the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for November, 2010
Beginnings
Nov 24th
Over the weekend, my family and I moved to Maineville, OH. We were able to find a really nice house with a lot more space than our old cramped apartment. While unpacking, I decided to finally tackle a task I had been putting off for years: pulling data off my old PC so that I can stop dragging it around everywhere I go…
While browsing these old files, I found the source code for the very first web site that I ever made.
As a disclaimer, this site is very rough. I had no idea about HTML–so it’s basically an export from Photoshop to the web. But as rough as it is, it was where I got my start, and so this site will always have a special place in my heart. Plus, it was something that I made for good friends, so that’s an added bonus 🙂
Anyway, check it out when you have a chance, and marvel at the awesomeness!
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Really Nice Update to MOG
Nov 16th
I’ve been using the MOG iPhone app for several months now. While I’m more or less happy with the service, the app itself has always left a lot of things to be desired. In it’s most recent update, however, MOG has finally addressed what I considered to be some of the biggest deficiencies…with these updates, it’s finally a real app 🙂 Here are some of the upgrades:
- New “Now Playing” Screen
- Seeking within a song (duh, can’t believe it took this long)
- New queue features:
- Queue Next
- Add to End of Queue
- Clear Queue and Play
- Stop audio by unplugging headphones (to me, this is the biggest upgrade, and is something I’ve been looking forward to for about 4 months)
Anyway, that’s about it. Again, MOG is a great service, and it’s nice to see continued improvements to the app.
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Are You a Sledge of Destruction?
Nov 14th
In a recent post, I shared a snippet from the Irish epic, Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley) in which the bard lauded the virtues of the ancient hero Cúchulain. Lest one thinks that these are an exhaustive list of this hero’s awesomeness, a few pages on in the epic, we find a detailed description of Cúchulain’s valor and feats in war. In this selection, Cúchulain’s foster-father, Fergus, sings the praises of the feared “Hound of Ulster”:
We have not found there a man-at-arms that is harder, nor a point that is keener, more terrible nor quicker, nor a more bloodthirsty wolf, nor a raven more flesh-loving, nor a wilder warrior, nor a match of his age that would reach to a third or a fourth the likes of Cúchulain.
Thou findest not there…a hero of his peer, nor a lion that is fiercer, nor a plank of battle, nor a sledge of destruction, nor a gate of combat, nor a doom of hosts, nor a contest of valor that would be more worth than Cúchulain.
Thou findest not there one that could equal his age and his growth, his dress and his terror, his size and his splendour, his fame and his voice, his shape and More >
In Memoriam
Nov 13th
Today, my family celebrates the life and commemorates the death of my grandfather, O. Dean Watson. Although I was unable to attend the memorial service, I wrote a few thoughts that I shared with my family.
Grandpa, you lived your life full of virtue–anyone who met you, and especially those who knew you well and loved you dearly, could immediately see that. You lived daily with immense compassion, purposeful integrity, and limitless generosity. Your words were always graced with good will, and you found—and brought out—the best in everyone, revealing to family, friends and strangers alike the love of God which filled your heart and soul.
And as if these great virtues were not sufficient, your life was marked indelibly by the deep faith which you held out for all to see. In good times and in bad, in rejoicing and in suffering, you always demonstrated the abiding trust you had in the promises of our Heavenly Father, a trust which you worked tirelessly and to your final days to cultivate in your family, your friends, and every person with whom you had a moment’s opportunity to fellowship. Even in the face of death, your confidence did not waiver, and courageously you More >
Do You Have the Virtue of Laying Waste and Plundering?
Nov 12th
I’ve recently been working my way through the Irish epic, Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley). One of the more interesting characters I’ve come across so far is Cúchulain. Cúchulain was a magnificent warrior, and was famous for his single-handed defense of Ulster against a formidable army. In one passage, he lops the heads off of four charioteers in a single swipe, and proceeds to conspicuously affix their heads to poles in an effort to goad the invading army to pursue him to their doom. Seven-fingered, seven-toed, and seven-pupil-ed, Cúchulain was a paragon of the human species, and is therefore lauded by the epic writer for his various and numerous virtues:
Now, many and divers were the magic virtues that were in Cúchulain that were in no one else in his day. Excellence of form, excellence of shape, excellence of build, excellence in swimming, excellence in horsemanship, excellence in chess and in draughts, excellence in battle, excellence in contest, excellence in single combat, excellence in reckoning, excellence in speech, excellence in counsel, excellence in bearing, excellence in laying waste and in plundering from the neighboring border…
I imagine he was the envy of his high-school class, and probably was featured on the majority of the More >
Quick ColdFusion Goodness: Case-Sensitive Column Name List
Nov 5th
Ok, so I should be working on my novel right now, but I thought I’d share a quick ColdFusion tip (not original with me).
Imagine that you want to use the column names from your query to populate the header row in an Excel file. If you use myquery.columnlist, you’ll get the list of column names, but they’ll be in alphabetical order…and in all caps.
An easy way around this is–surprise, surprise–to tap into some of the Java beneath the query object. The following will get you the column list as an array, in the proper order, and respect the column name casing:
columns = myquery.getMeta().getcolumnlabels()
Ok, back to the book! 🙂
Share this: NaNoWriMo: First 350 Words (or so)
Nov 5th
Ok, tonight was my first foray into my NaNoWriMo entry. I spent an hour and a half, and about half of it was spent looking up words, figuring out names for some of my characters, and finding a synonym for “candle.”
Anyway, I managed to eek out 350 words or so. In the scope of 50,000, it’s a drop in the bucket (probably less than that, actually). However, I did enjoy the 350 words I created, and the process of sitting down and writing has generated a lot of ideas for tomorrow’s efforts. I’m making notes, and getting excited for what this will shape up to be!
My entry is entitled “The Book of the Universe.” That’s all I’m going to disclose regarding the entry itself, but here are the first 350 words. Enjoy 🙂
Chapter 1: Ancient of Days
The light from the lone candle cast long and warm shadows over the sparse, wearing-down inhabitants of the study. It was not a study in the fashion of other studies; were it not for the small, weary writing desk and the cracked wooden stool, the room could scarcely have been distinguished from an abandoned closet. In such a condition, then, it is quite understandable that the More >
Taking a Break for NanoWriMo
Nov 3rd
I’m pretty proud of myself: over the last 3 months, I have become much more consistent about blogging (nearly daily), and I’ve also started reading regularly again. Part of this is due to my schedule slowing down a bit, and some of it is thanks to some better decision-making on my part.
To celebrate–and hopefully extend–this run of success, I’m actually going to be taking a bit of a furlough from the blog, or at least my normal posts about ColdFusion and theology. Through the end of November, I’m going to be participating in National Novel Writing Month.
National Novel Writing Month (or NanoWriMo as it’s affectionately called) is a simple challenge to the world to write a 50,000 word novel…in 30 days. While it seems like a ridiculously compressed time frame, I think it’s an intriguing idea, because it forces ideas to be put down on paper while leaving less room for the procrastination-breeding eye of the perfectionist. 50,000 words don’t come easy, so every second counts!
So anyway, I’m going to give it a shot. This is my first year to try, so I’m not sure what to expect. However, I think it will be a good experience whatever the outcome, and More >
CFSpreadsheet Custom Colors: Part Deux
Nov 3rd
In another post on using custom colors in CFSpreadsheet, I think I might have given the wrong impression that using custom colors REQUIRES that you abandon the CF-native spreadsheet functions. This is not true, of course–my intention was to show how adding custom colors IN ADDITION to the default palette will push you into the direction of POI and away from the CF methods.
However, if you really don’t care about using the default palette, you can have the best of both worlds: custom colors in conjunction with CF spreadsheet methods.
To not belabor the point, here’s the full code:
// create new workbook
excel = spreadsheetnew("My Worksheet",false);
// get reference to object containing color-related methods
palette = excel.getworkbook().getcustompalette();
// light blue color
lb = {
r = javacast("int",240).bytevalue(),
g = javacast("int",248).bytevalue(),
b = javacast("int",255).bytevalue()};
// using index 48 to overwrite HSSFColor.LIGHT_BLUE
palette.setcoloratindex(48,lb.r,lb.g,lb.b);
// now that we have a custom color that has overwritten one of the POI constants (LIGHT_BLUE),
// we can use "LIGHT_BLUE" with CF methods and it will understand what we're talking about
// specify format object for "odd" rows
format = {};
format.fgcolor="light_blue";
format.topborder="thin";
format.topbordercolor="grey_40_percent";
format.bottomborder="thin";
format.bottombordercolor="grey_40_percent";
format.leftborder="thin";
format.leftbordercolor="grey_40_percent";
format.rightborder="thin";
format.rightbordercolor="grey_40_percent";
// apply style formatting to row
spreadsheetformatrows(excel,format,1);
As you can More >
CFSpreadsheet Custom Colors (and more)
Nov 1st
In my last post on CFSpreadsheet, I showed how you can easily create a custom row striping mechanism for your Excel data. The one downside of the approach I outlined, however, is that it relied on the limited number of functions that CF exposes from POI, the Java magic that makes CFSpreadsheet work.
While the OOTB method is all well and good, there are a number of limitations. One of the most severe is the limited number of colors that are available to use in spreadsheet styles. There are a couple of dozen “named” colors that can be used, but that’s it: tough luck if you want 3 light shades of grey 😉
However, like most things in ColdFusion, you don’t necessarily have to limit yourself to what is available through CF’s tags and methods. Rather, you can tap into the Java goodness underlying it, and modify, modify, modify to your heart’s content…including creating custom colors for CFSpreadsheet styles!
Creating a ColorFirst, let’s set up our workbook:
// create new workbook
excel = spreadsheetnew("My Worksheet",false);
// get underlying java methods goodness
workbook= excel.getworkbook();
As before, we create a new spreadsheet with spreadsheetnew(). However, immediately following this, we invoke the getworkbook() method.
Now I don’t want More >
