the singularity of being and nothingness
existdissolve
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Posts by existdissolve
Quick Post: blogactionday.org Reminder
Oct 9th
Just a quick reminder: blogactionday (October 15) is approaching rapidly-next Monday! This is a day where bloggers are encouraged to devote a posting to the environment, regardless of their views of the multifarious issues surrounding this topic.
existdissolve.com is signed up for it, and I would encourage fellow bloggers to do the same. It only takes a second, and you can do it at blogactionday.org .
Finally, as a bit of mild entertainment, blogactionday.org has released a "What Kind of Blogger are You?" test. I took the test and am apparently an "undiscovered young upstart purist." Hmmm…Anyway, if it sounds interesting, take the test here . If you do, let me know in the comments how you fared…
Application Framework Infidelity
Oct 7th
On the whole, I tend to be fairly loyal in media technologies. I do what I can to support Adobe -I use ColdFusion, the Adobe Creative Suite , and I have even blogged several posts about Adobe's cool javascript framework, Spry . However, sometimes loyalty doesn't cut it. Every once and a while one will run across a problem that requires a certain solution, and said solution cannot be had in such a way that loyalty can be maintained.
Such happened to me recently. I have been developing an application at work that will be using a drag-and-drop feature. Being the loyal Adobe fan that I am, I went immediately to Adobe's Spry framework to search out an answer. Unfortunately, Spry does not currently include drag-and-drop functionality. As an aside, this is not something accidental. I found a thread from a few months back (Spry 1.5 era) in which this functionality was requested. The powers-that-be responded that they did not see enough use cases in which this kind of functionality would be needed. Although the thread participants presented a good number of suggested use-cases, Spry 1.6 is conspicuously missing this functionality.
So…what do you do when your go-to framework doesn't have what you need? You cheat More >
CD Review - Emery's "I'm Only a Man"
Oct 4th
Within the last six months, my little brother has introduced me to some seriously cool music. One of my favorite bands from this "education" is Emery, a hard-hitting "screamo" band hailing from the Tooth and Nail label. Instantaly I fell in love with their unique, emotive style and have practically memorized their first two full-length albums.
A few days ago, I heard rumors from my brother that a new album was imminently forthcoming from the band, a fact subsequently substantiated by the release of "I'm Only a Man" on Monday. Going into this album, I had high expectations and even greater anxiety. It is also nerve-wracking to go into a new album, not knowing whether or not it will engender a significant move forward for the band or an equally, but more devasting and disappointing mistake.
Undaunted, I loaded Napster at work and pressed "play" (I love Napster, BTW). I listened without pause through all the tracks, listening intently for indications of how the newest project would impress itself upon my musical conscience. After the first run-through, I admit I was a bit disappointed. To begin, this album is a lot more subdued on the "scream" part of the "screamo". While More >
A Little Taste of Spry 1.6 Goodness
Oct 3rd
A few days I blogged about Adobe's release (and sexy-fication) of the javascript framework Spry 1.6. While I have not had a lot of time to play around with the absolutely unique elements, some cool additions are the improvements they made to the password verification and confirmation widgets. With the root password widget, the developer can create a pretty robust set of validation rules for user-entered passwords, such as setting minimum and maximum lengths, required special characters/numbers, etc. The best part is that the Spry framework makes these validations incredibly easy to implement on a normal HTML form. For example, here is an example password field I have created:
<span id="passwordValidation"> <input type="password" name="password" id="password" /> <span class="passwordRequiredMsg">Please enter a password.</span> <span class="passwordMinCharsMsg">Your password must be at least 7 characters long.</span> <span class="passwordInvalidStrengthMsg">Your password must contain at least 1 number.</span></span>
That's it. Basically, the entire password widget is a span wrap on the password field. Within this, special validation messages can be defined. On this example, I have set an error message for "required," "minimum characters" and "password strength".
On the function side, the following is all that is required to fully validate this field:
var password = More >
Peacocke Tuesday - Randomness and Causality
Oct 2nd
Over the last week, I have rolled through several chapters of Peacocke's book, "Theology for a Scientific Age," and I will not spend time going over the finer details of each discussion. I simply wish to note one of the issues that stood out most to me.
In a sort of continuous investigation, Peacocke looks at the nature of causality and its relation to the universe in which we live. Until the last century, it was generally assumed that causality was a one-way street, a sort of "top-down" movement with determinable and predicatable outcomes. What recent inquiry has revealed, especially in relation to quantum physics, however, is that causality is infinitely more complex than the old assumptions would leave one to believe. Because of the interconnectedness of the universe, the precise nexus of the "cause" of an "effect" becomes increasingly blurred as the lines between a "something" as cause and the same "something" as effect converge more closely upon one another.
So what does this mean? Far and away from the classic models of the universe which assumed that absolutely predicatability of naturalistic processes could be gained by a sufficient amount of data, this understanding of the interrelatedness of causality reveals More >
A New Day, A New Spry
Oct 1st
Recently, I have blogged about how incredibly cool Adobe's javascript framework—Spry—is and what potential it has for making great dynamic web content. In those posts, I was talking about Spry pre-release version 1.5. Up until 1.4, it would not seem that Adobe was too terribly interested in marketing Spry. After all, there had not been even a logo created for the project, and the online documentation and samples was incredibly difficult to navigate. With 1.4, Adobe made the smart move of bundling Spry into Dreamweaver CS3, with native Dreamweaver support for Spry tags and functions, a major benefit for noobs like me getting their feet wet with a javascript framework.
However, about a month after the release of Dreamweaver CS3, the Spry team released 1.5. It included some seriously cool updates on all fronts-data, widgets and effects. But for whatever reason, they did not release a Dreamweaver updater. This means that to use 1.5, the user had to download it and replace the bundled 1.4 files with the new version. While not a huge deal, it is not particularly helpful for Dreamweaver support of the new features as they were not included in the original release. As a plus, a More >
A New Communion Experience
Sep 26th
Growing up in the Wesleyan Church, I've not had tremendously moving experiences with the celebration of communion. In the Wesleyan Church-as in many others-communion is served (by Discipline requirements) once a quarter. The logic of this, I suppose, is to avoid the celebration of communion becoming a dead, lifeless ritual that is performed every week simply because "that is what we do" (makes you wonder about worship music and preaching, if routinization is the criterion for "lifeless ritual"…). My experience has been pretty standard: the pastor rises, speaks a few words (perhaps from the Discipline) concerning the supper, and then ushers distribute the elements to the parishoners. Generally, this happens at the immediate end of the service, and the rush is on to get the elements to everyone, imbibe them, and get everyone on the road.
While I have grown accustomed to this "routine" (funny how that happens anyway…), I have not been seriously impacted by the actual ritual on very many occasions. In my own critique, I think the lack of impact stems mainly from the fact that the practice of communion-though done in a corporate setting-is mostly structured to be an individual response to God's grace in Christ. I More >
CD Review - Rascal Flatt's "Still Feels Good"
Sep 26th
Since their self-titled debut in 2000, Rascal Flatts has consistently and with ever-growing force become a presence within the country-pop crossover music scene to be reckoned with. Boasting such awards as two-time CMT Vocal Group of the Year, CMT Group/Duo of the Year, and an Emmy for the unforgettable phenomenon of “Bless the Broken Road,” this trio continues to assert itself on the charts and in the musical consciousness of America.
If gross reductionism will be forgiven, the success of Rascal Flatts is incontrovertibly linked to front man Gary LeVox’s enthralling and ever-soaring tenor vocals. While the band’s songs show all too infrequent flashes of artistic innovation, the sheer force, intensity and beauty of LeVox’s performances—both live and recorded—rescue and imbue with vigor songs that would otherwise be resigned to the purgatory of the “country formulae.”
In their newest release, Still Feels Good, this unfortunate tension between overall unimaginative songwriting and LeVox’s breathtaking performance virtuosity is thankfully and significantly more subdued than in their previous release, Me and My Gang. This time around, the band jettisons nearly every remnant of hardcore country that may have clung on in their transition to the world of crossover. While the steel guitars, mandolins and fiddles More >
CD Review - Pat Monahan's "Last of Seven"
Sep 19th
If you've listened to the radio in the last 10 years, you know about Train. With mega hits such as the frantically original "Meet Virginia", the year-long chart-occupying "Drops of Jupiter" and the funky feel-good anthem "Get to Me," Train has made an indelible and enduring mark on popular music. While every album is ultimately a band effort, it cannot be denied that the band’s success is intrinsically rooted in the compelling originality of frontman Pat Monahan's voice.
Yesterday, Monahan released his first solo album, Last of Seven. Lest the listener fear that this is yet another failed attempt of a successful lead vocalist to fly alone, Last of Seven merges the very best of Train's sound with a clear attempt to explore the range and styling of Monahan's voice.
Musically, Monahan does not depart dramatically from the genre in which Train is firmly entrenched. While a few songs attempt a significant deviation (like the gospel-inspired "Raise Your Hands" and the dirty-blues infused duet "Pirate on the Run"), the vast majority pursue the same Southern countrified moods of Train's earlier work.
Despite the musical unoriginality, Monahan's vocals are as good as ever. Whether bellowing the soaring choruses of "Two Ways to More >
Webservices in ColdFusion
Sep 18th
Today, for work, my boss asked for me to create a bit of functionality that would allow users to return lists of people from a database who live within [x] miles of an entered zip code. I've never created something like this before, but I've been around long enough to know that this kind of functionality requires gigantic databases of zip codes, trigonometric calculations, etc. simply to return the distance between two zip codes.
Fortunately, others have created such things and have kindly sydicated them as webservices. Webservices are very simple-they are a collection of functions that are remotely accessible to developers. So, if you want to create a search for Amazon books on your website, you hook up to Amazon's book-syndication service, call the appropriate method (like "getBooks()" or something) and use whichever programming language you is using to parse out the information in a usable fashion. Here's the one I'm using:
http://webservices.imacination.com/distance/Distance.jws?wsdl
ColdFusion makes stuff like this ridiculously easy within its "cfinvoke" tag. In about 4 lines of code, you call the method, pass in the method's require arguments, and create a variable for usage later on.
<cfinvoke webservice="http://webservices.imacination.com/distance/Distance.jws?wsdl" method="getDistance" returnvariable="distance">The zip code webservice required two arguments, "fromZip" and More >
