No I am not going to criticize Jobs for these choices. I can see the business logic behind every one of them so that is not fair.  He is after all running a business.    I will however include what I think those reasons are in this little rant (and why they are bogus).  So here goes … the top 3 roadblocks to purchasing an iPad

1. Lack of Flash support:
   It really boggles the mind to think that a device designed specifically to be used as a device to browse online would intentionally leave this out.  For me this is the single biggest problem with the device.  If this were fixed I would probably buy one even with the other issues below.  Now I may be biased as I do Flash/Flex development work however it is not for my own work that I lament, but for the numerous services that would be simply inaccessible with this device.  As with non-inclusion of Flash on the iPhone in the first place this is just a bone-headed move on the part of Apple.  I appreciate that they want to support and encourage HTML5  and I think that is fantastic!    However, it denies the reality-on-the-ground that as of right now and the foreseeable future, Flash is an integral part of the web experience.  (I am NOT saying that is good or bad, just a fact.)  This problem is likely to be the biggest day to day disappointment  for those using the iPad.
   Business Reason: Apple wants to be at war with everyone!  It is no longer enough to take on Microsoft.  Apple wants to rumble with everyone Google, Nintendo, Amazon, Sony and now one of its oldest allies Adobe.  I get it, Steve wants to rule the world.  Closed systems mean you have to buy from Apple.  Closed systems mean developers have to develop versions specifically for Apple products.  If you want to develop for Apple products you have to develop ON Apple products, which means you must BUY the Apple products.  It also means you have less time to develop for other environments and products.  The more exclusive applications available on Apple products the more users will have to buy Apple products to use those applications.  Apple is betting that at some moment a “killer app” will come along that makes owning an iXxx absolutely necessary. Failing that it is betting that ubiquity will be the killer app.

1. Still no Multitasking:
   I understood this on the iPhone, the official justification for a single processor thread was basically ~ensure that the devices primary purpose ( being a phone ) is not compromised by applications that hog cpu usage and memory~ So for the iPhone this strategy made a little sense. However now I don’t see the argument for leaving this out of a device such as the iPad.  There is no phone.  That is not its purpose.   so…..???  What is the problem?
   Business Reason: Cost and speed… get it to market faster and capture market share.  This required less change in the way applications and the OS worked so it *might* (doubtful) be corrected in a future patch or release.
2. Still no camera
   I’ll be honest I really don’t care about this one personally.  However when Nintendo can cram 2 decent cameras into the DSi.  WTF?  How much is a CCD camera to include $1 – $2 ?  Really on a $500 device?   Ok ok, I get that keeping features to a minimum is a design philosophy at Apple but in this day and age when it is difficult to even find a cell phone without a camera it just doesn’t make much sense.  Couple that with the fact that support for a camera is already built into the iPhone OS  again WTF?   So I’ll end on you can add a camera to the little iPod but you can’t put one on the iPod touch or the iPad ??  Wow Apple’s engineers must be really incompetent or unfocused.
   Business Reason: Planned obsolescence, 2nd gen upgrade.   We’ve seen this before from Apple (and other companies)   It is very likely that the camera(s) will be the great addition to a version 2 of the iPad causing legions of those who have perfectly functioning iPads to upgrade to new units even when their old ones are perfectly serviceable.   My prediction is that this upgrade will come to both the iPad and iPod touch at or about the same time, probably next year.

What I found was the problem was that I had a class that was extending another class explicitly  as in

package com.ohms.fp
{
   public class foo extends com.ohms.bp.bar
...
}

The issue I had was that even if this is the case I still needed to have the import….

package com.ohms.fp
    import com.ohms.bp.*;
{
   public class foo extends com.ohms.bp.bar
...
}

Once I fixed all these reference the error went away.

This little gem of a program  is great.  (As a bonus it is  free for both commercial and non-commercial uses.) Unlike other RE testers that I’ve used over the years, this one lets you actually step thru the parsing sequence and also see the execution tree of the RE.  These are very handy.  I find I am able to get to a functional RE statement in about a 1/4 the time as before.   You can get “The Regex Coach” from here.  http://weitz.de/regex-coach/

As a little bonus… here is a little gem of an RE statement (for field validation) for a field that must contain no value or one or more three digit numbers separated by commas.
(^(\d{3})(\,\d{3})*$)|(^$)


so in JavaScript the RE literal would be
/(^(\d{3})(\,\d{3})*$)|(^$)/


(String key, Object value)

However when calling Ext.iterate with an array the parameters are:

(Object item, Number index, Array allItems)

The gotcha here is that in the Ext 3.0 docs only the object call back is shown.  Because of this you might think that the array call returns the index then the actual item bu as you can see that is not the case.

There is a thread on the Ext forum here about maybe making this consistent in the next major release.

I was using the CF debugger in eclipse yesterday and my ColdFusion (CF8) code kept throwing the same debugger error on simple string equality statements such as : if( stringVar1 EQ stringVar2)

Here is the debugger error:

coldfusion.runtime.Cast$NumberConversionException
The value XX cannot be converted to a number.

It took a little digging to figure out what the problem was but I think I finally got it

It seems that the exception is thrown by any direct comparison of strings. Now if you’ve been using CF as long as I have you are thinking that this is crazy because how else are you supposed to compare strings…. well there apparently is a better way to compare to strings. The solution is to use the compare or comparenocase functions. The way these work is basically as such: if(comparenocase(stringVar1, stringVar2) eq 0)
The function returns 0 if the strings are equivalent, and -1 or +1 if one or the other string is greater or less than the other. If you switch all of your string comparisons to this the debugger exception goes away. Apparently this is one of those cases where CF basically handles the exception gracefully however it still gets reported if the Exception Information option is turned on in the debugger settings on the server. If you uncheck the box marked Exception Information on the Debug Output Settings in the ColdFusion 8 administrator (and restart the server) these debug exceptions go away.

Since I use FlexBuilder/Eclipse for my development I am able to take advantage of the advanced Find/Replace feature that uses regular expressions.

Here is the regular expression that I came up with to do my replacements.

Find: (^\s+)(.+)(\x26=)
Replace With: $1$2 = $2 \&

Here is a breakdown of what each part of each of these does

The Find string:

( starts capture group #1
^ matches the start of a line
\s matches white space
+ says to match ‘many’ of the previous char (white space)
) ends capture group #1

( starts capture group #2
. matches any character
+ says to match ‘many’ of the previous char (any character)
) ends capture group #2

( starts capture group #3
\x26 matches a char with hex code of 26 (ampersand)
= matches an equal sign
) ends capture group #3

The Replace string:

$1 Inserts capture group 1
$2 Inserts capture group 2
= Inserts and equal sign
$2 Inserts capture group 2
\& Inserts an ampersand (the \ is for escaping)

So the way this works is

Given the following line of code
stringVar &= ’some more text’;

• Capture group 1 (^\s+) matches the start of the new line and the indentation.
• Capture group 2 (.+) then matches to the var name “stringVar”
• Capture group 3 (\x26=) then matches to the operator “&=”
• Replace then inserts capture group 1 (the new line and indentation)
• then it inserts capture group 2 (the var name “stringVar”)
• then it inserts and equal sign “=”
• then it inserts capture group 2 again (the var name “stringVar”)
• finally it inserts an ampersand “&”

The final string becomes
stringVar = stringVar & ’some more text’;

Note that the expression only actually operates on the part of the line in blue and does not alter the rest of the line of code.

I know everyone knows that you can run both ColdFusion 7 and ColdFusion 8 on the same machine at the same time.   The common way to do this is to run one or both using the built in web server.  Now while this works I found that it is quite easy to switch IIS integration between ColdFusion 7 and 8 allowing both to run this way when needed.

I upgraded my local development environment to ColdFusion 8 about a year ago however my corporate development environment is still at ColdFusion 7.  90% of the time this is not a problem just as long as I am aware of what is and is not available.  (Mainly I have to make sure that I still use EQ, NEQ, GT etc…)    The one area that I found it necessary to have ColdFusion 7 for is for configuring the Flex / AMF gateway  (services-config.xml).

I do not have direct access to these configuration files on my corporate dev server (or ability to restart the server)  This is not usually a problem but can make for extra steps in this case.   In order for me to request a new channel or destination to be added to the config file I need to write it up and send it to the system administrator and have him add it and then restart the server.  Because to of the extra steps involved I have to make sure that it is configured exactly correctly.

When I was simply using CF7 on my local box I would just get a copy of the service-config.xml file from the dev server and then copy and paste the channel and destination sections from my local service-config.xml file and then send it back to the system administrator.  However now with CF8 my settings may not directly match.  First there is the issue that by default ColdFusion 8 splits the channel definitions and destination definitions into two separate files services-config.xml and remoting-config.xml.   OK not too big a deal however now I have to make sure to consolidate the settings into the one services-config.xml file for movement to the server.

OK Well to get back to my point.  I needed to be able to run both CF8 and CF7 as if they were the only version installed and running through IIS on my local box so that I could effectivly test these configuration files before sending them to our system administrator.    In the end my solution was to install both and switch between them.

The set up is not that difficult.  I first installed ColdFusion 8 using the default install path of C:\ColdFusion8\.  I then stopped the services and renamed the CFIDE directory in the Inetpub\wwwroot directory to CFIDE8.  Then I installed ColdFusion 7 to the default install path of C:\CFusionMX7\.   Then renamed the CFIDE directory it created in the the Inetpub\wwwroot directory to CFIDE7.   Then I pull the shortcuts each of the Web Server Configuration tools out of their respective start menu locations and put them on my desktop and renamed them so I would know which version applied to which.

Now to switch between them I just follow a fairly simple process… I stop IIS, and the version of coldfusion that is running.  Then I open up that version’s Web Server Configuration tool and remove IIS from the list. I close that Web Server Configuration tool and open the other version’s Web Server Configuration tool and then Add IIS to it.  Then I go into the Inetpub\wwwroot directory and rename the CFIDE directory that is there back what it should be (If i WAS running CF8 then CFIDE8) and then rename the other CFIDE? to CFIDE (say CFIDE7 to CFIDE)   Now the correct version of CF is connected up to IIS, the correct CFIDE directory is in place and I can just restart IIS and the appropriate ColdFusion server and now I’m running under the other version.

This set up is not as easy as running both versions concurently, however I found that I rarely did that anyway as it ate up system resources.  Once it is set up, this only adds a few steps to switching over from one version to the other and further I am running through IIS for both versions.

You have a laptop or other machine where you sometimes have 2 screens or monitors and at other times you only have one. Sometimes when you open the Flash CS3 IDE (more often when only using one screen but sometimes with both) The IDE or dialog boxes open way off screen. You can’t move it back and no matter what you do it won’t reset and just open on your primary (or only) screen.

The simplest solution I could find was to just delete the settings registry key

run regedit.exe and navigate to the following “folder”

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Flash 9\Settings\

you should just be able to delete the Window value or reset it but this doesn’t always work for some reason. So just delete the whole Settings folder. Don’t worry Flash will rebuild it when you restart it. If this still doesn’t work delete the whole Flash 9 tree … again Flash will rebuild it when you restart it. (as always with regedit you should back up at least this part of the registry before messing with it… Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

This fixed my problem… YMMV

If this post helps you… please leave a reply Thanks!

It might not mean a lot to many people but for as long as I can remember I’ve had ideas and inventions floating around in my head. A couple years ago I decided to start patenting my ideas…

This was the first of what I hope will be many more to come. So far I am working on three other patents with over a dozen other ideas just waiting for the time and money to be able to file.

For those that are interested I originally filed this patent application back in mid 2005, It was published one year later. It took almost two full years before it worked its way through the queue to a patent examiner. It was returned to me for some minor corrections late last year and approved early this year. After paying the fee to have it issued about two months ago, it was finnally issued today. The whole process took about 3 1/2 years and cost about $8000.

Here is a pdf of the patent.

http://justinohms.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/uspatent007380665.pdf

The patent is available for license.