So... watching The Biggest Loser. The Aqua Team is back. Always difficult for newbies to show up... yeah. Should prove to be amusing to say the least. I'm sure they'll be the first ones picked off, chewed up, and spit back out. So yeah there's that.
The other teams... yeah they're not that happy with them at all. Yeah they don't believe nuffin... sooo classic.
Been working a little with some modifications to make my own WordPress Theme. They say the key thing to remember is not to change any of WPs core code. Write all the plugins you want, write all the themes you want. But don't you dare change the base code.
Just look at the Replicators when SG-1 mucked around with their base code. Yeah remember that?
Well mucking around with WP's base code is similar... well it won't spawn up and come after you. But you get the idea.
First up, I wonder what kind of other post types I can come up with... who knows eventually I might come up with something for this site... yeah we'll have to wait and see about that now won't we.
Funny thing about Science Fiction stories / shows / whatevers. The authors can make them believable if they choose. On the other hand they can do whatever they feel like. I suppose that's why it's called fiction. Having the authority to do this that and the other. But please make sure it's a good story... or at least something that will hold your audience's attention. If it doesn't do that, and they leave? Yeah forget it. They won't be coming back.
Wow... just took at look at all of the categories and tags etc for this site. I might need/want to rethink most of it. Or at least keep the search active. Yeah that might be the best way to find blog posts at the moment.
On the other hand... I suppose it looks alright. Nothing too crazy. Nothing too bad. Yeah all of that and more.
Still working on the design of the site. Eventually I want to put the site in some kind of full with layout etc. Yeah not sure how that'll end up. We'll just have to wait and see what happens with it all.
Been watching The Outer Limits on Hulu lately. I just love this show. It's rather good.
I should post something about the episodes or something... yeah that would be a fun project for sure. We'll see if I ever do that though. Busy busy me.
Such an interesting word... "Today". Lots of things happen and lots of things exist simply because of "Today".
Not much to say really... just "Today" was alright.
Yes, that pretty much sums it up.
I'd say it never ceases to amaze me... perhaps it's more of an amusing type of thing. You're on the internet and go to search for a tutorial on this that or the other. A program is required. The tutorial goes through step by step on installing the needed program. Why is this?
I would think that if the program was written well, it would have an installer that was helpful enough to step you through installing the program. The tutorial you're reading wouldn't have all of the steps to install it... shouldn't it just say "First install this program, now that you have it installed, here's how you use it." Type of thing?
Yeah. That's what always gets me. Perhaps I'm just alone in this thinking... who knows.
Usually you wouldn't ever use a hello world example in Ant. Outputting text isn't really the goal of the thing. But this will give you a chance to see how to run an ant build.
So, open up a text editor and save the following as build.xml.
<project name="HelloWorld">
<target name="sayhello">
<echo>Hello World!</echo>
</target>
</project>
You would then run the program as:
ant sayhelloAs you might expect, it simply says Hello World!
Echo messages are useful to track the process of an Ant Task when it's going through specific procedures that you specify.
I suppose that means it's time for bed. :-) I guess that's a good thing... maybe. We'll see how well I sleep... if I can sleep at all. Yeah all of that... and then some. We'll figure it all out eventually. Maybe possibly.
If not... well that's just another story to think about... another song to write... something else on the horizon to worry for another day to come. With that I say good night, may sweet dreams meet you with their kindness. May tomorrow morning come in bright and wanting.
I use Ant a lot when I program. Mostly for deploying whatever I've been coding to a test site. I currently have an ant build file that has two targets. One target will put the files to a tomcat server running ColdFusion 9, the other target will deploy the files to a server running Railo.
Eventually I'd like to have my build file run to all of the possible ColdFusion versions that I can. Now that would be something special.
I should start a section regarding Ant... now that would be something special.
Who would have known that the night would have progressed so quickly?
I sure wasn't expecting it to be this late already... before long tomorrow will be here and everything else will happen. Work will come and yeah. So I can just look forward to dreamland I suppose. Hopefully I'll have some good dreams tonight. We'll have to see what happens.
For now, I'll just sit here and wait till the night continues and I will be able to go to bed.
Been thinking of creating my own Database Class. Either PHP class or maybe a ColdFusion component... perhaps both.
I imagine it would be something simple, something that takes arguments of the query built as strings.
For CF, not sure how I would do a <,cfqueryparam>> on parameters send into the function, if the function accepts a string. So something to think about with that for sure.
Not sure what I'll do with said class file(s) but yeah you just never know what it will bring.
Been working with my /var/www directory lately. Rather annoying how it wasn't working for me. Anytime I tried to upload a file it didn't want to do anything with it etc. Long story. So I ended up running the following commands:
$ mkdir ~/www
$ sudo mv /var/www /var/www-backup
$ sudo ln -s /home/user/www /var/www
Works like a charm!
Ah the fun times of inputting data from the command line in a Java program.
Java has come a long way in this respect. From starting with IO Streams to what they have now. Currently, there is a Console class in the java.io package. Here's a simple test I did capturing data the user enters:
import java.io.Console;
import java.io.IOException;
public class Test {
public Test() {
}
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
String in = null;
Console c = System.console();
if (c == null) {
System.err.println("No console.");
System.exit(1);
}
while (!(in = c.readLine("> ")).equals(".quit")) {
// do something with the content you just captured
System.out.println(in);
}
}
}
That's a very simple program now isn't it? Just accepts whatever you enter and echos it back out to the screen. If you type in .quit it will quit the program.
So yep, just a simple program for capturing data in a Console application.
Spent way too much time last night attempting to setup a Linux Server at home. After five hours, I finally figured it out. Woot!
So... I wrote a program that would help cheer me up whenever I feel down. Yes I wanted my computer to tell me how wonderful I am and that it loves me.
You'd do it to... if you wanted to. Yeah all of that... because of reasons and other things.
Quite simple actually, all I did was check for keywords that I passed in... if it matched a "bad" keyword, I would output something like "Don't say that, you're wonderful!"
If it happened upon a "good" keyword, it would say "I Love You."
Just something simple. I want to try some kind of text game where it takes input as text, and does things... just moving from screen to screen on a map would be amusing. "Go left, go right, go forward, go backward" etc. Just something to toy and play with for sure.
Merged two websites into one tonight. Figured why log into two places when one will do.
So yep this is the new improved site. Hopefully all I'll be doing is adding to it from here on out. We'll have to see what happens.
Speaking of moving things around. Tonight I formatted an old computer I have, put Linux Mint on it and created my own home server. Not too bad if I do say so myself.
Can't recall all of the processor specs and all of that, but it has 2 gigs of ram and a 320 gig hard drive in it. So no I don't think I'll be running out of storage space anytime soon.
Kinda enjoy having my own server in the house. Good for projects or whatever else I need/want to put on it.
Not to mention it'll be nice to actually have something that's up 24/7 instead of only when the laptop is on.
Surprise Surprise... I was working on a site and would you know it? cftextarea isn't supported in Railo.
Either I have to come up with some other way to use the cftextarea... or just tell peoples that the app isn't supported on Railo. That kinda sucks for ONE tag to bring down a whole site as not useable.
I suppose I could ditch CFs built in JavaScript error checking and use jQuery... or something else.
Something to think about for sure.
For now at least... yeah need to figure it out.
Been working on a Contact Manager. It's almost done... well the main part is almost done. I'm sure I'll figure more to add to it. There are still a few things I need to implement. Adding / modifying users comes to mind. But yes, there's more I can do with the project for sure.
Come to think of it, I should comment my code more. Sure there are some comments and all, but if someone wanted to modify it... yeah not sure how helpful the comments would be.
Oh Spam. Honestly where do you even come from? So annoying. So crazy.
Not even sure why you are around. I guess you're there to annoy people and whatnot. Yeah all of that. So no. I do not like you spam. You are evil and will never understand what it's like not to be spam.
So yes, you may go now.
So here's a simple problem I had earlier this week while working on a personal project.
I had a webpage in an iframe that spanwed a window. The new window would either add a record to the database or update an existing record. The page that opened the window would then reflect the updated data.
Well for a while I tried various different things. Then I finally came upon the correct way to do it:
window.opener.location.reload(true);
So after I do my updates or additions, I run that code and it refreshes the data list and shows the new information.
Easy. As. Pie.
So there I was... attempting to figure out the best way to to a like clause in a query statement using the cfqueryparam tag.
I had it coded like this:
like <cfparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#arguments.search_criteria#">
Well that didn't work. So I did some googling. After a little bit of searching, I finally found out how it should be coded.
like <cfparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="%#arguments.search_criteria#%">
After laughing at how simple that was... I used it. Worked like a charm.
Been attempting to put a datetime variable into a MySQL Database via ColdFusion. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong.
At first I tried:
#createODBCDateTime(now())#
For some reason that was only giving me the date and not the time.
Then I tried splitting up the date and time into two different fields, one for the date and the other for the time. Then I tried this code:
#createODBCDate(now())#
#createODBCTime(now())#
That gave me the date, but still not the time. Well I did some searching and then found there's a built in function in MySQL to do this. Why not.
Talk about simple:
NOW()
Well guess what, it worked just like a charm.
To Be a penguin, one must realize how much of a penguin they are. Not everyone understands what it is to be a penguin... others just must simply be.
Ah Multidimensional Arrays. Nothing too crazy in JavaScript. Just a little bit of this and that.
So typical arrays are fun and easy. You create them like so:
var colors = new Array();
colors[0] = "Red";
colors[1] = "Yellow";
colors[2] = "Blue";
Well that's fine and dandy, but what if you want to associate something with each of those? For example, what if you wanted to create a menu? You'll need at minimum a link name and a target. We could do something like this:
var colors = new Array();
colors[0] = new Array();
colors[0][0] = "red.htm";
colors[0][1] = "Red";
colors[1] = new Array();
colors[1][0] = "yellow.htm";
colors[1][1] = "Yellow";
colors[2] = new Array();
colors[2][0] = "blue.htm";
colors[2][1] = "Blue";
function createColors() {
document.write('<ul id="colors">');
for (var i = 0; i < colors.length; i++) {
var link = colors[i][0];
var title = colors[i][1];
var link_title = '<li><a href="' + link + '">' + title + "</a></li>";
document.write(link_title);
}
document.write("</ul>");
}
Then we would call it like this:
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
createColors();
//-->
</script>
Of course you could add more things, like an id, a title... whatever else you would need.
Here's a fun little css stylesheet that one can use for menus.
The CSS for the menu is:
#menu {
padding:0px;
width:120px;
}
#menu a {
text-decoration:none;
color:#000;
display:block;
border:1px solid #fff;
padding-left:3px;
}
#menu a:hover {
border:1px solid #000;
}
Which you can use with the following html:
<ul id="menu">
<li><a href="#">Link One</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Link Two</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Link Three</a></li>
</ul>
This will producde a simple menu that when hovered over will display a black box around the menu item.
Of course you can change the background color, or the font etc. to whatever you need it to be. Ah the simplicity that is CSS.
Watching this little gem of a movie today... surround sound of course.
Upon viewing it... the whole idea of having a clone of Picard really is a good idea for a story. Of course I would have loved for them to take it a little differently.
Something along the lines of having the clone be the age of Picard. They could have done some really good stuff there. Half the movie could have been following the clone around the Enterprise etc. and then we find out it's a clone.
Yep something like that for sure.
But it's still a great flick. I enjoy it.
There are two types of for loops in Java. Your traditional loop:
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
}
Or the advanced loop that will loop through items in say an array:
for (String s : stringArray) {
}
Let's go through both of these examples and see what comes of it.
First, let's create a String Array for the loops to process.
String[] strArray = {"one", "two", "three"};
Simple enough. Just an array containing three values of one, two and three.
With the traditional for loop, you would loop through the array like this:
for (int i = 0; i < strArray.length; i++) {
System.out.println(strArray[i]);
}
As you might have guessed, it outputs the three values:
One
Two
Three
Now, let's do the same thing, but using the other for loop. Sometimes this loop is called a For Each loop.
for (String s : strArray) {
System.out.println(s);
}
Again we get the three values:
One
Two
Three
I prefer the new method myself. It comes in handy. But there are times that you'll want to use the traditional for loop, (for example if you want to run through a Multidensional Array).
Happy Coding!
Friday decided to come. Can't complain about that at all. Looking forward to just relaxing at home during the weekend and all of that fun stuff. Oh yes good times indeed.
You'd think I'd be able to get away from the computer during the weekend. Well no. That's not always the case. I usually tend to program and just have fun. Hobbies are always a good thing, programming happens to be mine. So that's what I do.
I should come up with some ideas this weekend for projects and other things to work on. That would be neat. Of course writing a story would also be well accepted. Yes story writing is a must.
That's what I'll do, start a new story. See where it goes.
Created a Projects page. You can access it through here.
Nothing too special, so far only one project exists on it. The XML project that I talked about earlier.
If it's useful to people great. If not that's okay as well. Just something I felt like working on.
So I was looking into creating XML documents. Of course you could use the default that comes with Java or you could use JDom. I've used both methods in the past, and they both work quite well.
Got me thinking though, why not approach the creation of an xml document as a StringBuffer? Could be useful if you don't need to have a DOM to work with. Something simple to just output the xml document in a very simple text format.
I'm currently working on it. Possibly more just a proof of concept.
We'll see how it all turns out.
I was looking through some old folders the other night and stumbled upon a bunch of code that looked like they were starts to projects that never came to anything.
It was interesting to see the different kinds of ideas I had going, and then for some reason or another just stopped.
I'm wondering if any of these are projects that I should pick back up or not. Should be an interesting journey. Well not to mention it would be nice to clear out the junk and clutter that doesn't need to be there anymore.
So yep something to do for sure.
Looked over my HTML project. I should revive that one for sure and at least post the existing source code that I have. That'll be my next step.
Doesn't feel like I have time to do anything anymore. Especially writing stories.
Need to find a way to figure that out... how to just dive in and start writing things, stories... poetry... whatever I can write. Lots an lots of writing.
Ideas are not always easy to come by of course. So I'll have to do some thinking on those as well.
I suppose I'll just see what happens. Get some ideas together and just see what rolls off the tip of my pencil.
Second day of January. Talk about good times. Didn't have to work today, tomorrow work starts all over for the New Year.
Sometimes all ya have to do is smile at life. Once you can do that and laugh at yourself? Life will be a good ride. Of course it's not always easy, but shoot if you believe in yourself, the sky is the limit!
They've been doing it in regular desktop apps for years. Why not do the same for web apps?
Here's what I'm thinking. Create a project and code it in the main languages that people use for websites.
Honestly, would it be that difficult? I don't understand why people don't do this. Aside from the fact that they don't know more than one language maybe?
So let's say you have a blogging platform. Why not code it for PHP, ColdFusion, JSP, Perl etc.? (Lets not bring ASP into the mix... but I suppose to be fair we should.)
So yep, that is my question for the morning. Why not do that?
It makes sense to me... of course it might be the high quantity of caffeine in my system at the moment. But that's besides the point.
If you were to code your project in the different web programming languages... made sure that they all looked the same. Just ran differently under the hood. Shoot. I'm loving this idea!
Well, day one of the new year... not too bad. Nothing truly eventful occurred. It was just life as usual. Of course I hadn't planned on anything really great happening. It is just life afterall.
Probably time to take the Christmas tree down. Yeah... however the cats to appear to enjoy it. Will have to think that one through for sure. Silly kitties, having their fun and all of that.
Speaking of the cats, I'm amazed at how well they get along with the dog. Such good animals they all are.
Tomorrow is the second day. We'll see how that goes.
Bed Time.
Well 2012 came in last night.
Not exactly certain what I think about the new year yet. I'm sure it will be full of whatevers and everything else that has to do with whatevers.
Typical for a new year to do that to ya.
I'd like to say that there were lots of memorable moments in 2011... but well I'm not sure I can recall all of them. So I won't even attempt. Simply on the fact that I might miss a few.
So, here's to 2012! Let's hope it's a good year.
