Spelling checking is another function I wish ColdFusion supported out of the box. This Christmas day I took over the adventure of writing a spelling checker with pure ColdFusion, so it could even works in shared hosting environments, but gave up the journey in the middle of writing a bloom filter realizing I was taking a wrong way. Unlike other adventurous, I got discouraged by my first mistake and turn into Java. (more..)

I been working on few applications that use CSV files quite heavily. I wish people will move into something more sensible like XML to transfer data, but CSV seems to have some magical qualities everybody seems to like. But ColdFusion do not have native function dedicated to dealing with CSV files. Option 1: have capacity to read a properly formatted CSV into a Query object and it is quite fast. It took 5 tick counts to read my CSV file of 700 rows and return as query. (more..)

I had a task in hand this week, populate a PDF form with million(s) of records, save them, create books of 200 pages and send them to the printer. This is an ongoing daily process. So I had to fine tune everything like a fine car to run faster and not to hog up the server at the same time. Now this had unexpected consequences on me. This become my Heroin addiction without any euphoric benefits. I was not able to sleep. Drank coffee by the pints. Read half of the internet. Almost. (more..)

When I was new to programming, "regular expressions" is something that intimidated me for quite some time. All those squiggly lines, slashes, and brackets made me fallen in love with it. It was lengthy and comprehensive regular expression tutorials that scared me. Regular expressions are like Italian cooking. You start with a few essential ingredients, but you can mix them up in a correct order to create a complex dish. (more..)

In the latest version of TeaPot blog application I added an complete file manager function to the TinyMCE interface. Here I tried to pull that function out as an individual module so we can use it on other things. Previously I wrote ImageManager for TinyMCE/CKEditor which is quite simple and straight forward, but this version is bit more comprehensive.  This File Manager help you browse through user's files, upload new files, create folders and keep them organized. (more..)

I been working on mobile version for the TeaPot blog application this weekend and realized I'm in a need of a mobile image gallery interface to go with the in-build TeaPot image gallery function. There are few good mobile Image gallery functions out there but I'm terribly infected with the habit of enjoy coding, so I created another one. I don't think one extra JQuery Mobile Image Gallery would do any harm to the humanity. (more..)

There are multiple ways to generate Code 128 barcodes. Barcode4j and Barbecue are two wonderful java projects that we can use with ColdFusion; both of them generate barcode that can be saved as image files. Code 128 barcode also can be draw using a Code 128 barcode font. They are not that dificult to find, even free Code 128 barcode fonts. I guess different situations favor font over images or vise versa. But I been working on an InDesign server project, I choose to go with Code 128 font. (more..)

I was working on QR barcode using Zxing and the barcode generated by Zxing tend to give extra white spaces on some barcodes but my designer wanted trimmed image without extra white space around. ColdFusion does not have an image trim function, so I put together a small function to trim background of an image. This function takes two arguments. Image (required) This can take ColdFusion image object or path to an image file. (more..)

Dreamweaver have a habit of throwing annoying pop-up error messages when you tries to start your days work at morning and this morning it throw at me an complete paragraph:The following translators were not loaded due to errors: ICEregions.htm: had configuration information that is invalid. XSLT Transform.htm: has configuration information that is invalid. Most of Dreamweaver errors cause by its file cache system. (more..)

This website is hosted in a server that laying under my TV stand for past couple of years. I blogged about my initial setup, even though the setup have improved a bit since then, I still use DNSPark.com to host my DNS records. With having a Dynamic IP, occasionally my IP address changes. Since I have not running any DDNS update client in my server as any other normal person would do, I had to update new IP address directly in DNSPark.com admin interface. (more..)