What is boils down to is loading one large graphic for all the icons on your site. Or at least, grouping sets of icons onto a large graphic, and loading the whole set at one time.

The reason this technique is useful is because opening and closing an HTTP connection from a client to a server can be a very timely process. If you run ySlow or Safari’s Network Timeline, you’ll find that a lot of HTTP connections can really hurt your site’s performance. It gets an order of magnitude worse when you are building an iPhone web app, or an app that goes over a cell network.

Here is a step by step on how I use this a technique (and like I said other people have probably done the same thing but call it something else).

First, it makes things a lot easier if you define icon / asset sizes up front and stick to it. In this example I am choosing 50×50 for simplicity.

Fire up your favourite image editing software, and create a 50×50 gird using the Grid or Guide tools. I use Pixelmator (it’s powerful and it’s inexpensive).

Then go nuts on it with your über graphic designing ability:

(Don’t be upset if your art doesn’t look as good as mine. I am a professional.)

Once you have your Doom Tile, you can use it in your html by using the background-position CSS attribute. You can use background-position to choose which part of the image you want to display. Remember that your values are going to be negative because 0,0 is the top left of the graphic and you’ll need to move the graphic left to change the tile you want to show - “pull it left” for lack of a better term.

For example, if we wanted to show the second tile on the first row we would need to shift the graphic to the left by subtracting 50 from the X axis. Something like this:

   ...
     img.example {
			height: 50px;
			width: 50px;
			padding: 0px;
			background: url(DoomTile.png) no-repeat;
		}

     img.example-2 {
			background-position:  -50px 0px;
		}
   ...
   <div>
		<a href=""><img src="" class="example example-2" alt="" /></a>
	</div>

This defines the image’s view port to be 50px by 50px, sets the background to our Doom Tile, and then moves the background image offset to -50px on the X axis. This moves the second tile into the image’s 50×50 view port. Likewise, if you wanted to move to the second row you would subtract 50 from the Y axis.

You can download a working example of this here (only tested in Safari, but should be fine in any modern browser). This is what the example looks like when run:

You can also use this for image hovers or for simple animation (which is how it was used in Doom). The example also has a simple demo of animation using the second row of tiles.

Even though this is a simple example, you can see by Safari’s Network Timeline why this is a helpful technique. The example site only makes two connections (not including the XHTML logo), but displays 5 graphics and an animation.

As I am sure you are aware Coldfusion’s variables are more or less case insensitive. It makes somethings easier for some people, but those times when you need to get the variables out of the system and into another system, it can sometimes create a headache (or if you use Linux or Mac with insensitivity off).

I am working on a thing that does some stuff with another system, and it passes information on the URL. Part of the hand shake process is a passing of a hash of some variables. The variables go through a bit of a process before it gets to the point where it does it’s hash.

For some reason, the function urlEncodedFormat would output the variables into all lower case. I tried to write up a simple example to demo the problem, but all my simple attempts to recreate it do not recreate the problem.

However, running it through the whole process does indeed cause values like “Jane Doe” to come out as “jane+doe”. This causes the Coldfusion’s side of things to be different due to the lower case letters.

If you run across this - if you hit the magical combination to get this to happen - you can get around it by falling back on Java’s Encode object.

Goes something like this:

<cfset var urlEncoder = createObject("java", "java.net.URLEncoder") />
...
<cfset buffer = buffer & "&username=" & urlEncoder.encode(username.toString(), "UTF-8") />

and if you have, say, a time value:

...
<cfset returntime = javaCast("double", (time.getTime() / 1000)) />
<cfset buffer = buffer & "&time=" & urlEncoder.encode(returntime&"", "UTF-8") />
...

What I am working on is not open source, so I can’t give the full example, and I realise this is pretty vague, but if you run into this problem, hopefully this tip will get you going.

The other interesting bit on this project was having to load up bouncy castle libraries and rolling my own encryption functions because this page isn’t very truthful :-/. But that’s for another post.

The latest stable version of CFTextmate is 2.0. 2.0 was released before I started working on the project, so I am marking my stuff as 3.0 Beta. I still have a lot of things I want to add, but I’ve got most of my day to day needs taken care of in 3.0.

I was toying with some other names for the release, but I’ll just keep those to myself.

The major changes in 3.0, I think, are the inclusion of other CF engines and versions (Railo (which is awesome), BlueDragon, CF5, etc). Also thing like cffunction folding, function names in the symbol list, and cfscript colouring.

Here is a movie to show it off a bit.

You can download the plugin(s) on cftextmate.com. If you are into source code, you can get the code on github, or if you want to possibly have some input on the direction of CFTextmate you can join the mailing list.

(Thanks to Geoff from Daemon (where I work) for egging me on)

Oh, and go to WebDU for a special treat :)

To scratch my itch, I threw together a little process to create Textmate Bundles from CFEclipse dictionaries, and generated one for FarCry 5.1.

It works pretty well. Here is a movie of the FarCry Textmate bundle in action.

The thing about the generator is it can be used to move any CFEclipse dictionary to Textmate. I was going to do one for the base of Coldfusion 8, but, luckly, there is already a generic Coldfusion textmate plugin - and only noobs reinvent the wheel or just overlook the hard work of others eh?

However, if you need snippets for one of the older Coldfusion engines or for Railo or BlueDragon you can pretty easily tweak the code and move it to Textmate.

To download the FarCry Textmate plugin (which is beta) click-a here.

If you want to play with the code, or move your own cfe dictionary to textmate you can get the source code on github.

Textmate is Mac OS X only, but the E-editor is a Windows clone and it reads Textmate bundles out-of-the-box.

If you’ve never heard of it, what EC2 allows you to do is bring up images of computers into a big network of processing power and bandwidth. It’s like you have a whole box under your control, but … there is no box. It’s like VMWare for servers. The billing for these instances is by the minute hour - around $0.10 for Linux and $0.12 for windows - so you can bring up test boxes only when you want them, or throw a bit of extra power at a problem.

Anyway, it all sounds fun, but where does one start? I decided to sit down last weekend and start figuring it out. My ultimate goal with this, by the way, is to bring up an EC2 instance, put Railo 3 on it, install FarCry, and then move my blog over to FarCry.

Here are a few movies about what I’ve found so far. These are just on how to bring up an EC2 instance, and I’ll be making some more as I progress.

(Since youtube wont let me upload a 12 minute video…)

I ran into this Coldfusion error a few days ago, and it seems to be one of those hard to track down hiccups.

If you are unlucky enough to run into this error, it seems to have something to do with variable scope.

Here are a few helpful posts on the matter. This one: similarly named cffunction arguments, and this one: cfargument with the same name and default value. Alas neither of those were what I ran into so I’ll be throwing my hat into the “Can’t load null” ring.

This is so edge case you’ll probably never hit it, but what happened was: 1) I had a coding error and 2) I was using CF8, but the live server was CF7 (unbeknownst to me).

It seems if you do this in a cfc:

...
   <cftry>
   ...
   <cfcatch type="any">
       <cfset var error="blarg!" />
   </cfcatch>
   </cftry>
...

Things appear to work fine in CF8 (I assume if it ever hit that catch it would error though).

In CF7, or at least in my case, it blewed up with the “Can’t load null” error - which doesn’t give much more information than that.

It was really lame having the two different environments trying to figure out what happened. I I just fell back to the good old cfabort, cfdump, “let’s comment this out” debugging methodology (CFACFDLCTODM for short) and I eventually found the problem.

If you hit this, and it’s not one of those three thing, go with CFACFDLCTODM.

I think we are finally all setup! I am writing this on my own computer using our own Internet connection from our new flat in Australia. There is still some residual items from the states we have to get solved (like AT&T refusing to believe that I don’t live in the US, and a few more boxes of stuff to ship), but we are settling in now.

There are so many things to write about I am not sure where to begin - so I’ll just go all random.

Coke isn’t made with corn syrup, and it is actually drinkable. The food here is amazing, and I don’t just mean the food you get at restaurants (which is, in general, great), I mean normal grocery store food. I have seen way, way less xanthin gum, red dye number 8 and all those crazy chemicals that get pumped into US food - no bovine growth hormone. Did you know cheddar cheese is not orange? The food here is simply fantastic, we feel way less poisoned.

The tea is fantastic, and cheap. K can’t find stick deodorant. The movies theaters here are very, very nice, but the price of a movie is out of control - $15AUS *per person*. A night at the movies can easily be $100AUS. Thank goodness Hollywood doesn’t make very good movies anymore :).

Everyone we’ve meet so far has been really cool. I know there are bound to be jerky people here, but we haven’t run into one yet. I find that astounding. I think what I mean by that is Aussies seem far less greedy - or maybe self absorbed - they joke, and take jokes, and seem to take life in strides. They get things done, but not with the same level of undo, unwarranted, pervasive stress that I am used to from the US.

Now, of course, we’ve only been here a month so I am sure some of that is the newness of it all, but there is definitely a shocking difference.

Getting moved here was fairly uneventful. Kristin and I read a few books on how it all works, and I think that helped a lot. Kristin has done a lot of the work getting us setup whereas I started working the day after we got here. She has done an amazing job getting us “back online” so to speak. Getting us a flat, getting all the utilities on, and getting our stuff out of customs.

The only problems we’ve had were securing a flat (getting the down payment for the flat (which was quite expensive)), getting our Oz iPhones (we have no Aus credit history), and getting our stuff though customs.

We got lucky finding a flat, but getting the cash for the down payment from the US was a bit of an ordeal. If you ever are in a similar situation, western union main branches in the US, and the post office in Oz are your friends. Don’t go to the little side branch western unions - they have a rather low limit of cash they will send / pay out. (thanks Dad)

Oz customs is very strict. They even have a TV show all about customs. It’s kind of like the US show “cops”, but shows custom officers going though the mail and people stuff at the airport. It’s a hilarious show.

If you ever move to Oz and you ship a box that is valued over $1000 they’ll automatically think you are some sort of business. They will send you a huge packet of forms to fill out. Kristin diligently tried to fill out this 50 page document, but it turns out if it’s just your personal effects (and you can prove it somehow), you can write a letter to get your items.

There is no unlimited internet plans here - for anything. It’s odd at first, but then it sunk in that the internet is just another utility. While unlimited electricity, phone calls, or natural gas would be nice - it’s probably not going to happen. Why should an internet connection be any different?

I found a nice Chinese class to keep my studies going. The company is called Red Crane if you are interested. They are quite good, and the classes are fun. 周老师 and 王老师 speak excellent Mandarin, and are good teachers. Now that I have my computer, I can skype with 潘老师 too ^_^ (though the metered internet makes skype a bit more complicated).

Kristin has secured a sewing machine and will be sassying it up soon.

The company we are working for, Daemon (pronounced dee-mon), is great. We love our jobs, and are digging into them. (Since this is for friends / family) we do lots of internet mumbo jumbo, but our main open source product is called FarCry - lots more on that later.

There is so much more to talk about, but I have to get going to work now. I have a lot of FarCry type work to do, plus a lot of my open source stuff has been ignored during the move - so much to do…

Oh, one last thing - I now get up at 6:00 am every morning without trouble. I just wake up and my day starts. (If you know me, you know how absolutely crazy that is).

While getting to know my way around the new stuffs here at work, I hit a snag. I needed to edit a Coldfusion file using something other than CFEclipse - I use CFEclipse for 99% of the Coldfusion work I am doing, but every now and again it’s just easier to open a simple editor for a quick edit.

To my amazement gedit wouldn’t color code CFML files. Worse yet, the built in file browsing wouldn’t even show that CFML file existed because the stock Ubuntu install doesn’t have mime types for CFML files.

I did a quick bit of digging around, and couldn’t find a pre-made solution so I just slapped this one together. It seems to work fairly well. The syntax is from XML so it’s not fantastic, but it lets gedit open and list CFML files - it’s a start.

Here is a shot of it working.

You can download the files here. If you are using Ubuntu, it should simply be a matter of chmod u+x the install.sh file and then run it (use at your own risk and all that).

Perhaps when I get a bit of free time I’ll XSLT the CFEclipse dictionaries into the gedit syntax to get it looking a bit prettier, but for now it’s gotten me past my stuckness.