Viewing by month: August 2005
How Random is Itunes Shuffle Feature?
Posted on Aug 12, 2005
Ok, this is a bit of a pointless post but it is Friday and a half day, but it has often come to my mind as I work. Generally, I leave my music collection to play randomly using Itunes. I have noticed that my Itunes seems to get in moods and is less random than one might expect. Sometimes, like a couple days ago, it gets in a very nostaligic mood and seems somehow to find nearly every 80s song in my collection. Since late yesterday afternoon though, it has been obsessed with Überzone. Now, I have a total of 7 Überzone songs in a collection of 2722 songs. That makes Überzone about 1/4 of 1 percent of my entire collection. Yet, the supposedly random (or at least that is what I thought) Itunes shuffle feature has managed to play 5 or so Überzone songs in about 4 hours of use. There must be some rule of statistics that makes that nearly impossible if the selection were truly random...and this isn't the first time this has happened. Anyone else ever notice this? Any explanations?
Further Adventures in Flash Forms - Pre-selecting Select Boxes
Posted on Aug 10, 2005
I will expand on the project as a whole further, but in building further on the Flash form I have been discussing recently, I needed to pre-select items in a cfselect box based upon the values returned by a remoting call. This was my solution (and I am certainly no ActionScript expert, so if someone has a better way please let me know).
Multiple selects related for Flash Forms - Selecting Multiple Elements
Posted on Aug 09, 2005
In building the flash form app I discussed in a previous post, I used the custom tag developed by ASFusion. However, my app needed you to be able to have the last select box in a multiple selects related allow selecting of multiple elements. Out of the box, the custom tag did not support this. However, I added the following code at line 102 of the multiSelectRel.cfm template:
<cfparam name="thisSelect.multiple" default="false">
<cfif (i EQ totalSelects) AND (thisSelect.multiple EQ "true")>
<cfset thisSelect.multiple = "true">
</cfif>
Once this code is added, you can add the multiple="true" to your cf_multiSelectRelControl tag and it will work. Note: For obvious reasons the code above does not allow multiple selects on any but the final select box.
Correction: I forgot to mention that you will need to add multiple="#thisSelect.multiple#" to the cfselects on lines 122/123 and 125 to get this to work. (note: these are the line numbers AFTER you add the code above)
News.com Brief on FreeHand MIA from Studio 8
Posted on Aug 09, 2005
News.com has posted a brief story on Macromedia's decision to leave FreeHand out of the Studio 8 suite and the speculation that this is somehow related to the Adobe acquisition (which would seem a logical assumption). Personally, I am not going to miss FreeHand as it didn't really suit my needs from a development standpoint. Although, when I did have my business, I used it to open Illustrator files (so rare, I can't even remember really). I am actually equally unlikely to ever use Contribute in my day to day work. To be quite honest, Studio is a great product, but I have come to learn to live without it. I am forced to use Flash here and there...and doing CSS in Eclipse isn't very intuitive (I have to have the W3C spec open while I do it)...and for those times I am forced into doing graphic design work I prefer Fireworks to ImageReady. So, I guess Studio becomes my tool of choice when doing my least favorite tasks?
Populating a Flash Form from CFTree
Posted on Aug 08, 2005
Using a combination of techniques that were (for the most part) picked up from ASFusion I was able to populate a ColdFusion flash form based on a cftree selection. Unlike cfgrid, the tree itself could not (I believe) contain all the information I needed to populate the tree, therefore I used the techniques described to connect to flash remoting from a flash form. The app is not totally complete, but the remoting part is working and I thought I would share my experiences so far