the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for December, 2007
Two Levels of Creation…?
Dec 28th
Over the last several weeks, loyal readers of this blog (if any remain…) will note that the focus of the majority of my posts have centered around web application coding techniques. While part of the reason for this is that I have been improving exponentially in my coding abilities over the last several months (not hard when one is going from zero to somethng…), the major impetus for these posts is simply that I post about what I am thinking as well as that to which I am devoting my time. Frankly, while I love theology deeply, I have not been devoting much time to it lately, partly out of necessity, partly out of lethargy.
The last week, however, I have been on vacation and, more importantly, sick. During this time I have had a lot of restless hours to quiet my thinking and devote mental energy to things other than web application code (even though that has still managed to creep in). In these hours of contemplation, I have come across what I believe could be a major diffusor of objections to big bang cosmology (BBC) and evolutionary biology (EB) in re: the relationship of God's activity to the More >
Why It's Important to Read the Docs…
Dec 20th
This morning, I was working on a bit of code for a dynamic directory search that I am building for work. Because I like the paging options that Spry provides, I decided to wire up Spry to ColdFusion to create some datasets. No big deal.
However, I came across an issue I have not encountered with Spry before. Normally, in the master/detail/filter mode of Spry dataset work, I will load a dataset from ColdFusion on page load and then use Spry to filter these results. The filter parameters normally come from the dataset itself.
For example, here's a run of the mill dataset:
var dsPeople = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("com/getpeople.cfc?method=getPeople, "/directory/person");
This will get all the people in my database from the query results of my ColdFusion component. If I wanted to see a detailed view of one of the people, I would simply pass a Spry dataset value (e.g., '@id') to this dataset, and it would handle it nicely.
While this works fine for a small number of records, what if we're talking about tens of thousands? I'm actually not sure how long it would take for Spry to deal with, say, 10,000 personal information records. However, I suspect it would be an arduous task More >
ColdFusion and Technorati – A Quick Example
Dec 16th
Today, a client of mine (deviantmonk.com ) contacted me and requested that I set up a way for Technorati to be updated when posts are created and updated.
Although I have certainly heard of Technorati , until today I had not had any exposure to everything that it does. One feature is that it acts as a blog aggregator of sorts. Admittedly, it has some nice functionality: besides displaying posts from blogs, it also includes comments and is smart enough to get username and avatar information. The downside is that Technorati–like Google and other content aggregators–only update sites as their bots get to them. Obviously, left to itself, this can take some time, and posts which were made yesterday could not appear for several days (or longer).
Fortunately, Technorati has a nice webservice that allows users to ping the server to alert it to changes to the blog content. Admittedly, the update still takes about 10 minutes, but that is still better than the unacceptable alternative…
So anyway, the webservice is extremely simple. I wrapped up the relevant code in a nice ColdFusion function and simply invoked it on the end of my normal post processing. The enitrety of the code is as follows:
<cffunction More >
First Look at Adobe's Thermo
Dec 12th
I've written at least one post about Adobe Flex, the killer fusion of XML and ActionScripting 3 that makes the development of Rich Internet Applications extremely easy, fast and–let's be honest–extremely sexy. The one drawback of Flex up until now (IMO) is the clunkiness of the design interface. While it is easy to layout and manipulate design items, I have found it a bit tedious to style applications they way I want them.
Well, Adobe has made inroads to solving this issue with the development of their now Labs-interred Thermo. Thermo is basically the designer's Flex. Designers can import Photoshop files (and hopefully Illustrator…) into Thermo and begin creating working examples of functionality and animations in Flex. For example, graphical text boxes can be point-and-click converted to real, manipulateable input boxes; lists of items can be converted to real data-driven lists; and so on.
The purpose of this, of course, is to bring the design and development community closer together. Instead of the designer simply handing a flat PSD file to a developer with illegible notes about what they would like the final product to look like (e.g., transitions), the designer can herself create a mockup of the functionality in Thermo.
But More >
Long Time No Post–And a New Design!
Dec 10th
Wow–it's been almost a month since my last post…not good. Anyway, I've been terribly busy with my new job.
The new job has been somewhat of an adjustment because my job responsibilities have moved beyond simple design and coding: now, I am intimately involved in project planning, of which my greatest responsibility is helping to select and implement a brand-spanking new Content Management System that will service our entire organization.
But it's not been all meetings and research. From time to time, I still get to design and code. In addition to the CMS, we are also launching into a system-wide Intranet. As part of the communications plan, we decided to create a project site where we could blog about the progress of implementation as well as post training videos and other important information. I was fortunate enough to be handed the design of the site, which can be seen above.
For this design, I decided to use some bold colors and design features. I had already designed the logo, so I really wanted to play off the green in it. For a while, I struggled with the overall design, for it just didn't seem like the green and charcoal were doing More >
