XML standards - personal suggestions

• September 3, 2010
• James Skemp

As I prepare to create another XML data file, I started looking at the standards I use to create XML files, and what the recommendations are. Elements In the past I've used camel case, but on a recent file used Pascal case instead. I think this was more becauase I've started to using Pascal case for public items (variables), and camel case for private items, as that's fairly standard in development.

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Tic-Tac-Toe using Pascal

• July 24, 2010
• James Skemp

The following is a really old program (November 2003) written in Pacal using Bloodshed Dev-Pascal (which seems to no longer be updated). This is the code in main.pas, which it seems is the only file really necessary. This code is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license. program TicTacToe (input, output); label begingame, picknumber, checkmove, checkforwin, compmove, winner, nobodywon, playagain, illegalmove, compcrash, endgame; var playmove, turn, points : integer; place1, place2, place3, place4, place5, place6, place7, place8, place9 : char; currentplayer, ynagain, lastwinner : char; begin writeln; writeln('JRSs Tic-Tac-Toe v1.

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Dead? The digital download is barely out of its teens

• May 22, 2010
• James Skemp

Yesterday Slate posted an article by Farhad Manjoo titled The Digital Download Is Dead: How Google's music-streaming venture will change the gadget and entertainment worlds forever. After first, rightly, attacking Apple's iTunes and iPod (and related) platforms as being slow and unwieldy, especially on the predominate operating system Windows (not even mentioning Linux), and overall behind on the times, Farhad moves us from syncing our music collections out to the cloud.

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Netflix on the Wii - my experience

• May 13, 2010
• James Skemp

After receiving my instant streaming disc for the Wii a long while back, I finally popped it in my Wii and gave it a try. For this experiment I watched three episodes of 30 Rock: Season 1. I wasn't expecting much for quality, and each episode isn't very long, so I thought I was giving the Wii a very good chance. Overall, I was extremely impressed in the entire experience, and definitely think Nintendo's own video channels can learn a lot.

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Web Application Development Guidelines

• February 27, 2010
• James Skemp

While Web application development is just as complex as other application development, if not more so, it's fairly difficult to find information on best practices while doing Web development. In order to move towards implementation of Subversion, I needed to write up documentation on how we'd use it. After a couple drafts, which I ended up scrapping almost completely, I came up with the below. In the interest of sharing, I've included the full document below, after removing the few instances where I had to specify a non-Subversion application (our help desk application).

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Two simple ColdFusion calendar outputs

• October 26, 2009
• James Skemp

Here's two rough drafts of calendars created via ColdFusion (7, but I believe 6.1 would have the same functionality). Tables-based <cfparam name="URL.CalendarMonth" default="#Month(now())#" type="integer" /> <cfparam name="URL.CalendarYear" default="#Year(now())#" type="integer" /> <cfif URL.CalendarMonth LT 1 OR URL.CalendarMonth GT 12> <cfset URL.CalendarMonth = Month(now()) /> </cfif> <cfset VARIABLES.Calendar.StartDate = CreateDate(URL.CalendarYear, URL.CalendarMonth, 1) /> <table style=“width:375px;” summary=“Calendar of events for <cfoutput>#DateFormat(VARIABLES.Calendar.StartDate, ‘mmmm yyyy’)#</cfoutput>."> <thead> <tr> <th colspan=“7”><cfoutput>#DateFormat(VARIABLES.Calendar.StartDate, “mmmm yyyy”)#</cfoutput></th> </tr> <tr> <th>S</th> <th>M</th> <th>T</th> <th>W</th> <th>Th</th> <th>F</th> <th>S</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <cfloop from=“1” to="#DaysInMonth(VARIABLES.

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Linda Hamilton - 80s or 90s?

• October 14, 2009
• James Skemp

Previously posted on Facebook: 80's Linda Hamilton; sure, she did T2 in the 90s, but I bet if you think Linda Hamilton, you think 80s. Am I wrong? Rob Lumley brings up Terminator 2 as being his reason he'd go with 90s Hamilton. I'd agree with you on the Terminator franchise, but, obviously, not with Hamilton being better in the 90s solely because of T2. Look at IMDb - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000157/

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Applications I have to install on my core development machine

• October 9, 2009
• James Skemp

Here's a listing of applications, as I run into them, that need to be installed on my core development machine. TortoiseSVN iTunes Oxygen Xml Editor Visual Studio CollabNet Subversion FileZilla FTP client Sun VirtualBox Serious Samurize 7-Zip Amazon MP3 Downloader Why bother creating this list? Because at the moment I've just upgraded to Windows 7 and need to reinstall my programs. Above is the order I did it. Notepad On every computer I touch for more than 15 minutes, I always add Notepad to the Send to menu.

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Solved: Upgrading to Windows 7 on an HP a6360t with a second hard drive

• October 9, 2009
• James Skemp

I purchased an HP Pavilion a6360t with Windows Vista Home Premium and later upgraded it (due to a conference) for free to Windows Vista Ultimate, and then added a second hard drive. What would happen when I upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium? Could I use the 64-bit version? The answer to these questions is, due to testing, below: Windows 7 Upgrading, doing a custom/clean install on my primary drive required approximately 38 minutes.

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ColdFusion: cfscript to determine if variable exists and output html-escaped

• October 8, 2009
• James Skemp

There may be an easier way to do this in ColdFusion, but I finally created a function to determine whether a variable exists and if it does, returns in, all html-escaped. <cfscript> // Checks the passed CF variable to see if it exists, and if it does, outputs a trimmed and html-ready version of the value. function checkForValueOutput(data) { if (IsDefined(data)) { return HtmlEditFormat(Trim(Evaluate(data))); } else { return ""; } } </cfscript> (Obviously, this can rather easily be converted to a function.

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