited about it, it seemed more complicated then it should be.
After doing some more research, I came across Code Igniter. Code Igniter has turned my PHP world upside down. Its easy to use, straight forward, and has a lot of build in functionality that would take me forever to achieve on my own.
Working in an object oriented frame work just makes me feel like a more effective programmer for some reason. Maybe its because I feel more organized and can really see how fast I can put applications together using it.
The user guide, video tutorials, wiki, and forums for code igniter all rock. There is a wealth of information in there that I can draw off of.
I am re-working notpopular.com 2.0 once again (at this point maybe i should call it notpop 2.5), and I am using Code Igniter to do it. Lets hope that my newly peaked interest in object oriented PHP development will carry me though the development and launch of notpop 2.0 (2.5?!)
Bulk downloading from Flickr
Some of my friends have stated to discover how awesome Flickr is, and have started to upload tons of pictures of the parties and other events we throw.
I am weird when is comes to data. I’m worried that Flickr or any other photo hosting sites for that matter, will one day go away and I will lose access to all those awesome images.
The only solution to solve my neurotic ways is to download the large versions of the images from flickr, and back them up locally, 7 ways from sunday.
I could always click into each picture and then save it. LAME. not doing it. Instead, I spent about 5 minutes googeling for a solution, and I came across FlickrDown.
FlickrDown is an open source app based on Microsoft .NET 2.0, and it works great. Download it, run it, enter a flickr username, pick the album and download. EASY AS THAT!
download it today! http://greggman.com/pages/flickrdown.htm