development

Mollio

I've used Mollio on two projects now, and I have to say I'm really impressed.  The guys down at Daemon have done a great service to web developers at large by releasing Mollio as they have.  I can't say I particularly care for the red/black theme, but it's consistent, attractive, and unless you've got branding [...]

Get Firefox – Piss Off

After much griping about my Get Firefox banner, I've added a 'piss off' (read: opt-out) link to the banner that will set a cookie so you won't see it again for 30 days.  After that, it'll tell you you still need a better  browser, but you can, of course, opt out again, ad nauseam.

CSS and Get Firefox

Everyone knows that browser compatibility is the bane of web developers.  If it's not a CSS bug or some DOM incompatibility, it's a plugin version issue (what's that, you say?  I'm thinking of something that starts with 'F' and ends with 'lex'….).  So help people put their best foot forward with a neat little CSS [...]

ColdFusion and Java

No, this is not "that" post.
Since my post a while back about the new features of Java 5 (or Java 2 1.5 5.0 SE, or whatever the hell it's called), Sean Corfield and I have had a couple IM discussions about languages, development environments, developer mindset, tool support, frameworks, and various other things.
We were talking [...]

Debuggers?

Over at Damon Cooper's blog, he's soliciting comments on the ultimate CF IDE.  What surprised me was the number of requests for a CF debugger.  CF Studio had one, way back in the day, and apparently people still miss it.
On a similar note, I've been doing a lot of Java development in Eclipse of late, [...]

CAPTCHA – eeeewwwww

Dave Shuck posted about making CAPTCHA easier on your users this morning.  While I can see the point, CAPTCHA sucks.  I can't even tell you how many times I go to post something somewhere, see a CAPTCHA image and hit the Back button.  It's not that it's terribly difficult to deal with usually, but the [...]

AJAX Anti-Example

US Airways has a AJAXy interface for their homepage, but don't follow their example.  Try, for example, searching for the status of flight 8022 (from Philidelphia, PA to Portland, OR) today.  That happens to be the flight my sister and her family are on at this very moment.
You might try entering the flight number (knowing [...]

All Hail Java 5

If you do any Java development and are stuck with Java 1.4, my condolences.  Java 5 is so amazingly better, and in relatively inconspicious ways.  For those of you not in the know, here's a highlight:

Generics: I've been waiting for these in Java since my undergraduate days down at the University of Arizona.  Roughly analogous [...]

Trac Patch for Mid Air Collision Bug

Trac, for those of you who don't know, is a simple but powerful project management tool that sits atop a Subversion repository and does all kinds of neat things.  Ticket tracking is on, release scheduling, an integrated wiki, and source browsing, all wrapped up in a nice package.  If you're not using Subversion, Trac is [...]

Application Modelling

For the past month or so, I've been largely immersed in modelling a totally new version of PIER.  I've done some modellling in the past, but never a soup-to-nuts model of a brand new application.  After getting most of the domain model's class diagrams fleshed out, and starting to go back over it fixing problems, [...]