I’m releasing a Yahoo Widget that I created a long time ago and have been meaning to release for quite a while too.

The story all begins when I took over the Coldfusion platform support for, I started to find myself spending a bit of time watching cfstat on the servers to get a feel for the current status of the machines. As we had multiple servers (then 4, now 6) and only being able to get to cfstat directly on the machine, this was not really practicable.

What I really wanted was a little desktop application that could give me the headlines of cfstat for as many servers as we had, all in an easy to digest format, the result is the CFStatShot Yahoo Desktop Widget.

I know you, just like me, has looked for a cool throbber/loader graphic for your web application more than one. Go on admit it.

Well there is no need to search any more as I’ve found a site that lets you create one from many available styles: AjaxLoad.info. Fantastic!

Now I didn’t expect to hear this when I came into work this morning:

"Dude, look Safari on Windows"

I was a little incredulous at first, but it turns out it’s true you can now get Safari for Windows.

While this is interesting I think I’ll be sticking with Firefox, as I’ve never got on with Safari on the Mac anyway. I’ll give it a try though as it does seem silly fast compared to the other Windows browsers.

Every so often, in pretty much any field, something comes out or is released that I don’t realise I’ve been missing until it’s pointed out to me. Today it is a little proof of concept for toggling multiple check boxes by click-hold-drag. This is something that I’ve become familiar and comfortable with in desktop programs, but I never noticed it was missing from web browsers. Now this script has pointed out that it’s not there - I miss it.

I decided quite a while ago, probably about 18 months ago, that I wasn’t going to attempt to style form controls any more.

This was based on my personal experience and my personal preference - I think your average user appreciates being able to easily identify a text box, a form button etc. - as forms can be confronting beasts to some people. If you leave all the form controls in their default style in the users chosen browser then at least they can readily and quickly identify and understand them.
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Every time I start a new project I’m always trying to do things better than I did on the last project, it’s the way for all developers.

One thing that has always bugged me is trying to get the base text size the same across all browsers, but now I’ve totally dropped the idea of supporting IE 5.5 ever again I thought it might be easier now.
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I’ve come across this problem before, where I want to hide the overflow of an element, this works fine in all browsers except IE - however it’s never been a problem in anything that I’ve progressed far enough with to worry about fixing it for IE.

Well this evening I came across the problem again, and found the solution - IE (I’m just looking at 6 here - not sure if 7 does the same) doesn’t like it when you have a position: relative; on the child (or possibly children) of an element which you have declared overflow: hidden;.

So in my case swapping that out for position: absolute; on the child and overflow: hidden; position: relative; on the parent worked a charm. Now IE 6 plays nicely like its other browser friends.

I had the following date string from a data dump file 11-APR-07, without looking at the Coldfusion documentation I pass the string to lsParseDateTime() and dump the output to see if it parses the string correctly, which results in {ts ‘2007-04-11 00:00:00′}.

Great it worked! So I move on to writing my test case (yes, yes I know it should have been the other way around).
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Something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time now is to create a couple of back end implementations for my JavaScript Image Cropper UI (I really need to come up with a snazzy name for that) - obviously that hasn’t happened.

I have noticed a couple of implementations appear in the comments, we are now using it at work and I have been emailed about at least one more, but I would like to formalise this a little bit to share these implementations with other users; hence my solicitation.
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I and a small team have been writing a small application in PHP using CakePHP, which we all have an ongoing love-hate relationship with.

However we have been thinking that to really get things moving forward quicker we might move to Coldfusion. We currently have a dedicated server which runs my family of sites which is a LAMP box running.
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