Rahul Narula's Blog

While debugging one of the application tonight I doubted the issue could be the underlying database driver it was using. I thought that writing a tiny script to check the version of the Oracle JDBC driver that was used, like the one below would have done the trick

 <cfscript>
 jdbcDriver = CreateObject("java", "oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver");
 writeoutput(jdbcDriver.getMajorVersion() &"."&jdbcDriver.getMinorVersion());
 </cfscript>

But to my disappointment this was not giving the results I expected.

Hence I started looking for a utility online that could help. I came across a few resources like this and this but all these talked about getting details from the ColdFusion database drivers(macromedia.jdbc.oracle.OracleDriver) which are different than the Oracle database thin drivers (oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver) I was using and wanted info on.

After spending a little more time on figuring this out, I can up wiith this snippet that helped me with what I was looking for.

<cfset oracleDriver=resolveResource()>
<cfif fileExists(oracleDriver)>
Loaded from <cfoutput>#oracleDriver#</cfoutput><br>
<cftry>
<cfzip action="read" file="#oracleDriver#" 
         entrypath="META-INF/MANIFEST.MF" variable="mainfest">
<cfset line = listcontains(mainfest,"Specification-Version","#chr(13)#")>
<cfoutput>#listgetAt(mainfest, line, "#chr(13)#")#</cfoutput>
<cfcatch type="any">
  Unable to find version details
</cfcatch>
</cftry>
<cfelse>
  Oracle Driver not Found !!
</cfif>
<cffunction name="resolveResource" returnType="string">
  <cfargument name="resource" required="Yes" 
        default="oracle/jdbc/OracleDriver.class">
  <cfset var resourceURL = getClass().getClassLoader().getResource(resource)>
  <cfif isDefined("resourceURL")>
    <cfreturn listlast(listfirst(resourceURL,"!"),":")>
  </cfif>
  <cfreturn "">
</cffunction>

The above snippet fetches the version info from the manifest file of the jar where the version info is available for all oracle jdbc drivers. After utilizing <cfzip> earlier to get the list of ColdFusion tags the <cfzip> helped me with this one too.

I leveraged an existing function resolveResource() that we have to resolve from which jar a java class gets loaded. It is quite helpful in situations where there are conflicting classes (in different libraries or different version of the same lib) in the class path. resolveResource() is used to return the jar file location from where the object is loaded.

Two utility ColdFusion UDF

2009-03-25T19:08:00.001+05:30

While working for the ExcelProcessor utility I required a function to convert the Excel cell reference to the number. ie. for a cell reference A17, I had to refer data in 17 row, 1 column. similarly AC6 would be 6 row, 29 column. To accomplish this I wrote a UDF that took the alphabets representing Excel column and returned number.

Here is the method code, in case you bump across the need to do something similar

<cfscript>
  function convertExcelCRtoNumber(cr) {
  var intVal =0;
  var charVal ="";
  var j=0;
  var t=0;
  if(cr.length() > 2) {  return -1; }
  cr= ucase(cr);
  for(i=cr.length()-1; i >=0;i--)  { 
    charVal = cr.charAt(i);
    t = iif(j >0,  (charVal-64)* (j*26), charVal-64);
    intVal += t;
    j++;
  }
  return val(intVal);
}
</cfscript>

So now <cfoutput>#convertExcelCRtoNumber(‘AZ’)#</cfoutput> would give 52 and <cfoutput>#convertExcelCRtoNumber('IV')#</cfoutput> would give 256. Since Excel has the maximum limit of 256 columns i.e till IV I am limiting the string to 2 chars in length. To be able to return correct number in the series for more than 2 char string like AAB, ZZZ was something I was not able to achieve easily and since the above function met my immediate requirement I didn’t spent much of my grey matter figuring that out. Though that is something I keep it as a exercise for readers ;-)

Now out of curiosity, I tried to do the reverse of this, i.e a function that will return Excel style column reference given a number and this is what I could manage

<cfscript>
  function convertNumbertoExcelCR(colnum){
    var colname="";  
    var div = colnum \ 26;
    var offset =  colnum mod 26;
   if(colnum > 256){
     return "invalid";
   }  
   if(offset == 0) { offset = 26; --div;}
   colname =chr(64+offset);
   if(div){
    colname=chr(64+div) & colname;
   }
  return colname;
  }
</cfscript>

<cfoutput>#convertNumbertoExcelCR(40)#</cfoutput> would give AN and <cfoutput>#convertNumbertoExcelCR(79)#</cfoutput> would give CA. Again this UDF will limit the number to 256. This method again will not give the expected cell reference if the number goes big enough to correspond to 3 char string ie AAA et al.

I trying posting these 2 UDFs on cflib.org but was unsuccessful due to some error on the site. Hopefully will be able to upload it sometime.

ColdFusion and Excel 2007 Integration

2009-03-23T19:30:00.004+05:30

There has been a lot of resources available already for ColdFusion and Excel Integration but yet I couldn't find anything to make use for my requirement of processing xlsx files.
This gave me an opportunity to role my own version, using POI which primarily has the following features :

Support for xlsx files i.e. it can consume files created with Microsoft Excel 2007
Support for reading large files using the POI Event API than the normal user API which is limited by the memory

The creation of Excel documents which is done using HSSF and XSSF APIs for xls and xlsx documents respectively, can still be an issue as the memory requirement of files is so large that it can completely overwhelm the server and whilst this is not really the fault of the API - the BIFF8 file structure demands that the complete file be built in memory before it can be saved to disk.

I used POI 3.5 beta 4 which has support for new Office Open XML file formats, such as XLSX and PPTX introduced with Office 2007.

I am using using the JavaLoader Utility to load the POI 3.5 and also the custom jar used to read Excel document. . Refer this post to find to how to install POI 3.5 beta on ColdFusion 8 using JavaLoader.cfc

This is not a pure ColdFusion solution and wrote a custom library to

utilize the POI Event API library for processing
make the utility also available for Java program

Importance of using java for the utility is much as ColdFusion natively doesn’t support batch processing and I feel that in case we are using this utlity to consume large data it makes more sense to load the processed data using batch. Though we can leverage JDBC batch processing in ColdFusion we could just do the same directly in Java without involving ColdFusion.

The installation instruction are pretty simple which have been added to the Readme.txt file. All the details about the usage are also in the Readme.txt file.

I would like to thank Ben Nadal whose POIUtility.cfc is the base of almost the complete write Excel functionality which I tried to use as is and adding support for creating Office 2007 (xlsx files).

I am naming this utility as ExcelProcessor and is still in development. Please let me know if anybody is interested in the source code and can contribute in improving the same. I would like to hear feedback, suggestions, comments from people who take the opportunity to try it.

Download ExcelProcessor (zip)

ColdFusion biggest challenge

2009-03-03T18:50:00.005+05:30

Ya I know it has been quite a long that I had written a post. It has been quite a hectic 2009 and hence this is my first post in year 09. I feel its just a blink of an eye and 2 months are trimmed of 2009

Many people would have found the subject quite interesting but since I wanted to be shown alive and no specific topic to write about I just thought of why not interact with community folks and find out

What has been the biggest challenge of all that you had in your as many numbers of years working with ColdFusion (irrespective of version)?

I know this question might have been answered by you a lot many times but why not refresh the memory once more and share them with ever growing community.

The format I would prefer the response would be

No. of years with ColdFusion
Problem definition
How you work around the challenge
Lessons learnt (if any)

A vacation in Goa

2008-10-01T18:55:00.004+05:30

This year my firm decision of heading to Goa paid off finally when I packed up and headed to North Goa. After being back from a much needed vacation I feel refreshed and energized. I hope this last till my next vacation.

My Goa travelogue.

Only interested in some pictures peek in here.

If you need help in planning a trip to Goa I can surely help with my experiences. The Goa wikitravel has a lot of information regarding the same.

Adobe announces CS4

2008-09-23T11:46:00.007+05:30

Adobe today announced the new CS4 range of products. The new Creative Suite 4 product line advances the creative process across print, Web, mobile, interactive, film and video production. With new levels of integration and expressiveness for Flash technology across the entire product line, Adobe’s biggest software release to date includes Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium, Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium, Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium, Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection, as well as 13 point products, 14 integrated technologies and seven services.

Adobe plans to offer tiered upgrade pricing from previous versions. For a limited time, validly licensed customers of eligible versions of Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Production Studio and Macromedia Studio will be able to upgrade to Creative Suite 4 for the CS3 upgrade price. For more detailed information about features, upgrade policies, pricing visit CS4 Home

Adobe Creative Suite 4 and its associated products are scheduled to ship in October 2008. You can preorder them on Adobe Store at www.adobe.com/go/gn_store.

Google Chrome : Googles take on browser

2008-09-02T13:08:00.013+05:30

With a few hours to go before Google unveils the first beta version of its open source browser, Google Chrome. I am getting ready to try my hands on it. As with most of Google launches there is a lot of talk & hype about the success of its new product.

These are a few things you can expect from the browser as per Google

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.

Google chrome promises to be fast, clean, streamlined but yet simple. It uses components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others. We won't know what Google Chrome will look like till tomorrow, when they make the beta available for download, but Techcrunch has a few screenshots of how it might look

Download (PDF) the pre launch comic strip

Cuil - Did you give it a try ?

2008-07-28T18:05:00.003+05:30

Cuil a new search engine is unveiled today, 28th July 2008 which claims to be more powerful than even the big daddy, Google. The claim can turn out to be real, if not today but sometime down the line as it is created by a startup started by ex-Google employees.

More about what I found using it.

Edit current page - A neat little bookmarklet

2008-07-10T23:17:00.007+05:30

Ever wondered if you could edit the page you are browsing on make updates to it. Found a very neat little bookmarklet that allows to exactly do that.

Edit current website

Just drag the above link to your bookmarks toolbar and voila you are all set to edit the page you are currently viewing. Don't worry though the changes are only temporary and are lost once you move away or refresh the page. But its a handy snippet to have some fun or create fake screenshots ;-). I suspect this to be one of these, but there is a lot of discussion about it on the Blogosphere.

You can find more such handy bookmarklets(including this one) here

CFUnited 2008 : Adobe Keynote Summary

2008-06-18T18:46:00.008+05:30

Ben Forta as usual started his keynote with a bang and announced a few things on the ColdFusion front. Here are the announcement from Adobe

Full version Enterprise Edition free ColdFusion for Educational Use.
Setup of CFML Advisory Commitee will help define the rules & guidelines around the use and evolution of CFML. The initial members of the committee are

Sean Corfield (lead)
Ben Forta (Adobe)
Sanjeev Kumar (Adobe)
Gert Franz (Ralio)
Ray Camden (CF Jedi)
Rob Brook-Bilson

Adam Lehmann's talked about some of the new features and enhancements they are working for the new version of ColdFusion "Centaur"

Language Enhancement

Create UDF & CFC in CFSCRIPT
explicit LOCAL scope keeps local variables local <cfset var="1">
can be used anywhere in within the function
New tags <cffinally> and <cfcontinue>
Others
- new and import keywords
- implicit constructors
  - <cfcomponent init=" ">
  - Method name init()
  - Method with same name as component
- implicit getters & setters – Applies to <cfproperty> which will automatically have implicit getters & setters without actual code in the cfc which can also be overridden by users version.

New Server Events using Server.cfc file

OnServerStart
OnServerEnd

Databases are at the core of all CF apps and integrated ORM in Centaur will dramatically simplify data integration with hibernate

CFUnited : Checked In

2008-06-16T00:46:00.002+05:30

Started my CFUnited trip. Checked into Grand Hyatt room number 1156 after a nice and decent Air France flight from Bangalore reached Dulles on time. Anyone interested to drop by are most welcome. See you at the conference.

Batch query processing with ColdFusion

2008-06-10T12:39:00.010+05:30

Many a times we wonder if we can perform the action in database as a batch of multiple SQL statements. Though there are ways where in one execute multiple statements from but not all databases support that. Also that option risks the potential of SQL injection attacks if the queries are not written correctly. I personally would not prefer using for the purpose.

In one of my recent project I was required to perform multiple database inserts from the files. The records I am talking about can reach anywhere above 10K. I am sure not many of you would still want to use for this scenario.

To accomplish the task in hand I took advantage of the executeBatch() available in JDBC 2.0. the below script shows how we can do batch updates to a Oracle database.

<cfscript>
   class =  createObject("java","java.lang.Class").forName("oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver");
   DriverManager= createObject("java","java.sql.DriverManager");
   connectStr = "jdbc:oracle:thin:@<serverName>:<portNumber>:<sid>";
   con = DriverManager.getConnection(connectStr, '<username>', '<password>');
</cfscript>

The above snippet is used to get the connection to the database using a connection string. If you have a datasouce setup and want to use it to get the connection use the following snippet :

<cfscript>
  ic = createObject("java","javax.naming.InitialContext");
  ds = ic.lookup("<datasource>");
  con = ds.getConnection();
</cfscript>

Note : The datasources set in the CFAdmin will not be available using the above method. Only datasources set in the J2EE server will be available.

After we have the connection[con], we can use the following script to add statements to a batch and execute it as a batch.

<cfscript>
 con.setAutoCommit(false);
 sql = "INSERT INTO test(id,name) VALUES(?,?)";
 pstmt = con.prepareStatement(sql);
 for (i=1; i<=1000; i++) {
   pstmt.setInt(1,i);
   pstmt.setString(2,"Sample String#i#");
   pstmt.addBatch();
 }
 updateCounts = pstmt.executeBatch();
 flag=true;
 for(i=1; i<=arrayLen(updateCounts);i++){
  if(updateCounts[i] == -3){ 
    flag=false; 
    con.rollback();
    break;
  }
 }
 if(flag){
   con.commit();
   writeoutput("Operation succeeded");
 }
 else
   writeoutput("Operation failed");
 </cfscript>

The JDBC recommendation is to set autocommit to false when using batch updates "for proper error handling." Doing so also allows all the benefits of transaction processing.

Update: To check if your database supports batch updates just check using this snippeton the connection object created above.

<cfscript>
writeoutput(con.getMetaData().supportsBatchUpdates());
</cfscript>

CFUnited Countdown

2008-06-06T22:24:00.003+05:30

As part of the CFUnited countdown the attendees have been asked a few questions. Since I will be second time lucky to be able to make it to the conference from India, I take the pleasure to answer the questions asked by Liz

What are you looking forward to most?
The memories of my first visit to CFUnited in 2006 are still very much fresh in my mind and since it will be the second time around I plan to meet a few more people and make friends with, though I am on a different side of the globe it always gives me immense pleasure to interact and socialize with community. I surely will meet Ray (Camden) to personally thank him for offering me CF blog hosting. Also plan to make a few other friends.

Which speaker will most likely end up on your camera?
As many as can fit in my camera, which means it will cover atleast all from the sessions I attend. I am eager to attend the ColdBox session by Luis Majano at the very minimum.

What do you plan to do outside conference time?
Since I would be coming 3 days in advance for the conference and will have a mate along, we had planned to do DC Tour and museums especially, National Air and Space Museum. Also planning a day tour to Baltimore for National Aquarium and harbor.
If you feel there is something we are missing and should visit, please let me know in the comments

Fill in the blank: I will mainly be around the ______ booth.
It will be Adobe and no points for guessing the reason :-). I would also make sure to pay my visit to the Fusion Authority booth, still have the <CF_Relax> T-shirt I won from their booth ;-)

Do you have a new project you are working on and will reveal it at CFUnited?
Though it might not be that exciting, but for me I am working on something in which I am leveraging CF Ajax features for the very first time. Good to be able to explore some of the Ajax features.

ColdFusion 8 nominated

2008-03-28T13:10:00.005+05:30

ColdFusion 8 has been selected as a finalist in the Web Development category of the Great Indian Developer Awards 2008. Voting is open for all till May 2nd.

Great Indian Developer Awards recognize the product and innovation excellence of the hundreds of software products and tools that aid developer productivity, across 15 different categories. The selection criteria applied by an international stature panel places emphasis on functionality, usability, innovation excellence, bleeding-edge quotient, and feedback from the developer ecosystem.

Now that I have already casted my vote what are you waiting for !!

Adobe RIA Architect Summit 2008

2008-03-18T11:59:00.008+05:30

The Adobe RIA Architect Summit is an opportunity for architects and aspiring architects to get an insight into how to design and architect Rich Internet Applications. It is also a unique platform to interact with experts and technology leaders and a chance to develop connections within the community.

The summit is an unparalleled opportunity to hear from eminent people like Dr. Naresh Gupta, MD of Adobe India and David Wadhwani, VP of the Platform BU, Adobe Systems Inc. on the impact of RIAs, the business opportunities that they present and strategy and future of Adobe’s platforms.

When: Thursday, April 3, 2008 9:00 am - 6:00 pm
Venue: The Chancery Pavillion, Residency Road, Bangalore, India

More details and registration, on a First Come First Serve basis, at http://adoberiarch.eventbrite.com/

Synchronizer Token Pattern in ColdFusion

2007-12-12T19:56:00.000+05:30

Most of the times we feel like maintaining the control flow of the application and prevent users not use browser control especially the browser Back button. Control flow sequence is particularly important to preserve when form submission involves transaction processing on the server which might lead to inconsistencies.

People familiar with Struts framework in Java might be aware of the Synchronizer Token Pattern available to take care of this very problem. I tried if not same a similar principle in ColdFusion to get over the problem on hand for me.

The solution described below is in no way a full blown Synchronizer Token Pattern that might be implemented in Struts but a very simple approach to solve a very mundane problem. The basic idea is to set a token in a session variable before returning a (transactional) page to the client. This page carries the token inside a hidden field. Refer code below :

<cfset variables.timer =gettickcount()>
<cfset session.timer =variables.timer>
<form name="a" action="2.cfm" method="post">
<p>Name : <input type="text" name="name"></p>
<p>Age : <input type="text" name="age"></p>
<cfoutput><input type="hidden" name="timer" value="#variables.timer#"></cfoutput>
<p><input type="submit" name="Sumbit"></p>
</form>

Upon submission, request processing first tests for the presence of a valid token in the request parameter by comparing it with the one registered in the session. If the token is valid, processing can continue normally, otherwise an alternate course of action is taken. After testing, the token resets to null to prevent subsequent submissions until a new token is saved in the session.

<cfif structKeyExists(form,"fieldnames") and form.timer eq session.timer>
  <cfoutput> Your name is #form.name# & age #form.age#</cfoutput>
  <cfset session.timer=0>
<cfelse>
  <p>Your session is expired<p>
</cfif>
<p><a href="javascript:history.back()">Go Back (Simulate Browser Back)</a> 
| <a href="1.cfm">Preferred Back</a></p>

Wanna try a demo

Please note that this is just an idea implementation I did in less than 5 minutes and has scope for improvement. All suggestions/comments are welcome.

Adobe.com has a new look

2007-12-07T19:13:00.000+05:30

Yesterday night we at the web team released the new look Adobe.com.

Your comments/feedback are most welcome as to what you feel about the new look

Adobe Share

2007-10-10T16:31:00.000+05:30

I hope many people must have already heard and used Adobe latest online offering codenamed "Share" which is available on Labs. It is a free web-based service that offers 1GB of space and allows you to easily share, publish and organize your documents. You only need to have an Adobe ID.

With Share you can:

Send documents without email attachments.
Access your documents from anywhere.
View all the documents you have shared or received in one place.
Post a link to your document on a wiki or blog.
Embed a Flash® preview of your document on any website.
Limit access to a document to a list of recipients.

Update: Ray Camden already has a cool little CF API for Share.

Directory Watcher

2007-09-06T16:18:00.000+05:30

A few months back during our internal DevSummit at Adobe, India an engineer demo a slick little utility that sits in the system tray and monitors a directory for updates. It notifies the user of any update to the configured directory. The light weight utility also had a RSS feed that yours can subscribe to provided you have it enabled.

On the lines of this utility standalone executable, I thought doing this in ColdFusion was a cake walk. Using the Directory Watcher event gateway provided with ColdFusion I built a RSS feed using <CFFEED> for all the music I have on my machine. The feed will be refreshed everytime I added more music, so my friends subscribed to my music feed get updated.

 <cfcomponent>
 <cffunction name="onAdd" output="no">
    <cfargument name="CFEvent" type="struct" required="yes">
 
<cfdirectory directory="c:\music\" recurse="yes"  name="music" filter="*.mp3">

<cfquery name="mymusic" dbtype="query">
 select name,size,directory, DATELASTMODIFIED from music where type='File' order by DATELASTMODIFIED desc
</cfquery>
 <cfscript>
      // Create the feed data structure and amymusic the metadata.
      MovieStruct = { link="http://rnarula03",title="Music", description="Music directory for Rahul", pubDate="#now()#", version="rss_2.0", item=arraynew(1) };
      / Add the feed items. 
       for(i=1; i <= mymusic.recordcount; i++)
 {
        MovieStruct.item[i] = StructNew();
        MovieStruct.item[i].description = StructNew();
 S = numberformat(mymusic.size[i]/(1024*1024));
 link = replace(mymusic.directory[i],"c:\music","")&"\"&mymusic.name[i];
        MovieStruct.item[i].description.value = "Movie "& mymusic.name[i] &" (" & S &" MB)";
 MovieStruct.item[i].description.value =  MovieStruct.item[i].description.value & "<br><br>Download at: \\servername\music" &link;
        //MovieStruct.item[i].link ="file://///rnarula03/music/"&link;
        MovieStruct.item[i].pubDate = GetHttpTimeString(mymusic.DATELASTMODIFIED[i]) ;
        MovieStruct.item[i].title = replace(Rereplacenocase(mymusic.name[i],"\.mp3$",""),"."," ","ALL");
       }
    </cfscript>
    <!--- Generate the feed and save it to a file and variable. --->
 <cffeed action="create"  name="#MovieStruct#"  outputfile="c:\wwwroot\music.xml" overwrite="true">
 
 </cffunction>
 </cfcomponent>

This will publish the complete list of music files in my folder, which is also shared to facilitate easy download. The only issue I am having is the network file share link doesn't work from Firefox due to some reason. Still investigating on the same. Also the network link (like file://///servername/share) is not treated as a valid link in RSS & it doesn't appear as link on the fed item. If anyone has any idea on the same, please let me know about it.

FEEDJIT real-time traffic analysis

2007-09-04T15:26:00.000+05:30

One thing that keeps me motivated to write more on my blog is the ever increasing number of visits on my blog. I have used a few tools to monitor the traffic in the past including Icerocket, Statisfy, Google Analytics to name a few but my I always like to try new tools just because of the kind of stats and analysis they provide. Icerocket, for instance, provide you the visitors tracking which include last n number of recent visits along with the time (in the time chosen chosen) and the geographical region. There are many other reports available like rank, hit by browser with nice charts etc etc. Google Analytics on the other hands doesn't seem to provide live stats and is bit more inclined towards e-commerce related reports.

In continuing with my endeavor to get the best stats and reports for my blog I am evaluating FEEDJIT on my blog. Feedjit offers two types of widgets and can be added to your blog without sign up/registration. The first one let you get a live arrival and departure traffic report on your blog. This widget is totally customizable using Ajax controls. The second widget, integrated at the bottom right of my blog, shows a map with the location of the last 100 visitors. Hover over any dot to get more information about a person.

Yet another very simple but nice widget that caught my attention was whos.amung.us. The USP of this stats is its 30 seconds setup and again like FEEDJIT doesn't require any registration.

Asynchronous File Upload

2007-08-31T19:31:00.001+05:30

For one of my current project, we wanted to have to support multiple file attachments in one of the forms. The first thing that came to my mind was how about doing it the GMail way. For me the GMail file attachment module functions the best way. I was sure that I could find some reusable component that I can quickly use. But to my disappointment or lack of (search) time or call it bad googling, I couldn't find something, in ColdFusion, that I could have used. Incidentally I found the Google Guide today to help me better my googling.

To my good luck I found an implementation in PHP, which I quickly (5 mins to be precise) implemented, that's where I love ColdFusion. The implementation is a simple yet intelligent use of (hidden) iframes and JavaScript.

Download it !!

oob Conference 2007

2007-08-29T10:59:00.000+05:30

India’s only conference on Ideas and Intellectual Property
14 - 15 Sep 2007
J N Tata Auditorium,Bangalore, India

If you have an idea, or simply want to get inspired to create your own idea, then OOB (Out Of Box) Conference 2007 is the place to be. Over 30 top speakers at the conference will keep you inspired; will get you thinking; and will push you to action-mode.

The future is ideas, ideas which will revolutionise and change the way we do things forever. At OOB, you will learn how to create, develop and execute your own idea. You will also learn the truth about Intellectual Property and how to create one. So, this September, OOB Conference 2007 is the place to be.

The delegates are swooping in and the chairs are fast getting filled, so ensure your seats right away.

More on OOB at http://www.oobconference.com

San Jose Semaphore cracked

2007-08-16T23:41:00.000+05:30

Even tried to solve the puzzle presented by rotating lights high atop the Adobe headquarters in San Jose. The puzzle has been reportedly been solved by a computer science engineer named Bob Mayo and an engineer named Mark Snesrud.

San Jose Semaphore website describe the riddle as

San Jose Semaphore, by artist Ben Rubin, is a permanent public artwork commissioned by Adobe Systems Incorporated in collaboration with the City of San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affair’s Public Art Program.

Located within the top floors of Adobe’s Almaden Tower headquarters in San Jose, California, San Jose Semaphore is a multi-sensory kinetic artwork that illuminates the San Jose skyline with the transmission of a coded message. The content of the San Jose Semaphore’s message is a mystery; cracking the encryption technique and deciphering the message is posed as a challenge for the public. To the first person or group to successfully crack the code, Adobe will award bragging rights and acknowledgment on both the Adobe website (www.adobe.com) and the San Jose Semaphore website.

Update: Read the complete analysis of the solution here, and how much pain the winning team took to crack it here. and here are other projects of the artist who created the semaphore.

Adobe.com : A perfect web experience

2007-08-12T23:23:00.001+05:30

Harley Manning, vice president Forrester chose Adobe.com as the perfect Web site on the Internet.

Read the complete article regarding this on WSJ.

ColdFusion 8 - Go grab it

2007-07-30T11:04:00.000+05:30

The new revolutionary and much awaited release of ColdFusion, ColdFusion 8 aka Scorpio is now shipping.

That is it from me. You still waiting to hear more. Go grab your copy now.

Still looking for reasons to upgrade, find out what you will miss otherwise.