Palyne

My brain is frying. While trying to figure out a bug in Taskerbot — which mysteriously has assigned just SOME tasks of SOME viewers SOMEtimes to the mysterious userid 9 which does not even exist — I finally gave up and decided to just remake the whole form/script and do it differently.

I originally coded it in the context of TKR which is such a pain in the butt because of the identity/privacy issues and not being able to just use the USERID all over the place like normal. tBot doesn’t have that issue and is going to be standalone so I’m redoing it the way it oughtta be.

While I’m at it I redesigned the top border, and the footer, and so on.

Then I decided my error messages need to display more prettily.

Then I decided that if I’m going to be writing code I could at least be creative.

So my new rule is that all error messages have to be in some form of poetry. By default, haiku, but it could be something else.

This is my sense of humor. Users will have to live with it.

This is the code that calls it (inside a CFIF tag): Read the rest of this entry »

OK so the girls can sue me, but I think this image a couple folks use as sig blocks on a forum I frequent is just HILARIOUS. Go Arnold!

I’m working on the ROTA module of Taskerbot now, which I’ve started and stopped at least three times. Par for the course, I’ve mostly forgotten whatever the hell I was doing last time I was working on it, so I’m starting over. Again. On the bright side, three years of occasionally working on the idea finally seems to have gelled in the back of my little tiny brain, and now I actually think I can do it, and make it fairly simple in fact, unlike the complex coding behemoth it began.

Tonight the challenge was the basic creation of the sort. The manager takes a list of his members and using simple drag & drop javascript, puts them in the sequence that he wants for event-assignment (usually, tasking). Read the rest of this entry »

My best friends and I wax on about RV all the time. What I’d give for a transcript, given all the things we’ve thought of spur of the moment, that fall out of my brain when I hang up the phone. One night we were talking about focus-viewing.

I often use basketball as an analogy to remote viewing. Not because it’s a good one, just because pretty much nothing is a good one so it’s not much worse than any other.

In basketball, you need a lot of practice in ‘live games’ and that’s the best thing. But really, if you want to work on layups, shooting hoops, passing, whatever, then you don’t expect a person to play five 2-hour games a week and learn everything they need from that experience. You also practice specifically your layups and passing and free throws and so forth. Because without some focused-skill in those areas, your games are going to kind of suck, and there’s too much “else” going on in games to know that you will personally get lots of practice on that one specific thing.

As a general norm, folks don’t do a lot of that in RV until they get some experience and decide they want to focus on something and make their own target pool for it and so on.

In RV a lot of it’s about learning theory and the “promptness of feedback.” Now, we never get it as rapidly as actual learning theory says matters most–that is a matter of microseconds–but it’s generally agreed that “the sooner, the better” for feedback. But you have to take into consideration that “30 seconds after session” is not nearly as ’soon’ for most the session if it was a 2 hour session, as it would have been for a 15 minute session. Read the rest of this entry »

Me and a friend were talking about setting up Remote Viewing tasks as an experiment, using a number, words, etc. to see if we would get symbol, or be able to dowse for numbers / letters, etc. It turns out the utility I wrote for that last night will server as a lovely improvement to the existing “bulk self-tasking” upload option in Taskerbot. Read the rest of this entry »

CFGRID, combined with CFLAYOUT (tabbed variant) and CFMENU (simple, not dropdown, as the dropdown does not play well with the CFGRID where they overlap), certainly does make the pages look more clean and professional. And the amount of code in the actual CFM file is drastically reduced, over what I had to hand code (I do everything by hand, old school!) for a paginated list previously. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, so then I ran into the same problem I had that I blogged about previously, which is this: getting a full link, image, with unique record ID, into the single column value from SQL so I can have it in my CFGRID.

With one hitch: this time, I needed to use logic to evaluate the image filename. The filename that is in the database is the one for the actual photo, but the filename I needed is a mini-thumbnail that is based on that photo. Now, the thumbnail naming is consistent, at least in regards to matching the database’s photo filename. But there are two big caveats, that kept causing SQL errors:

1 – some columns didn’t have any value at all there. Their original upload was a PDF for example so there are no files and no value in the database.

2 – the filename entries in that column varied in length. So I couldn’t just say, give me the first 5 characters only, then add a new extension (as all the mini thumbnails are JPG, but the filetypes in the database may vary).

This means I had to do four things:

1 – Get the real length of the filename entry

2 – Get what the length would be MINUS 3 digits (the filename extension)

3 – Get only that quantity (#2 above) of characters from the original filename

4 – Then add strings to it, to add the ‘mini_’ and ‘jpg’. And while we’re at it, add the strings that will give it the IMG REF and A HREF because CFGRID is not going to be doing that for me either.

5 – And during all this, we have to make sure we are NOT trying to do database math on column values that are incapable of having it done to them or it will probably trigger an error for the user. So if there is no filename or it’s too short we just have to do something else. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, now that I’m using CFGRID that means I can’t use all the simple logic that CFML is so famous for making easy.

The irony of this is that it’s a big deal how ‘easy and lovely’ CFGRID is. But it’s mostly so freakin easy because it forces you do all the hard work you used to do writing CFML code, instead writing SQL code.

It’s rather like a thing at work recently. We used to take content from editorial and build a product. Then we got this automated script tool that builds all the XML almost instantly. Unfortunately it requires the editorial people spend eons making this absolutely perfect, must be precisely formatted, multipage excel workbook which in some cases amounts to 55 sheets of hundreds of lines each… screw up a field and it’s a problem, screw up something important and it won’t run at all. These people are far less technical than we are, so it puts a larger burden on them. Now production is happy because we can say, “Hey, now we only charge a fraction what we used to, and it’s much faster, to build that product.” But editorial is doing at least as much work as our PM’s used to, except on the front-end, rather than the back end, and frankly they didn’t have enough time to begin with (probably why their turnover % is ridiculous). In the bigger picture, the equation and the answer did not improve.

Where was I.

Oh yeah. In my primary coding project there is a gallery of sorts, and the artists (we call “viewers”) have the choice as to whether they use their name, their alias, or ‘anon’ on their contributions (which we call “sessions”). Read the rest of this entry »

You would think text wrap would be a parameter on the tag itself. It took me quite some searching to find the answer to that one.

There is actually CSS styling you can do in huge detail on CFGRID, but it isn’t provided with the standard documentation, so it is totally metaphysically obscure. None of it seems able to remove the invasive underline should you be crazy enough to use HREF in your CFGRID, but aside from that, everything else seems do-able.

Here are the three little things I critically needed to find and use: Read the rest of this entry »

This is only part of solving a larger problem. The problem is using the HREF on CFGRID underlines every damn thing and I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. I did find extensive notes on CSS styling for the grid, down to every single cell, but nobody crying about it on the internet had gotten any answer on how to get rid of the underline.

So I took the HREF parameter off my CFGRID because the underline looked so horrible and made it so unreadable I wouldn’t even use the grid if I had to suffer that. Which left me with the following dilemma: since the grid no longer links to something semi-automatically (posts to a form, click chooses a whole row, you can pass the ID value you need), I would have to link to it manually.

As part of doing this I decided that much like the simple HTML table I’ve been using prior to trying to implement CFGRID, I would use a little icon that would intuitively tell people (a) to click that for a link, and (b) that it would open in a new window. So I had three things to figure out: Read the rest of this entry »

In the HTML format CFGRID, my date “mask” formatting, using the CF documentation, didn’t seem to work at all. I don’t know why but my impression from cfdocs was that it wasn’t going to work in the HTML format grid I was using. I hacked this by changing my SQL to begin with, rather than doing it in CF. Read the rest of this entry »

I avoided using a CFC binding initially because I didn’t grok how and, before I knew that my route made pagination impossible, a query in the HTML CFGRID seemed so much easier. But here is how the binding part is done. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone raved about how cool it was that ColdFusion’s CFGRID tag automatically would do the pagination for you.

All the little examples I looked at, had that nifty little page number and button at the bottom.

Except mine. I could do code pretty much just like the examples, except that I was using an HTML form and a QUERY in it, but the little pagination thing never appeared.

It turns out that you cannot do pagination in a QUERY HTML CFGRID in CF8. Instead, you have to put your query out in a CFC page and “bind” that to the CFGRID. It is the CFC page that actually works out the pagination stuff.

I’ll cover the CFC and binding separately.