the singularity of being and nothingness
existdissolve
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Posts by existdissolve
Headin' to Vegas!
Oct 17th
Tomorrow morning, I jump on a flight (fortunately non-stop) for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference [09]. I'll either be not blogging at all, or very regularly…it's tough to tell at these kinds of conferences.
Things I'm hoping to learn:
- This conference will unveil the newest release of SharePoint-I'm interested to see if there have been significant changes over the current version. I've heard that there are some cool new features, but you never really know about this kind of stuff until you see it, especially when early reports come from fanboys
- I've been getting into XAML and Flex a little bit recently, so I'm interested to see what's going on in the world of Silverlight. It's very rarely spoken of in the circles I frequent (the cool ones, of course!), so it will be nice to see what the status of SL development is.
- Now that we're getting close to a more or less stable architecture at work, we'll be getting to place pretty soon where we'll be able to start building on top of SharePoint. Several of the sessions are devoted to UI/Social Networking/Pretty, so hopefully I can come away with some decent/fun/workable ideas.
- Other stuff/how not to get mugged in Las Vegas
While I'm away, More >
It's Really About Us
Oct 15th
This year's Blog Action Day topic is all about climate change. Hardly non-confrontational, right? Depending on who you ask, you can get a variety of opinions about this subject. Some will foam at the mouth, ranting about how humans are killing the planet and that we're all going to freeze to death, or burn up…or both. Others, with equal rabidity, will quixotically assert that climate change is a hoax, foisted upon the minds of the gullible by political forces with nefarious agendas.
Who's right? Well, it's a difficult question. We don't exactly have the right kinds of data from which to make accurate predictions about whatever future the current, apparent trends in climate change might bring. Given that we have not had the opportunity to examine the effects of similar conditions on more or less equivalent celestial masses, all of the prognosticating about doom-and-gloom weather models is really quite tenuous. And on the other side of the frenzy, the sometimes intentional distortion of whatever-limited-research-we-do-have does not help provide meaningful answers. Both approaches are not only naive, but in fact are diametrically opposed to actually getting at what is important regarding the discussion of climate change.
How so?
Let's think about this for a More >
It's Really About Us
Oct 15th
This year's Blog Action Day topic is all about climate change. Hardly non-confrontational, right? Depending on who you ask, you can get a variety of opinions about this subject. Some will foam at the mouth, ranting about how humans are killing the planet and that we're all going to freeze to death, or burn up…or both. Others, with equal rabidity, will quixotically assert that climate change is a hoax, foisted upon the minds of the gullible by political forces with nefarious agendas.
Who's right? Well, it's a difficult question. We don't exactly have the right kinds of data from which to make accurate predictions about whatever future the current, apparent trends in climate change might bring. Given that we have not had the opportunity to examine the effects of similar conditions on more or less equivalent celestial masses, all of the prognosticating about doom-and-gloom weather models is really quite tenuous. And on the other side of the frenzy, the sometimes intentional distortion of whatever-limited-research-we-do-have does not help provide meaningful answers. Both approaches are not only naive, but in fact are diametrically opposed to actually getting at what is important regarding the discussion of climate change.
How so?
Let's think about this for a More >
My First Sitecore Desktop Application
Oct 12th
Over the weekend, I downloaded Sitecore Xpress and spent some time developing a Sitecore Desktop application based on XAML, C# and the Sitecore API. Here's the result:
Interesting XSLT Gotcha
Oct 8th
Today, I got around to trying to tackle some of the XHTML validation errors we've been receiving on our sites at work. One of the peskiest errors was what appeared to be a simple unclosed <img> tag-easy to fix, right? Well, I promptly navigated to the xslt file, opened it up, and quickly found the offending tag.
…
…it was already closed.
…
…hmmm…
Honestly, I couldn't figure out what was going on. Just to make sure, I recopied the most recent, seemingly correct version.
No change.
I went back to the file, made ABSOLUTELY sure that the tag was closed and that there were no weird quotes floating around.
No change.
By now, I was desperate. I even started commenting out random bits of code around the <img> tag until I was POSITIVE that nothing else was causing this issue.
No change.
Blurg.
Well, it turns out the fix is pretty easy, and it all has to do with the "method" attribute of the <xsl:output> directive. On my xslt file (which I did not create, BTW), the method was set to "HTML" like so:
<xsl:output method="HTML" …./>
For whatever reason, this method of output can do funky things like remove the self-closing parts of tags. Dumb.
Anyway, I simply switched the More >
Just Installed Sitecore Xpress
Oct 8th
At my day job, we use Sitecore as our enterprise-level Content Management System. We are currently running 9 (or so) sites through it, although we'll have nearly 20 installed by the end of Spring 2010.
I like Sitecore quite a bit, so when I found out that they offer a free, downloadable personal developer version of Sitecore 6 (the newest release), I just had to get it! Sure, it's a stripped down version…but it still appears to have a TON of functionality, so whatever.
The install itself takes only about 15 minutes and is smooth and easy. Even with a non-supported version of Vista like I have (Home Professional), the install runs without a hitch. I even had time to add a custom background image to my Sitecore desktop!
Anyway, if you use Sitecore or are interested in seeing what it's all about, grab the download. At the very least, your experience installing it will be positive
Download Sitecore Xpress
St. John of the Cross: The Danger of Experiential Worship
Oct 5th
I'm currently reading through St. John of the Cross' "The Dark Night of the Soul." In this short book, the 16th century mystic expounds upon his "Songs" which deal with the "dark night of the soul," the period of purgation through which all followers of Christ must come in order to be perfected and united completely in love and purpose with the Divine.
The Songs itself is quite short-only a few stanzas. However, St. John devotes several pages to expounding the meaning of the verses. In his introduction to the concept of the "dark night of the soul," St. John describes some of common barriers that hinder believers from true knowledge of God and precipitate the need for the grand purgation. Two of these hindrances are spiritual voluptuousness and spiritual gluttony…or simplified, the danger of experiential worship.
To John, the con-mingling of the spiritual and physical experience of worship is wholly positive: to be united with God is not just an act of mystical ecstasy, but is rather a way of being that intersects the whole of one's life with that of the divine. The danger of experiential worship, however, arises when the experience of worship-and not God-becomes the thing for which More >
The Discipline of Giving
Sep 14th
(Thanks to Kevin for the inspiration!)
This Sunday's message was about money. Yep, pretty exhilarating, right? I mean, who doesn't LOVE to sit through half-an-hour-or-so of hearing someone speak at you about how you should give more, how giving money is an act of worship, how you really will be blessed-in-spite-of-the-recession…blah-blah-blah, right?
We've all sat through these messages before. We've all heard how only 3% of Americans Biblically tithe 10% of their income, and of course that means that you, me, and the person sitting in front of us are not in the holy 3%. But we should be thanked nonetheless, right? After all, without the 97% of us backslidden, God-hating heathens, pastors wouldn't have such wonderfully shocking statistics. That counts as some form of giving, right?
In all seriousness, growing up in the church I've sat through an unbearable number of messages about money. I've heard pastors rail against congregations for not giving enough; I've heard others try to coax money out of their parishioners on the promise of God formulaicly responding to their act of generosity and sacrifice; and I've even seen people intimidated out of their money by, let's say, overly enthusiastic ministers trying to mold their listeners into the More >
CFSharePoint: Copy Items from One Folder to Another
Sep 12th
In a previous post, I wrote about watching out for data type mismatches when using the CFSharePoint tag. While this is all well and good, much of my post was based on a misconception of how an "inout parameter" works. While I can't claim great knowledge of this, I think I have a better understanding.
From what I understand, an inout parameter expects a specifically named parameter-let's say "Result"-to be passed in. When you pass this parameter to the web service, the value, or "out", should be the variable that you want returned. So if I want the "results" parameter to return its value as "finalResults", you could do something like:results="finalResults"
In the last post, I was under the impression that the initial value of "results" HAD to be a ColdFusion data type, like a structure or array. This is not correct. Sure, I can pass in the appropriate data type with the "results" parameter; however, whatever structure I pass in will overwrite the "out". This is why if you run the example I provided in the last post, copying an "About.doc" file from one folder to another will really just create a new "About.doc" with the value of the binary object More >
