Well, I now have proof people read my blog!

A couple of days ago I found out that some added some of my PaperVision3D experiments to a RSS feed of demos!

Check it out here: http://davr.org/rss/pv3d.php. Thanks for including me David!

On the ColdFusion front, I got a mention in the World Famous (in CF land) ColdFusion Weekly Pod cast for my blog entry on Answering evaluate()'s cry for help. The trick I outlined in the entry was taught to me by a senior developer a few years ago when I was in my "<cfscript> for everything!" period.

Thank you Matt and Peter for the mention and the plug for being a presenter at Cfug. And keep up the good work guys on the pod cast!

If you are keen to present to us, email me @ djohnsmarie@gmail.com :-)

...I feel famous...

Check this out.

A bit more fun with a Carousel.

What I have done is added multiple carousels (9 in fact) with different number of pictures and radius settings.

The effect is quite fun!

'ave a look:

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If you are new to ColdFusion, check out Ray Camden's Contest.

Any "Newbie" CFer with in earshot (and IMshot) of me has been informed about it (and no Ray, I'm not helping them much)

So if you are a New Zealand Newbie CFer, or know one, let them know about this contest!

(I think it'll be kool if a NZer won it!)

Following up from the first New Zealand Flex user group, here are a few links of interest:

The Recording:

- https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a200985228/p80799088/

Andrew Spaulding's part recorded fine, but the second half not so well, due to technical problems.

couple of blog entries from our hosts:

- http://blog.getoutsmart.com/archives/2007/04/20/from-web20-to-web3d/

- http://labs.getoutsmart.com/archives/2007/04/19/new-flex-based-3d-rendering-platform/

Enjoy!

Ok, I admit it, this is more for fun than anything...

I am working towards a finished idea, but this is a small step towards it...

Hope you like it!

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I've been running the Auckland CFUG for a couple of years now.

The last few months I have been broadcasting the events via software formally known as Breeze so that anyone in the country can attend.

At the last few meetings, the virtual attendees have numbered greater than the in-person attendees. We've had members attending from:

- Waiheke Island

- Hamilton

- New Plymouth(all be it for 20 seconds! :-p )

- Wellington

- ChristChurch

- Invercargill

(let me know if I missed you!), which is a much larger reach than just Auckland!

So the re-branding of the Auckland CFUG to the New Zealand CFUG is offically beginning!

International Presenters we have had in the past include:

- Ray Camden

- Mark Drew

- Peter Farrell

Local presenters have included

- Kai Koenig

- Indy Nagpal

- Warrick Hing

- Chris Lambert

- Dave Quested(who has left the land of the long White Cloud for Cork, of all places!)

- Glenn Wright

- Me

(Oh, did I mention, if you come in person there is beer and pizza?)

Coming up I have confirmed other well known international CFer's, as well as various local people (I'm looking at you Christchurch and Wellington!) on my hit list of people to bludgeon into submission ask to talk!

Every meeting is open to everyone! If you are attending from New Zealand, your name will go in to the prize draw on the night to win some kwel Adobe give-aways held at the end of every meeting!

All Levels of CFer's are welcome, from the "What's this CF about then" to "I've been working with CF since version 0.8"

So, if you live in New Zealand, head on over to http://www.cfug.co.nz (yet to be re-branded!) and sign up. We also have a Google Group you can sign up to keep up-to-date with happenings and events!

(Oh, did I mention, if you come in person there is beer and pizza?)

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Straker Interactive for their continued support of the New Zealand ColdFusion User Group in the form of providing this website and a location to hold out meetings.

(Oh, did I mention, if you come in person there is beer and pizza?)

Mark Ireland's blog post is-eval()-a-cry-for-help? caught my interest earlier today.

I don't normally do blog entries on other people blog entries, but this one got me thinking...

In his example he was asking if one code example was better or worse than another.

Times when I start convincing myself that I may need to use the "evaluate" function, I normally take a step back, look at the code and then work out a more elegant way to execute the code.

evaluate in it's self is not the end of the world, but the consistent use of it introduces overhead that can often be avoided. (a quick google search on "ColdFusion evaluate" shows multiple hits on how not to use it)

Peter Bell, an active and respected member of the CF community added this comment:

[quote]

You can *almost* always remove evaluate, but one case I keep running into is this.

I have a generic getter that calls a custom getter if it exists. If needs to call variables.get#PropertyName#().

I have to do:

because variables["get" & PropertyName]() isn't syntactically valid CF for some reason.

[/quote]

Here is one way to not use evaluate in that situation:

The ability in ColdFusion assign functions to values, then call that value is pretty cool. From my limited understanding, that is heading down the "Mixin" track.

You could declare a structure, and get functions from multiple CFCs and assign them to keys in that structure...

...when I start thinking about this, for some reason Frankenstein's CFC pops in to my head ...wonder why?

Just got back in from the first New Zealand Flex User Group meeting.

It was very good.

Campbell fronted the meeting, and Andrew Spaulding showed us how to gererate a PDF from Flex2 using "Life Cycle data services" (service formally known as "Flex Data Services") via Java. Pretty kool He showed off some other CS3 stuff too, how you can go directly from of products in the CS3 directly in to MXML. He told us Fireworks does this, but didn't have time to Demo it (...but I believe him!)

After that the our hosts getoutsmart.com (one of the world's top 3 Flex Shops ya know! )showed off their 3D, virtual chat room. This consisted of a round 3D room with a small character walking round in it, with Flex Components on the wall that could be interacted with, and a video control too. Again, very kool.

I enjoyed talking to Darren from getoutsmart.com about his thoughts and goals in Flex2/ the on-line world.

The Flex group looks like it is going to be a great place for me to learn and be inspired to learn!

Campbell ran me home after the meeting, so it was good to talk more about the bright future this group has!

Thanks Campbell, Kai and Ross!

For all you in Auckland, I hope to see you there! (must RSVP sometime!)

See fxug.org.nz/meetings.html for details!

(The Aussies are on their way apparently!)

I'm looking forward to being involved in this group.

In the wonderful world of spam, there are programs that surf the web looking for email addresses. (so I've been told. Can't say I've met one yet)

When looking round blogs, I seen a few tricks by people to protect their inbox from spam with tricks like this:

- someone [at] somewhere [dot] com

- someone [you know what goes here] somewhere.com

- Have a form (with or with out captcha) to send the email, thus not showing the address in plain text at all

One attempt that I saw, that I liked was this:

- djohnsmarie@gmail.com

Now, you're seeing my email right?

If you did a view source, you would see this:

While that doesn't look like an email, the visitors to my site will see me email. This is the HTML coded version of an ASCII character.

The question I have is: Does that actually fool a Find-and-record-emails-Spam-bot?

While I'd like to *think* it does, does anyone *know* if my attempt at protecting my email inbox will work, or if that attempt is futile?

(Even if it doesn't, at worst I'll be giving GMail's spam filtering a bit more of a work out!)

In case you are interested, the CF Code to generate that is (taken from my CFEclipse ScribblePad):

Tonight at the Auckland CFUG, we had Mark Drew "Connect"ed in to show off CFEclipse.

I've been using CFEclipse now for over a year, and love it.

I REALLY like the easy of copying and moving code round.

But Mark opened my eyes to the REAL power of CFEclipse...

It was like I was driving a Porsche, and only using the first gear (may be reverse a bit to often too!), and he showed me the other gears...and the overdrive...and the warp drive...

I am looking forward to using the new found (well...shown...) powers tomorrow!

Also he mentioned that if he was doing this presentation in August, he would have a lot more to show! From what I gather, he will start showing off the new bits @ cfObjective.

The meeting was recorded. Mark's voice didn't travel so well (from London to New Zealand), with the sound dropping in and out a bit, but the video worked fine, so you can see what is going on OK.

So, if you have never looked @at using CFEclipse, I suggest you check out http://www.cfeclipse.org and have a look. You can't beat the price! It's FREE!

Once I get the URL for the recording I'll add it to this entry and the http://www.cfug.co.nz site, so check back later!
[edit]
The link for the recording is https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a200985228/p56436186/
[/edit]

In the presentation he covers
- Installing Eclipse
- Installing CFEclipse
- Over view of features in CFEclipse