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October 2008

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Sleepy Groovy

By barneyb on October 27, 2008

I just finished whipping up a quick little expense tracking app for Heather and me, and I'm again amazed at how wonderful the development experience is with FB3Lite, ColdSpring, and CFGroovy (Groovy and Hibernate for CFML).  When I was finished with the core functionality, I couldn't figure out where the app was.  There were my [...]

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The FlexChart Manifesto

By barneyb on October 22, 2008

The current state of web applications is a fragmented mess.  HTML is still the standard approach, but dynamic data loading with Ajax and application embedding with Flash are both incredibly popular, particularly for data-heavy applications.
HTML is great because it's easy to build and well understood by user agents, but you lack drawing capabilities.  SVG addressed [...]

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FlexChart 2.0

By barneyb on October 20, 2008

I've released FlexChart 2.0 today.  Binary download is available here: flexchart_2-0-r4392.zip.  The demo app is still available, of course.  Backwards compatibility is not quite 100%, as I'll explain below, but the non-compatibilities only affect certain classes of charts, and they're the complex ones.  For simple stuff it should be drop-and-go.
There are no real outward changes [...]

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Java SE 1.6.0_10

By barneyb on October 16, 2008

Just did the 1.6.0_10 upgrade on my server.  Oh how I love Linux.  Just unarchved the new JDK, repointed a single symlink and restarted my Java servers.  There didn't seem to be a significant difference in spinup time for my ColdSpring AOP-heavy apps – perhaps a touch faster.  No problems with Magnolia either as near [...]

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"Missing Huffman code" Error Using ImageWrite()

By barneyb on October 13, 2008

I've been having troubles with thumbnail generation on one of my apps recently.  Just sporadically, with no obvious pattern as to why.  The error is about a missing Huffman code (used for JPEG compression).  Turns out that certain images when being written at certain sizes, throw this error when you use the built-in imageWrite().
The solution [...]

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Chrome and Google Spreadsheets

By barneyb on October 10, 2008

I use Google Spreadsheets for a few things (and other doc types for a few others), but I usually do hard-core editing in Excel.  Export from the web, edit in Excel (or more likely Calc), reimport into Docs.  Hardly elegant, but when I'm going to be cranking a workbook for two or three hours it's [...]

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More FlexChart Stuff

By barneyb on October 9, 2008

I've made another minor enhancement to FlexChart, this time around grouped legends.  Previously, if you mixed grouped series and ungrouped series (e.g. a stacked column chart with a line series overlaid), the legend would be all kinds of wonky for the line series.  I've fixed that so it'll now render in a reasonable way.
As always, [...]

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CFGroovy Demo App Update

By barneyb on October 8, 2008

A couple users complained that my CF Groovy demo app doesn't work on MS SQL Server because Hibernate doesn't escape the table names it creates, and "user" is a reserved word.  Since I do all my work on MySQL, I never saw the issue.
I've updated the code to use an @Table annotation to specify an [...]

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Backgrounder FTW

By barneyb on October 3, 2008

The iPhone has a number of problems, but the inability to background applications is one that just got fixed.  There's a new app on Cydia for backgrounding an arbitrary application, called surprisingly enough, Backgrounder.  It adds a couple behaviours to your home button for backgrounding, as well as supporting the ability configure apps to always [...]

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