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Sorry for the down time yesterday, but there was a complication moving my site to a ColdFusion 8 server. Very soon I'll be able to get some demos of the image effects set up and running, and a number of others as well.

 

Random Spam

My friend Anthony has put up a display to capture random spam messages from bots. You can check out some of his weird results here: http://experimental-playground.com/messages.php.

 

Simplified User Interface

Ever wasted time trying to figure out how to do something in an application? I know I've sat and cursed at badly designed user interfaces, just as everyone else has, and thanks to an awesome book, Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr., I've been thinking about user interface design nearly every day.

Whether we like to admit it or not, every page on the internet is at heart a user interface; a website's design really isn't anything other then a UI for that site's content. Sure its not an application, but hard to find buttons and links are just as annoying as hard to find settings and options.

 

Reusable CSS Design

One of my favorite things about the web is seeing the transformation from the 'ancient', flat text of the early 90s into the slick, beautiful web designs that modern users expect. The wonders of CSS have unlocked amazing new potential for design, and created some wonderfully clean and usable site desins like Web 2.0 at http://www.openwebdesign.org/. This design is appealing, clear, and the content can really shine. Unfortunately, CSS people seem to have no idea what a pain it is to work with designs like this.

 

Recursive CTE in SQL Server 2005

Recursive Common Table Expressions are solving a lot of problems for me at work today, so I thought I'd throw a note up on here about them. Its a common problem with databases that records often have a parent record in the same table, which can in turn have another parent and so forth up the chain. What happens is that at some point you need to find out the whole structure of the tree, which becomes much more difficult. Enter RCTE. While I've known that other servers had capabilities like this for a while (Oracle for example), I'd not seen a good way to do it in SQL Server.

Find out a little more at the bottom of this page.

And an official Microsoft page can be found here.

 

Could not generate stub objects for web service invocation.

God to I hate this message. There are a 1,001 questions about the cause of this message on the CF 6.1 livedocs for the tag, and none of them have the right answer for my situation. Whats more, I can't find anyone who does have a good solution for CF 7.0 or any version. Click more to read my tale of woe.

 

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Jon Hartmann, July 2011

I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.

Learn more about me on LinkedIn.