This video was shot when aiden was about 5 months old. We’re thinking about submitting it to ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’. We got a big laugh out of this and of course, so did Aiden.

View the video in Windows Media here

I saw this video about the dairy industry and vowed never to buy non-organic milk again. It is narrated by Alec Baldwin and shows the dirty underbelly of the dairy industry. The organic milk that my family buys is called “Horizon Organic”. They make this claim on the side of the carton:

“Horizon Organic products are as good for you as they are delicious because they are produced without the use of antibiotics, added growth hormones or dangerous pesticides.

That’s why choosing Horizon Organic is a wholesome and nutritious way to reduce your exposure to added chemicals.”

They go on to say, “When you choose Horizon Organic, you also contribute to the health and well-being of the planet and animals. We allow our cows to make milk according to their natural cycles and keep them in good health by giving them certified organic feed, fresh air and access to pasture. In return, our cows give us great-tasting organic milk.”

To me this correlates with other unhealthy practices that the poultry & beef industries endorse. The following study done here is about prions. This and the horrible treatment of cattle are why we’ll not be buying anything other than organic when it comes to beef, chicken, eggs, pork, milk and cheese from now on.

“This year, 20 billion pounds of dead cows will be fed to American farm animals. These animals, in turn, will be slaughtered and eaten by American consumers.

Experts agree that England’s epidemic of Mad Cow Disease occurred as a result of feeding infected dead animals back
to cows being raised for human food. The same practice has occurred in America, although new FDA regulations prohibit feeding cows their mothers and sisters.

The infectious agent responsible for mad cow disease is a Prion (pronounced: pree-on). This protein particle resembles a crystal, and is very difficult to destroy. Prions are neither bacterial nor viral in nature. They contain no DNA. Prions reproduce by “folding” mirror images of themselves in the brain of either cows or humans. During this invasive process, areas of the brain turn into a sponge-like mass. The medical term for Mad Cow Disease is Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE). In lab tests, Prions have been exposed to temperatures of 680 degrees Fahrenheit and higher. The Prions survive. (Page 17, Mad Cows and Milkgate by Virgil Hulse, M.D.)

Although the Food and Drug Administration has banned the feeding of dead cows to live cows, they have not banned feeding slaughterhouse renderings to other farm animals.

What happens to cow carcasses today? They are fed to pigs and chickens. By eating chicken, humans may be exposed to Prions. Some scientists say that the incubation period for the human variant of the brain wasting disease may be as long as 30 years. ”

This little gadget will not only validate the syntax of an email address of a user, but also will use java.net.InetAddress to make sure the domain they are using is valid. This is a handy tool to cut down the number of fake email addresses your application may receive. I have included the source for you to review and change if you like.

You may want to add the ability to actually validate the account as well as the domain. This is possible by using Javamail or other third party classes to instantiate VRFY() function or like functionality on the address, but I do not recommend this because some servers disable this command.

I compiled emailValidator.jar using Netbeans 4.0. I found that the latest version of Netbeans will not create compilations that are compatible with CFMX. I suspect this is due to the latest JVM update. Testing so far has revealed that CFMX will only run under Sun’s JVM version 1.4.2_10 and under. So, in other words CFMX does not support J2SE 5.0 as of this post. However, I am sure that will be included in an updater of CFMX 7 or future iteration of CFMX. Here are all the J2SE 1.4.2 downloads and reference docs. That page also has the JRE.

Anyway, enough said.. here it is. You’ll need winrar to decompress it.

This is a pesky little task that gets overlooked from time to time in applications that need to do things like notify clients on their birthdays or display an 'age' field based on date of birth. There a few ways to handle this. Here are a couple ways I decided to approach the problem.

By the way, here is a great little article that explains a little bit about fundamental celestial mechanics. Giving that a once over will help you understand what is going on with our scripts.

This first example finds the lapse days based on a simple equation that divides your year difference by 4. The value (intSlippage) is then subtracted from your total days because that is the number of days you have slipped from the year you were born. It compensates for people under 4 years old because they have slipped less than one day. Most likely, your application is not going to care about a few hours.

The second example actually uses the tropical year formula which is the actual equinox calculation. You can find the actual equation used to arrive at 365.242190 in the link I have provided above. This example is actually more efficient:

Sun's Charset class reference

Every so often, you may have to deal with international data that has not been stored properly in an ntext or nvarchar field. Generally, this data will be stored as ascii representations of unicode or NCRs. So, when you need to display this in the browser as a certain language type, you'll need to tell ColdFsuion or Java what charset the data is to be displayed in and what you'll need to store it as when you insert or update.

Here is a scaled down working example of how to do this with ColdFusion using the Java Charset class. This example will loop over your query data and convert it to the Charset you specify. This example is used in the context of a function call and the beginning and ending character sets are passed in as arguments.

Keep in mind that you'll need the starting and ending character sets as your arguments. Here are a few charsets as examples
Latin: CP1252:
Chinese Simplified: GB2312
Chinese Traditional: Big5
Chinese Taiwan: Big5
Japanese: Shift_JIS
Korean: EUC-KR
Czech: ISO-8859-2

Viral ads are certainly gaining ground in popularity these days. In my opinion, as the so called �gen Xers� start to be promoted into top management positions, you�ll start seeing more and more of these types of ads. The ads clearly play to the twisted sense of humor that most of our generation seems to enjoy. This will likely pay big dividends for those companies bold enough to make the leap.

Here are a few virals that I have come across that I think are absolutely hilarious!

Some are windows media and others are QuickTime.

Pregnancy Test (WM)
Breast Exams (WM)
VW Terrorist (Q)
Condom Viral (WM)
Sexual Harassment Viral Training Video (WM)
Smart Beep (Q)
Nissan (WM)
Frostbite Gum (WM)
Greenpeace (WM)
Vim Clearer (WM)
Marriot (WM)
Nueva Sportwear (WM)
Virgin Atlantic Airlines (WM)
Sci-Fi Channel (WM)

Back in the days of ColdFusion 4.0 when cfscript was a new blessing for CFers, the short-circuited if or IIf() had immediate appeal because of the similarity to JavaScript's short-circuited if functionality.

Example in JavaScript:

After all, cfscript was built on the Mozilla JavaScript engine and should have like functionality. What I didn't like about IIF() however, was that one needed to use the DE() or delayed evaluation to display a simple string. So, I stopped using it until it struck me that I could simply escape the quotes in the immediate if and display whatever I wanted without worrying about the DE() function... This is also great because it speeds the parsing of IIF() so that it is equally as fast as a if else in your code.

Here is the same thing in C#

Here is an example of what I did with IIf() in my 4.0 days:

Note the use of DE to return the string 'foo' or 'notfoo' instead of the string's value.

-----------------

Example of escaping your quotes with single ticks, you avoid the DE(), like so:

----------------

My technique could also apply in the circumstance that you are checking for the variable's existence within IIf()'s first expression.

Macromedia's Example 1:

Macromedia's Example 2:

My Example with no evaluate and no DE():

----------------
This inline is a great technique for use in cfscript,forms and select boxes. I personally think it is very clear / readable whilst keeping your code clean and compact.

Enjoy!

When there is no documentation about your db, this little snippet can help you quickly find your way around in a pinch.

Every now and then a story catches my eye and I wonder, "just what are people thinking?". These poor folks not only had to endure their child being sick but also Gerber's inappropriate response. This affirms that my belief that common sense is not so common these days.

"Angela Jackson spoke to CBS4's Nefertiti Jaquez and told her she bought the Gerber brand oatmeal Monday morning at the T&C Market off Northwest 95th Street.

That very same day, she says, she fed her grandson the oatmeal mixed with some formula in a baby bottle. Soon, she realized there was something wrong. When she opened the bottle, she found maggots crawling in the bottle. The bottle her little grandson was drinking out of.

The formula made the child, Monroe Ingraham, sick. He had to be hospitalized for food poisoning. He suffered a severe fever and couldn't stop vomiting.

The family called Gerber with disappointing results. They say the company told them, its not a big deal. It can't hurt the baby."

Full Story Here

For all you aspiring C++ developers out there, those of you on a budget and propeller heads like myself here is a great site that offers free windows management software! It is called Sysinternals and has a vast assortment open source software dedicated to file and disk management, networking, processes and threads, system information and much more.

For some of us, it is just a great and FREE way to manage our systems, for others it is way to get ramp up their C++ skills in a hurry by dissecting some advanced code: [ go to Sysinternals freeware ]

Please feel free to let us know which utilities helped you out of a jam!