I worked on a project recently where the user would click a button to generate a spreadsheet.

In CF9, that turns out to be incredibly easy with many of the new spreadsheet functions and tags.  In the example below, I borrowed from some code I found on the Net.  Unfortunately, I can’t find where.  Oh, well.

At any rate, here it goes!

<cfsilent>

	<!--- get export data --->
	<cfquery name="myquery" datasource="mydatasource">
		SELECT KittyName, KittyBreed, KittyAge
		FROM KittyTable
	</cfquery>

	<!--- create excel spreadsheet and populate with query --->
	<cfscript>
    	//Create a new Excel spreadsheet object
    	theSheet = SpreadsheetNew("KittyData");
		//add column headers
		SpreadsheetAddRow(theSheet,"Name, Breed, Age",1,1);
		//add rows
    	SpreadsheetAddRows(theSheet,myquery);
	</cfscript>

</cfsilent>
<cfheader name="content-disposition" value="inline; filename=export.xls" />
<cfheader name="content-transfer-encoding" value="binary" />
<cfcontent type="application/msexcel" variable="#spreadsheetReadBinary(theSheet)#" reset="true" />

And that’s about it! Basically, we run a query, create a spreadsheet object, put the data from our query into the spreadsheet object, convert the object into binary, then serve it up to the user!

Microsoft:

select top 100 *
from employees

Even if you have 400 employees, the query will only return 100.

Oracle does it a bit differently:

select *
from employees
where rownum < 101

I’ve worked on several projects where I’ve used custom attributes in HTML. The reason being that it’s awfully convenient to store data that can be used by jQuery. For example, I may have an attribute that contains the value an input held before it was changed. Then if I do something with the new value, for example, validate it with an AJAX call or something, and it turns out it’s no good, then I can set the input back to its previous value by setting the input value equal to the value of the custom attribute.

Unfortunately, in previous versions of HTML, custom attributes weren’t standard.

Well, thankfully HTML5 now allows custom attributes! There is an important rule that you need to know about, however, which I learned about here.

A custom attribute in HTML5 must begin with “data-”. That’s really about it!

So now you can write something like this:

<input type="text" id="zip" name="zip" data-origval="46250" />

And if you’re using jQuery, then you set the input value with something like this:

//variable for holding original value
var origval = $("#zip").attr("data-origval");
//set value
$("#zip").val(origval);

At any rate, that’s when I tried Oracle’s VirtualBox, and it is, by far, a superior product.  It’s much easier to install Ubuntu and other non-windows OS’s.  Additionally, I can get the screen resolution up to 1280×960 by default, and can even go to fullscreen in complete HD (if you have native HD resolution on your laptop or PC).  Finally, VirtualBox has a nice set of client tools, so it’s easy to share a folder and move the mouse seamlessly between Ubuntu and Windows.

Once snafu with which I was confronted was getting Ubuntu’s Unity desktop to run in the virtualization.  For some reason, it defaulted to the Gnome desktop.  I googled it but couldn’t find the answer.  As it turned out, I was able to get it to work but adjusting the video RAM the virtualization uses.  See the screenie below:

Virtual Box Video Ram Settings for Ubuntu

I think the issue is that Unity needs more than the default 8M of video RAM VirtualBox assigns out of the box.  So, just up it to the maximum, assuming you have a decent video card on your computer.  My laptop has 2G of video RAM, so it’s hardly an issue.

At any rate, once you do that and then fire up Ubuntu, you should see the Unity interface!

Ubuntu Unity on VirtualBox

Yes, it’s been awhile, but I’m baaa-aaack.

At any rate, I’m diving into HTML5. I thought I’d start learning about how HTML5 can deliver video and audio. Before HTML5 you would probably have used Flash, but with all the major browsers now supporting the HTML5 video and audio elements, you can start using HTML5!

One of the problems, though, is that the major browsers do not all support the same video formats. There are two major camps. The first camp is the big, mean corporations, namely, Microsoft and Apple. They want to use H.264 (mp4). The other camp is Opera, Firefox, and Google (oh wait, Google is a big, mean corporation, too). This camp wants to use webm or ogg because they are open source.

You can still use the HTML5 video and audio elements, but you’ll just have to offer both formats, which is pretty easy to do. Here is an example of how to do it:

<video controls>
   <source src="assets/videos/test.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
   <source src="assets/videos/test.webm" type="video/webm" />
   <p>Your browser does not support HTML5 video.</p>
</video>

You just enter both video types, and your browser will pick the first one that it likes! Pretty cool.

So, I set my little test up, and was all ready to go, and it worked just like it was supposed to (IE was playing the .mp4; Chrome, Firefox, and Opera were playing the .webm file), EXCEPT for Safari. It wasn’t playing anything, which kinda stumped me. To Google we go to find the answer!

I came across this little thread. It turns out that in order for Safari to use the video tag on a Windows 7 machine, you need to have QuickTime installed! That’s just was I did, and presto!, it worked. Stupid, but there you go.

That is an aside. I did notice in his code that he created a Coldfusion structure in a way that I had not known before, and I thought I’d show you how it works.

Take a look at the following code:

<cfscript>
test1 = StructNew();
StructInsert(test1,"foo1","bar1");
StructInsert(test1,"foo2","bar2");
StructInsert(test1,"foo3",ArrayNew(1));
StructInsert(test1,"foo4",StructNew());
</cfscript>
<cfset test2 = { foo1 = "bar1", foo2 ="bar2", foo3 = ArrayNew(1), foo4 = {  }  } />

<cfdump var="#test1#">
<cfdump var="#test2#">

The result of this code produces:

Coldfusion Structure Dumps

Essentially, the same result. Interestingly, Coldfusion capitalizes the keys when using the second technique. I wonder why?

Firstly, I’m running Windows Vista, but most of the story will apply to Windows 7, as well.

I downloaded this awesome program called SpaceSniffer. It’s a standalone executable (it doesn’t need to be installed), and it gives you a very nice graphical representation of how your disk space is being used.

Well, one thing I found out is that about 20 gigs of hard space was being used up by system restore files. Since I backup my computer pretty regularly with Acronis, that seemed a bit silly. Strangely, with the advent of Vista, the windows OS doesn’t let easily change that.

Never fear!  There is a way to do it, and I found some very good instructions here.

Not the actual signal, but the name Wi-Fi.

My girlfriend asked me this question a couple of days ago. Obviously, the Wi stands for Wireless. But what does the Fi stand for? The only thing I could think of was Fidelity, as in Hi-Fi. Remember Hi-Fi’s? That’s what they used to call stereos way back in the stone ages. Hi-Fi stood for High Fidelity. I guess that meant that the stereo produced awesome sound. But why would you need Fi in a wireless signal?

So we looked it up on wikipedia.

Turns out, it does stand for Fidelity. But not for any technical reason. I guess just because it sounds good:

“The term Wi-Fi suggests Wireless Fidelity, resembling the long-established audio-equipment classification term high fidelity (in use since the 1930s) or Hi-Fi (used since 1950). Even the Wi-Fi Alliance itself has often used the phrase Wireless Fidelity in its press releases and documents; the term also appears in a white paper on Wi-Fi from ITAA. However, based on Phil Belanger’s statement, the term Wi-Fi was never supposed to mean anything at all.
The term Wi-Fi, first used commercially in August 1999, was coined by a brand-consulting firm called Interbrand Corporation that the Alliance had hired to determine a name that was “a little catchier than ‘IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence’”. Belanger also stated that Interbrand invented Wi-Fi as a play on words with Hi-Fi, and also created the yin-yang-style Wi-Fi logo.”

Well, I tried and played with numerous plugins, but didn’t find anything that fit the bill.  I tried every plugin from this site’s definitive guide (which is a little outdated).  But none of them worked.

After much banging of my head on the table, I finally found SyntaxHighlighter Evolved.

If you want it to wrap lines, make sure you change the version to “2.x”. Version 3.x doesn’t wrap lines (not sure why).

Well, without further ado, let’s see it in action!

Here’s some javascript:

//adding info from clicked row to 'active' div
$("#oe_pn_search_results tbody tr.even, #oe_pn_search_results tbody tr.odd").live("click", function(){

	if(!($(this).find(":first").hasClass("dataTables_empty"))){

		//create variable for part number
		var part_number = $(this).find(":first").text();
		//create variable for part number description
		var part_desc = $(this).find(":nth-child(2)").text();

		//insert values into parent form
		$(".oe_order_row[active='true']").find(".oe_inp_prod").val(part_number);
		$(".oe_order_row[active='true']").children(".oe_order_row_desc").text(part_desc);

		//remove active attribute
		$(".oe_order_row").removeAttr("active");

		//close dialog
		$("#oe_pn_dialog").dialog('close');

	}

});

And now for some Coldfusion:

<cfif part_numbers.recordCount neq 0>

	<cfset text = '{ "aaData": [' />

	<cfloop query="part_numbers">

		<cfset fulldesc = "" />
		<cfset part_number = "" />

		<cfif Description eq "">
			<cfset fulldesc = LongDesc />
		<cfelseif LongDesc eq "">
			<cfset fulldesc = Description />
		<cfelse>
			<cfset fulldesc = Description & " (" & LongDesc & ")" />
		</cfif>

		<cfset fulldesc = ReReplace(fulldesc, '"', '\"', 'ALL') />
		<cfset fulldesc = ReReplace(fulldesc, "'", "\'", "ALL") />

		<cfset part_number = trim(StockCode) />
		<cfset part_number = ReReplace(part_number, '"', '\"', 'ALL') />
		<cfset part_number = ReReplace(part_number, "'", "\'", "ALL") />

		<cfif part_numbers.isLast()>
			<cfset text = text & '["' & part_number & '","' & fulldesc & '","' & LSNumberFormat(OnHand,"9") & '","' & LSNumberFormat(Allocated,"9") & '","' & LSNumberFormat(Available,"9") & '"]] }' />
		<cfelse>
			<cfset text = text & '["' & part_number & '","' & fulldesc & '","' & LSNumberFormat(OnHand,"9") & '","' & LSNumberFormat(Allocated,"9") & '","' & LSNumberFormat(Available,"9") & '"],' />
		</cfif>
	</cfloop>

<cfelse>

	<cfset text = '{ "aaData": [] }' />

</cfif>

Note: long lines of javascript with no spaces still don’t wrap properly, so I had to change the css for the code blocks from “inline” to “inline-block”