Posted on Fri. February 25, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Entries for February 2005
This blog post/article is dedicated to rudy on sitepoint.com. Rudy is a sql guru and says he is a coldfusion novice. Yet he does have a great handle on computer languages and how they work. He has mentioned several times that he doesn't see the need for coldfusion components, mostly because he doesn't understand them. And he has yet to have anyone explain to them in a way that doesnt use the words "object", "method", or "instantiation". So thats what I am going to do with this article.
continue reading...
Now I have used and enjoyed Open Office before, but I never really have considered Star Office. But this link to the Star Office 8 beta looks somewhat promising. It looks a lot like microsoft word, you can open edit and save as microsoft word documents, and all documents are saved in an xml format, which seems to consume my thoughts nowadays. Another look might be in order. Oh and I forgot to mention, like open office, its free.
Posted on Fri. February 25, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Just so you know, Firefox 1.0.1 is now available for download.
The release notes, found here, tell us whats new in this release:
Here's what's new in Firefox 1.0.1:
* Improved stability
* International Domain Names are now displayed as punycode. (To show International Domain Names in Unicode, set the "network.IDN_show_punycode" preference to false.)
* Several security fixes.
For more information about what security fixes, use the link above. And just as an aside, im probably not going to upgrade imediately to this one, my laptop has been acting up lately so I don't want to put it under too much stress, and it will be a shame to have all my extensions disabled untill the authors get around to it, so ill probably wait for the next one.
Posted on Fri. February 25, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Confessions of a
New Coffee Drinker. Very very funny. Never tried coffee? Nows the time to start the habit.
Posted on Wed. February 23, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Trying to get your employer or even clients to buy into the new cfmx 7? this article on communitymx can help. its a great overview and really explains a lot. I hope to be able to upgrade very soon.
Posted on Wed. February 23, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
I read this entry on talkingtree.com the other day and decided to try it this morning. Styling your rss is very cool, very nice, and makes it much easier to read, yet doesnt take away from the programs that need to parse it. very cool entry, and now when you click on short or long on the side with my rss feeds, youll see a very nice styled page. Thanks Steven Erat.
Posted on Wed. February 23, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Looking for ideas in making a favicon? Check out this link:
http://www.deltatangobravo.com/archives/2004/march/favourite
Posted on Mon. February 21, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
If anyone ever tries to do a CREATE TABLE sql script with MSAccess, you might find this link of intrest.
http://lists.evolt.org/archive/Week-of-Mon-20040105/153585.html
I didn't think it was possible.
Posted on Sun. February 20, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Guide to writing more effective emails.
Ryan Guill
February 20, 2005
Sources:
Renee Montagne
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4490997
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
http://www.webfoot.com/advice/email.context.html?Email
Introduction:
In todays world it becomes quite easy to get caught up in a storm of emails. With all the advertisements, spam, and actual email you want to read coming from you from all directions, its easy to spend the majority of your time just typing and hitting send. But there are many things you can do to help to ease the load, and this paper outlines a few of them. Most are just shortcuts, things that will make it easier to glance and see exactly what you need to.
continue reading...
Posted on Sun. February 20, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Those are my phonetic initials. Although hard to read, I found a great resource for phonetic alphabets, http://www.columbia.edu/~fuat/cuarc/phonetic.html.
I didn't realize that there are so many different variations though.
Posted on Sun. February 20, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
I've been putting off posting about this guy for a while, just cause I wanted to be able to say it all. But I don't think its possible. Just check out Dearmitt.com fully. Check out his blog, troyscripts definately, and all the "what I'm" series. Theres a bunch of good stuff there.
Posted on Sat. February 19, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
I consider myself very lucky to have found this little jewel of software called slide show pro. Its a flash component for a slide show that is just amazing. And a steal at only $20 bucks. I spent yesterday making a backend for it on my website, and now you can see the finished effects here at www.ryanguill.com/slideshow/. Its awesome, I love it, thank you slide show pro. I know I will have many many clients that are going to love it. I've got some nature photos and some pictures I took in Washington D.C. up so far, I'll add more as time goes on and try to keep you updated here.
Posted on Sat. February 19, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
I know of a few people trying to learn html, css and xhtml. So I thought I would put together some links I knew of and a friend of mine gave me some more. I know there are many more out there, so if you know of some that should be added to the list, let me know.
- The starting point for all things web, the w3c.org.
- A great resource, the w3c schools tutorials
- An alphabetical list of all css properties
- A special charachters reference
- ten css tricks you may not know from evolt.org
- some more css goodness
- a necessary read for all web developers, daily
- Position is everything
- some very good tutorials from forty internet
- some very good visual tutorials
Posted on Sat. February 19, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
What am I talking about, Im always speaking of google. Anyway, did you know that Time Warner owns Google? Well not exactly. But as JD on MX pointed out, they own quite a bit of googles stock. Interesting.
Posted on Sat. February 19, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Could it be phone service from google? This looks mighty convincing.
Posted on Sat. February 19, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
I'm not sure, but I think I heard about this from Joel on Software a while back. Anyway, did you know that most of a jpeg's filesize is unecessary information about the picture? Well PureJPEG is here to help. From their website:
"PureJPEG is an easy to use, high performance utility to remove unnecessary data from images you email or post on the net, without affecting the image quality whatsoever (no decompression/recompression is performed in the filtration), removing such extraneous information as:
* Digital camera technical data (EXIF)
* Comment blocks
* JPEG thumbnails
* Application blocks
While you should never use this application on your personal image archive (where this information may actually serve a purpose in some scenarios), it is generally worthwhile to purify JPEG files when sharing images, or when posting images online."
Posted on Sat. February 19, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
If you're like me, you check the weather websites like weather.com from the weather channel or my preference AccuWeather pretty often. There are many more out there too. But do you know where they get their information? For the most part they get it here, the national weather service database xml/soap service. The cool thing is, its available to anyone and everyone. Webdevelopers, heres your chance to either provide another service on your websites, or maybe make a site to compete with the big boys.
Posted on Sat. February 19, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
If you can't tell already, im cleaning out my "to blog" folder this afternoon. Some of these items are a little old news, so forgive me for that, but hey, if you haven't read them yet, they're new to you!
As msnbc.com reports file sharing doesn't hurt most artists. Surprise, surprise.
Posted on Sat. February 19, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Are you a drunk dialer? If so too bad you don't live in austrailia (im assuming the majority of people who read this blog don't live in austrailia). As reported a long time ago on Flash Ape...
"If you live an Australia, Virgin Mobile now offers help. You can choose to blacklist numbers you dont want to call by dialing 333 plus the number...it will block calls to that number from your cell until 6 a.m. the following day."
I know some guys who could use this...
Posted on Sat. February 19, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
I found this blog of m. moreno a while back and just forgot to mention it. Its pretty cool, it mentions this site called gravity shots that takes pictures of terrain from the air with rc planes and helicopters. Really cool stuff, definately worth a look. Also worth mentioning that the site is built with coldfusion and fusebox.
Posted on Sat. February 19, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Bored on a Friday Night? Try google fight. The more results for a term, thats who wins. Great idea, and actually kind of informative.
Posted on Fri. February 18, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
I had to do some work with cfdirectory today, and I found that the documentation is horrible. So just so you know, if you need to do a cfdirectory action="create", all you need is action="create" and directory="", and you must use ExpandPath() inside it. Those are the only two attributes you need. When it comes to deleteing a directory, I just found another reason to switch to cfmx 7, the recurse="true" attribute. Im just not going to use cfdirectory action="delete" on 6.1, its just not worth it.
Funny thing though is that if you go to the 6.1 livedocs for coldfusion, and look through the comments, one of the macromedia guys let it slip that it was coming.
Posted on Fri. February 18, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
If youre like me, you not only love tobasco sauce, you also love thier ads. And if you really are like me, then you will want to check out their website at tabasco.com, which is made with coldfusion I might add. If you missed the superbowl ad, you really need to check it out, especially if you're male, and I love these label ad's as well.
"hot as in don't be surprised if your valentine starts moaning its name. - Original tobasco pepper sauce"
Posted on Thu. February 17, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Did anyone ever see this 1990 movie with the governer of California? I loved it, even with its cheesy graphics and all. It really wasn't bad for 90 actually. Anyway, if you remember, Quade wanted to go to this place that implanted memories into his brain of a vacation. Now stretching the imagination for a minute, is it too hard to believe this would be possible soon, even within our lifetimes? Think about it, you have the memory of a vacation you never took, but its like you did. A perfect vacation or any memory for that matter. Notice I said possible though. It wouldn't ever happen for many reasons. But how cool would that be? Of course we just couldn't allow it because then people could wipe out a memory of comiting a murder or something and overwrite it with something else. But still, a cool idea.
Posted on Wed. February 16, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
I found this cool website called 10x10 / 100 words and pictures that define the time. its pretty cool, gets images from news sites and makes a collage of sorts for the current hour in time. Not too bad. From the same site, I found wordcount that number the top 86800 english language words in order of usage. Look around, its pretty interesting.
Posted on Wed. February 16, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
This just in, the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Movie is being featured on amazon, and looks awesome. B told me about this a while back, about the book and I think im going to have to read it. Looks pretty good, so I can't wait.
Posted on Wed. February 16, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
I'm posting this mainly because I don't want to lose this link. I didn't even realize this was possible, but this is a great effect. Using nothing but css and xhtml. css images maps.
Posted on Thu. February 10, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Personally, I think that this rocks, although I will acknowledge that others do not think so. Too bad.
Posted on Tue. February 08, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
You didn't think I would slip up and not mention the brand new google maps beta did you? Of course not.
Once again, google quality as you have come to expect it. One of the best map apps I've ever seen. Its got its bugs, sure, but that is more than understandable I believe. It is a beta after all.
If youre on the tech side of things you might want to check out this link from simon willison's weblog where he talks about some of the technology that makes maps.google.com possible. Worth a read.
Posted on Tue. February 08, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
It's everywhere these days. Microsoft sucks this, microsoft sucks that. Articles like this one from rob Rohan are all too commonplaced these days. I'm even starting to waver a little i'm afraid. Seriously, if mac can meet with me on a price that I feel is fair I very well may have an i(something) on my desk next go round.
The latest problem: msn messenger is down. again. Seem like they just can't get it right the last few days. The whole point of this post though is to put this link to the .net messenger service status which at the moment, is displaying an error. Dang.
Posted on Tue. February 08, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Well Sean Cornfield thought blue was boring all of the sudden this morning and well, that got me to thinking. I've been wanting to update my blog for a while now so I thought this was as good of a time as any. I've got a couple more tweaks to do but for the most part, welcome to my new blog design. Hope you like it. If you don't, feel free to not drop me a line and tell me about it ;)
Posted on Tue. February 08, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
I just came across Cameron Childress' Blog and noticed an entry about a security flaw in Firefox. Well we all knew this was coming, but seriously, one flaw out of how many from redmond? Oh well, check out Netcraft's article about the flaw, and make sure you click the link of the demonstration that proves the flaw.
It has to do with the way the browsers interpret Unicode and is not a problem for IE. Which is leading all of these IE supporters to go "HA! We did it right this time!!!". Actually, its a feature that IE just doesn't support at all, working or non working. So whatever. I do recomend anyone that reads this blog to make the change in your about:config file. If you don't know how or don't feel comfortable doing so, let me know and I'll either walk you through it or I will do it for you (if i know you and its possible to).
Posted on Mon. February 07, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
If you need something cool to check out, try orisinal.com. This site has been around for quite a while and my sister reminded me of it recently. It has stunning flash graphics and some very strange games, but all of them are very cool, although some are a little, um, sweet. Yeah thats a good way to put that. Anyway, sweet or not, they are very cool so drop on by there. But be warned, I believe the site gets quite a bit of traffic so you may have to be patient, but it is definitely worth the wait.
Posted on Sat. February 05, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Ever heard of one? I had a long time ago and I forgot about it. But then reading this blog today i was quickly reminded.
You can check them out on their website although you wont find a price there. (at least from what I can see). These are supposed to be some of the best chairs available, with ergonomic support, natural tilt and the whole nine yards. They have even done case studies about this chair. Supposed to be the creme' de la creme'. Can anyone find a price for me? I've emailed a dealer here in Memphis, but haven't heard anything back yet.
UPDATE:
The guy who blogged about the chair (mentioned above) told me that he bought his chair here:
the ultimate backstore. price? just a measly 750$!!! and thats for the floor model!! But remember that still comes with a 12 year warranty with in home support. But dang.
Posted on Fri. February 04, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
From the Washington Post:
"Researchers in Boston have isolated a kind of cell from human bone marrow that they say has all the medical potential of human embryonic stem cells -- a claim that, if verified, could shake up the debate over human embryo research that has divided the country for the past six years."
This is serious stuff that really would solve a lot of debate. If you read on through the article it also talks about using many of these bone marrow cells to, if nothing else, heal much heart damage caused by heart disease. And with the heart disease that runs in my family, that is very good news to me indeed.
Posted on Fri. February 04, 2005 by Ryan Guill #
Well I can't find the original news story (if you want to look for it I'm pretty sure it was on msnbc.com or New Scientist) but I read an article recently about how birds brains were rather developed, a whole lot more than previously believed.
And then this morning I was hanging out on fullasagoog and came across a blog entry by Jens Loeffler who linked to one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Whew, how about that run on sentence? Anyway, while you're there and in between "wow"'s then notice that the video is in flash.
Posted on Fri. February 04, 2005 by Ryan Guill #