Andy Jarrett links to this great little guide to installing subversion on windows. Great link, now if we can just get a good guide to using subversion on windows...

A few days ago I asked about what would be a good domain name for the COAL project. We'll we bounced around several ideas but coul not come up with anything solid. So for now, I have added it as a subdomain of ryanguill.com. And since the dns has finally gone through, let me present you with: http://coal.ryanguill.com I must speak for just a moment on the design. Although it doesn't really look like a documentation website, I am quite proud of it. It is my first website I have ever designed using css strictly for design (I either use my friendly tables or pay someone else for my designs). And the whole site is both XHTML Transistional and CSS valid! As I mentioned before one of the biggest parts of COAL is going to be the documentation; It is how you know what service fits your needs the best and how you discover how to use it. As you can see from browsing around the site right now everything is just mostly stubs, but it will start to blossom in the next couple days. Stay tuned and once again, if you would like to help with COAL or have any comments or suggestions, please let us know!

Steven Erat has done a great job with the Online Coldfusion Meetup Group. If you don't have a cfug in your hometown (like me in memphis) or even if you do it's a great thing. Great presenters and information through a breeze live meeting. You can see today's presentation by Hal Helms and Jeff Peters here: http://mmsupport.breezecentral.com/p46486428/ If you haven't already done so, join the Online Coldfusion Meetup Group now!

This morning I opened my morning links tab like I always do. It fills my tab bar up with around 30 links, the stuff I check every morning. I always start from the left and just use ctrl+w to close each window as I'm done with it, and open any links in each page in a new window by using ctrl+click. Well this morning, my fat fingers couldn't stay on the w key while I was trying to close a window and I hit ctrl+3 instead. It jumped focus to the third tab in the group! I was confused for a second, went back and tried it again and my fat fingers did it again. But at least this time I figured out what was going on. You can hit ctrl + (any number, up to 9 I guess) to jump to that tab in your bar. This is going to be quite useful for me, because I use ctrl+tab all the time to cycle through my tabs, and oftentimes I'll have 5 tabs open and just want to go back one tab. Amazing what you stumble upon because you miss a key! By the way, does anyone know where there is a list of firefox keyboard shortcuts? Update: Patrick McElhaney graciously pointed me to http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/keyboard for all your firefox keyboard shortcut needs. Thanks Patrick.

kottke comes through again, this time with the anonymous post Why Geeks and Nerds Are Worth It.... Why couldn't someone had posted this back in high school...

Pete Freitag shows you how to turn on find-as-you-type again in firefox. I'm almost positive this used to be on by default back in the pre-1.0 days. I had just gotten used to hitting ' or / to find a word, now I can get back to the way things used to be. To turn on find-as-you-type, go to tools, options, advanced, accessibility, and check Begin Finding when you begin typing. And don't worry, it doesn't work if you have a text field focused. (side note: I would like to see what happens in gmails shortcuts and other Access Keys)

I am wanting to start working on the actual website for COAL and looking for suggestions for the domain name. I have checked out projectcoal.com, coalproject.com and cfcoal.com all of which are available, but seem to lack something. So far, as Jared mentioned earlier, cfcoal.com might be the best bet 'cause it at least its easy to remember and ties coal to coldfusion explicitly. Brand recognition is a big part... So any other suggestions or votes? I am wanting to get the domain ordered later today and get started because the documentation and website is going to be a very importaint part of coal and its success. Also, if anyone has a design for the site they would like to donate, let me know. If not im sure I can come up with something.

A great little game for a monday diversion, guess-the-google uses a keyword search from google images to retrieve 20 images, and compiles those into a mosiac image. You then have to guess what keyword was used to create the mosaic. It's great fun if not mildly addictive. My best score so far is 209, what can you guys get? from the makers of montage-a-google.

Well i've had a little bit of interest in COAL so I thought I would post a little bit of an update. Like Jared posted on his blog, he has been helping me with the structure of the service. We looked into the j2ee Service Locator Pattern and decided it was a perfect fit. So we went with that and have it pretty much lined out now. So let me take a second to explain exactly what COAL is, isnt, and what my ideas are for it. It is, like I mentioned, an idea loosely based on php's PEAR. The general idea is to create a large library of cfc's (services). They will be arranged in directories and sub-directories (packages) in a way similar to java's package scheme. These cfc's can be anything from just libraries of udf's (Ray Camden, if you read this I sent you an email about using CFLib.org's udf libraries) to very specific-purposed cfc's and everywhere in between. Any cfc can even use other cfc's in any package, either directly or even using COAL itself to make the bridge. They can extend or use composition. They (cfc's, services) can also depend on components in the library that are not exposed as services. There are plenty of ideas (although I am always looking for more) about the types of things that could be useful. Basically, think: if there is something you finding yourself writing code over and over again for all the time; if there is a cfc's that you have written that you think is just great and you use it all the time, and think someone else may be able to benefit from it; anything to make your job easier if it was in a completely reusable component; you get the idea. Also, just because there is already a service in COAL similar to what you have, if its different, it can just be named something else. Let me explain a little bit about how COAL works under the hood, just cause it's cool (although you will not have to know anything about this to be able to use COAL, its remarkably simple). COAL is a folder that contains all of the libraries of cfc's, a config xml file, and three cfc's that do all the heavy lifting. coal.cfc (the only one you ever have to worry with, the manager) coalFactory.cfc (creates the object from the service) and coalCache.cfc (performs caching of objects for performance). You put this COAL folder in your /{cfroot}/wwwroot/ folder so it will be accessible from any site that coldfusion is running on with that server. you create an instance of coal.cfc and call its init() method (either directly or you can use coal.cfm, more on that later). Just like this: now youre set. You can use that object to load any service that you want. For instance, say you want to load in Jared's xmlHandler component. simple: Basically you just choose the variable you want to load the component into, you use getService() with the service name, and perform any .init() or .configure() methods you need to. Under the hood, a lot happens. I think i'll leave that for another entry cause this one has gotten quite long so far. If you want to see the project where it is now, you can go to This link to download the latest files. Basically, these are the hurdles as I see them now. First and formost, getting quality content into COAL. We're going to need volunteers and giving developers to donate useful cfc's to the project. We're going to need people to test them out and offer any suggestions. We're also going to have to write up some ground rules about the cfc's, what you can do, what you can't. We're going to have to get a website together with documentation, which I don't think will be too awful hard though. And the big thing, were going to need to get developers interested in COAL. It has the potential to be something all of us will love and use every day, but it also has the potential to sit right here and fizzle with just me using it if we don't get the word out. If enough buzz is created and enough people out there start using it, there should be no reason that a hosting provider shouldn't install it on your server for you. (btw, I am also going to include a way for hosting providers to restrict access to certain packages if they need/want to). Thanks, and as always, if you want to help, if you have a cfc to donate, if you think you would just use it if/when it comes available, please let us know. Even if all you do is just leave a comment saying, yeah, id use that.

Get ready for the Mint Julep. Being a Kentucky native, the Kentucky Derby has always been a favorite of mine. Today I decided to look up when it was this year (its two weeks from tomorrow, on May 7th, 2005) and came across their 2005 website. They are using a lot of Flash, and very well. Its definately an improvement over the 2004 website for sure. This is how I really like my flash. Great looks, very functional, but not overdone and reducing the usability of the site.

I am working with some xml this morning working on COAL and have noticed a few interesting things. First, I have always used to read an xml file into a variable and then used XmlParse() to parse the variable into an xml structure. Well apparently according to the ColdFusion Livedocs you can specify a filename path directly into XmlParse(). For instance, instead of

<cffile action="read" file="c:/xml/myxmlfile.xml" variable="foo" />

<cfset foo = XMLParse(foo) />

You can simply do

<cfset foo = XMLParse("c:/xml/myxmlfile.xml") />

This is new to me, but maybe im just the last to know. Also I noticed an odd quirk with XmlSearch this morning. I am really wondering if I'm just doing something wrong, which is entirely possible. Im definately new to the whole xpath scene. XmlParse() says that it is by default not case sensative. So I (apparently wrongly) assumed that xmlSearch() xpath statements would be case insensitive as well. But I kept getting no results from a VERY simple xpath statements and couldn't figure out why. Out of desperation I changed the case of it to exactly the way it is in the xml, and of course it worked. The do not mention anything about being case sensative, although maybe its just a straight up xpath thing?

Posted on Thu. April 21, 2005 by Ryan Guill #

A while back I had an idea for coldfusion, one that I thought that all of us as developers could really benefit from. I know many php developers that use this thing called pear on an everyday basis. Now to put a description of what pear is in a paragraph or two is sort of hard, but basically its a library of different classes that extend php abilities. Some of it is just user defined functions and things like that, but its also a collection of open source and pliable shopping cart classes, math classes, validation, content management, and virtually everything you can think of. So I have this idea for COAL, the Coldfusion Open Application Library. Since most of us have and use cfc's every day, they provide the perfect way to package many of these reusable components in a way that everyone can use. I am talking about something more than just CFLib udf collections, althought that would be a great part of it. But a collection of open source cfc's, things that do all of these things that we have to do over and over again every day, and put together in a way that we could easily extend them right into our everyday coldfusion development. PHP's PEAR comes with a binary installer that you must install on your server, mostly because it has scripts that are not only php, but also pearl and other languages. Althought we would probably want to limit COAL to just coldfusion and java classes. But COAL could be easily installed in a special directory in your cfusionmx7/wwwroot/ directory and be accessible from any website that is on the server. I have a vision of a pure oo implementation of it, where you would access everything through a facade, a single cfc. "one cfc to rule them all..." ;) I think this could be a very powerful thing for the coldfusion community. It of course would be an open source project that would have to be managed well, and like cflib.org, all code would have to be tested extensively before it became part of the package. Also, just because the project is open source, wouldn't mean that the code that went into had to be open source. If someone wanted to submit code, encrypted, to use in the framework, as long as it worked well, it could be included but the source would not have to be available. It would of course still need to be free. I think if enough people showed interest in it, this could become something very useful to all of us. So now I just ask you guys, what do you think? Would you be interested in working on a project like this? Would you use a project like this if it existed? And do you have any ideas for COAL? Thanks, Update: You can see some of the packages available in pear on their website, here.

This has got to be one of the best firefox advertisements I've seen. Found on Blogs For Firefox where you can get a fullsize image of it. Surely someone can come up with some good pun using spreadfirefox.com and this...

Good article on wired.com this morning about the adobe/macromedia aquisition called Webmonkey Says, Let Adobe Be. Definately worth a read.

I have had a couple times using my mxna pod where someone would post an entry to their blog that had a really long word in it and it would break my layout. So I have updated it to where it loops through the title of the blog and cuts off any words over 25 characters. Here is the new code if anyone is interested. Again, to show more or less entries you can easily edit the limit argument in the webservice call.

After just four votes, Pope Benedict XVI (aka, Joseph Ratzinger) has been chosen to lead the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church as the 265th pontiff. Benedict XVI turned 78 this past Saturday and was Pope John Paul II's chief theological adviser for 20 years. Again, I am not catholic, but I do realize the power and responsibility that the Pope has to lead the Christian Church, and hope and pray that his reign is as successful as the pontiff before him.

Just a followup from yesterday's post on how much I love dell. As I mentioned, the dell dude insisted on sending me a new disc for my computer, and promised it would be here first thing the next day. This morning before noon, a delivery driver was knocking on my door wanting a signature. I was talking to the guy at at least 8 pm Central time last night, and he got the disc out the door, overnight and to my door within hours. You just can't beat that. Not with a stick.

Its been a crazy day for me. Woke up this morning to the adobe/macromedia news that has stumbled me to say the least. I also have started reformatting and reinstalling my Dell computer. I have had it for a little over a year and half now and there was a lot of residual from my previous employer and job that still lurked around. It was just time for a fresh start and to get back to the basics and reorganize a little bit. Well in the process of moving to memphis I had misplaced my reinstallation cd for my dell laptop. What a hitch huh? Well I thought, I just bought a inspiron laptop for my girlfriend, although it was a different model. But it had a cd for windows xp and I started wondering if I could use it instead. Well since I had bought some good customer support for my laptop I thought I would give dell a call. In minutes I had a great customer support rep talking to me and answering my questions. He said it should be fine to use the other cd, but was also dropping a new cd for my computer in the mail and that it should be here first thing tomorrow, free of charge! He was very nice, and easy to understand (which was surprising!) not to mention helpful. So I reinstalled and the only hitches I have come across has been Microsofts fault of course. Windows update purely and simply sucks. There just has to be a better way to handle this. Of course the sheer volume of updates I am having to do aren't helping anything. Its looking more and more like my next machine will be a mac. I wouldn't even mind getting a decent older laptop and putting some flavor of linux on it. But im about fed up with microsofts bull. And something tells me longhorn, if it ever actually makes it to market in my lifetime, will only give microsofts bull a place to roam. sigh. Too bad Dell doesn't make macs....

Of course we are now all going to be using adobe coldfusion (man that just doesn't sound right), so will they have to change it to the adobe xml news aggregator? guess so. I don't know what to think about the whole macromedia being bought into oblivion, except to think that I feel like a name, a brand, a company that I have depended on daily for years has just left me in the cold. But i'll make it. I would just feel a whole lot better if adobe would make their intentions for ColdFusion known. Are they going to continue its development? keep it limping along for a while? ride the cfmx 7 wave as long as it lasts and then say, well that was fun? I can see it going either way, and so far the only thing I have seen is opinions from people who obviously don't know what they are talking about (ie, coldfusion was dead anyway, etc). It's going to be a long road, but as with everything else I guess, the journey is half the fun!

By now most people have seen or at least heard of the Presidential Playlist. Pres. Bush released a list of his 250 songs on his iPod that his Daughters gave him for his birthday. While this is a cool way to see what sort of music our commander and chief enjoys, which gives a sense that his is after all, human, I do not think it is right to commercialize the presidency. Now maybe I am taking this idea a little far, but what if I'm not. What if the next White House Press release comes from a podium with Coca-Cola underneath the presidential seal? What if the presidential limo starts to look more like a nascar racer? There are plenty of other possible examples but I think you get the idea. I just think that apple has enough market share without bringing the president into it.

Back in October, Jason Kottke talked about biomimicry and how he saw Janine Benyus speak at Pop!Tech in Camden, Maine. He linked to ITConversations.com which provides an mp3 or podcast of her speach. Well I just now got around to actually listening to it, and I must admit it's quite cool. How better to design things most effectively than to look at God's creations an imitate it. Things like the Golden Ratio, and the way protiens and amino acids "know" exactly what to do... this is the future. The one thing I wish I could do is find a book that applies biomimicry to software... Im sure someone has. Janine's book can be found here.

A while back I posted an entry called Firefox on crack that gave you a link to steps to make firefox faster. One of those methods was to increase the concurrent connections that firefox would make to a single server. It was mentioned that this is poor etiquette really if you made this number too large. Following along those lines, Christian Cantrell post an entry a little bit ago about IE supposedly only keeps two concurrent connections open at one time, because of the rules set down by the RFC. Its funny, because this comes from an IE blog on msdn, and they say "It turns out that this is a case where IE strictly follows the standards-- in this case, RFC2616, which covers HTTP1.1.", like even they realize that its crazy that ie and standards would be in the same sentance without a "not" or "doesn't" or even a "sike" thrown in. But also, as one of the commentors pointed out, the rfc is recomendations, not rules.

An interesting use of java, the Baby Name Wizard is a interactive graph that shows you the popularity of a given girls or boys name from 1900 to 2003. Very cool, very responsive. And pretty acurate from what I can tell.

From Digital Media Minute, another great color scheme resource, ColorCombos.com which has a library full of great color combinations.

Well, I just upgraded my blog to the new version 3.6.3. Went well as far as I can tell, even though I had done several mods that I had to redo. This post will really be the final test to see if I got everything. Really looking forward to the future posts for my trips out of town.

If you are using Ray Camden's blog.cfc and also like to check mxna regularly then you may be interested in this pod I built earlier using mxna's webservice. It's pretty easy, nothing special here, but if you like it then it may save you a little bit of work.

Another link from Jason Kottke, is a great article in NY Times about Albert Einstein. It explains how the man who was responsible for the theory of relativity was also the man behind three more papers in the same year. One of those papers awarded him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. But as This article titled "One Hundred Years of Uncertainty explains, this paper on Photons, that eventually lead to his discovery of Quantum Mechanics, haunted him for the rest of his life. From that point on, even on his death bed he tried to disprove his own work. If you know anything about quantam mechanics you can see his problem. A world that is filled with uncertainty and probablities; a world where it is even possible that the moon isn't even there when we aren't looking. If you enjoy science and mathematics at all, read this article. If you don't, try to read it anyway, you may learn something.

I posted earlier today about the subversion book being available free online, which Pete Freitag responded that it has apparently been available for a long time. I started to go through the book, but hit snags almost imediately. I have dabled very lightly in *nix based platforms but definately do not understand the command line interface for them, and don't know how to translate from *nix command line to windows command line. The book mentions that it should be possible to use subversion on windows easily, but does not explain how very easily. A google search yeilded very little help and I was wondering if anyone had any tutorials or help documentation on how to get up and running with subversion on windows xp. I do all of my development on my laptop, and unfortunately do not have another box to put linux on at the moment (sigh). Any help will be greatly appreciated, and hopefully this will help others who find themselves in the same boat.

Guess I don't have any excuses anymore. I have been meaning and wanting to learn Subversion for a while now, but keep putting off buying a book about it. Glad I did though, cause as Brandon at Devnulled reports this morning, Subversions free, and now, Version Control with Subversion by O'Reilly is published online for free as well. Supposedly is more recent and has less eratta than the print version.

Is this AJAX? Im not sure, but check out Panic Goods. Its not flash (or flex), so it's got to be some sort of Javascript/DHTML voodoo. Regardless its an awesome looking shopping cart that has some crazy functionality. Drag a shirt into the bottom to add it to your shopping cart, drag it back out again to see the puff of smoke. And it's some pretty good css styling as well. Link from Adam Montgomery.

Theres a new web-mail on the block, and it starts with a G too. I'm not giving up my Gmail just yet, but Goowy Mail is a webmail client that is built entirely out of macromedia flash. They have skins, and a more "outlook" kind of feel to things. They offere a gig of storage to get you started. So for a new user experience, you might want to at least run by there and sign up, just to see how good of a job they really have done.

I just got my confirmation of being added to mxna. I am very glad to be a part of this community, and now I have more of a reason to post! I hope to offer a lot of coldfusion insight to my readers and hopefully all the good links from around the web as well.

Joe of clearsoftware posted a reply on his blog to a post of mine about oo a while back when I was struggling to figure out how it would all work in a cms, and what the real benefits are. Once again, I want to thank Joe for taking his time to comment and reply to my post. I also want to point out that there was a lengthy conversation with Sean Corfield through email that helped me to understand a lot of things as well. I had intended to post it, but just haven't yet. The main thing that I think needs to be pointed out is that there is obviously a rift forming between those that "get" oo and those that haven't gotten it yet. Jared Rypka-Hauer has noticed this and I agree with him that correct terminology needs to be used. I agree with everything he says in that post, but the fact is there is a big gap that a lot of people seem to be having trouble crossing. Maybe its a lack of documentation, maybe its a lack of books, maybe its simply a lack of people using the right words, I don't know. All I know is my only objective in all of this is to get my head around this stuff to make me more productive, and also to be able to teach others what I have learned. I try to take time to look through forums and blogs and boards and help where I can. And OO is obviously growing. Its almost like were talking two different languages here. and all we really need is a translator. Maybe its just a need for more examples. I believe syntax is one of the biggest part of the battles. I can't tell you how many times I have looked at some part of an example to go, "ohh, you can do that? Well that changes everything..." At the end of the day, Im not sure what needs to be done, or where I need to go. My new cms is definately going to be a learning experience I know that much. And if you keep on reading my blog, I'll let you know what I learn along the way.

I am always looking for more of these, so if you know of any good ones let me know, but here is another color palette generator

asfusion.com talks about how to make two related cfselect boxes. This is definately getting bookmarked for later... This would be a good addition to rays blog.cfc for categories...

I can't believe I am actually posting this, but JD started it. Bunny Suicides is a morbidly funny series of cartoon images. Its amazing how creative some of them are...

A small wednesday diversion, check out the top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes.

Check out all the people in St. Peters Square. And. I am a christian, but not roman catholic. That being said, I have always been very interested in roman catholic tradtions and the vatican. The passing of the Pope is a sad and grevious thing, and it continues to invoke awe in me at just how many lives he affected. My God rest his soul, and be with the cardinals as they choose the next Pope.

Another link from Kottke i think, Grand Theft Auto: Block City. Each and every day I am still amazed by the people whith too much time on their hands...

Looking for a pc version of a mac mini? Cheap, small footprint? You might want to check out This post and comments from simplebits. Lots of good links in the comments.

Finally someone did it. The Starbucks Delocator is a site that helps spread the word about coffee shops besides starbucks. Of course, they cannot use the word starbucks, so were going to let google do that for us, just click here for the Starbucks Delocator. (btw, I hate starbucks coffee...)

From Jason Kottke, One Dimensional Tetris. Like he says, cool for all of three seconds...

This is sort of a test, I just want to see if it works. If so, you will be hearing a great song by Grand Funk Railroad, Some Kind of Wonderful.