Viewing by month: June 2006
Handling Display Weight/Priority Using SQL
Posted on Jun 16, 2006
I was presented with an issue the other day while I was building our updated promo maintenance tool that handles internal banner ads. The issue was that the frequency of the display was weighted (I called it priority) like most banner ads are. In our case we had determined to limit the priority to 3 options, but the solution I will provide can work for more (but it has to be a limited set and likely small). Anyway, I was going to use the random records in T-SQL solution I previously discussed to send me back a single random record, therefore I needed to handle the priority within my query so that records with a higher priority were more likely to be randomly chosen. The solution I came up with feels a bit contrived, and I would love to hear a better one, but it works and is really easy to do. Nonetheless, I present this solution to both offer it to someone who may find it useful, but also to solicit feedback from someone who might have a better solution (kinda like Ray's Friday Puzzlers).
Model-Glue Unity Presentation Notes
Posted on Jun 15, 2006
Joe Rhinehart just finished presenting the new release of Model-Glue framework as part of Adobe's Developers Week. It was a great presentation and built on the excitement of both his prior video demo preview and last night's public beta release. I am going to share a few notes I took down during his presentation.
sIFR Update and v3.0 Status
Posted on Jun 12, 2006
Mike Davidson discusses the 2.02 maintenance update (and says it should be the last update prior to 3.0). However, this update includes two very important fixes (from Mike's post):
- fixes a bug related to the Microsoft IE Eolas update
- degrades sIFR text gracefully to HTML/CSS in the presence of the Firefox AdBlock extension
In addition, although Mike is no longer the lead developer on sIFR, he discusses the work that is being done by Mark Wubben for the 3.0 version which is currently in Alpha. For those of you who have not yet tried sIFR, I highly recommend it.
ColdFusion Open-Source Update - June 12
Posted on Jun 12, 2006
This week started off relatively quiet, and I thought I would have very little to write this Monday morning, but things eventually picked up and this ended up being a busy week. Joe Rhinehart's Model-Glue:Unity preview grabbed quite a bit of attention. Also, Rob Gonda added some very cool features to ajaxCFC and released ajaxCFC for Mach II code and example application. Lastly, Rob Rohan had an interesting post that speaks generally of open-source and the difficulties that many open-source developers may face - and why many projects seem to fade.
Google Develops Browser Sync Tool for Firefox - PCWorld
Posted on Jun 08, 2006
I read an announcement from PCWorld that Google just released a browser sync extension for Firefox. The extension allows you to share favorites across mulitiple computers, as well as restore open tabs and windows. They do, however, warn that the synchronization process may cause a slight delay when initally opening Firefox. I am testing it out anyway, because I haev always found sharing favorites across computers to be a royal PITA (and is the primary reason I keep most of my favorites at del.icio.us recently). I guess I will find out how slow it is when I get home later :)