Why SSN should NOT be stored as an integer in a database

Good synoposis on the dangers of storing some types of user data as integers.

"If you have a hand in storing SSN's on any level during developing, read this. Personally, I've seen this happen too many times."

read more | digg story

Cool use of....Ajax?

To be honest, I'm not real sure how they're doing this but it's pretty sweet. Watch in real time as stories on digg are updated/added.

http://www.digg.com/spy

CFEclipse

I downloaded Eclipse yesterday so I could try out CFEclispse. I guess maybe I don't know how to use it because so far it doesn't seem like there is anything better about it vs. Dreamweaver 8. It also seems to choke my system whenever I open it. If anybody has any tips I'd love to hear them. Also, if anyone has suggestions for good Coldfusion development apps I'd like to hear about those too.

Coldfusion is Safe at Adobe

We're just beginning to use Coldfusion on some projects at work. I'm very excited about what I've seen so far. We've developed a few Flex apps now using VB.NET for the backend data integration and one using Coldfusion. The difference in speed of development between the two was like night and day. I couldn't believe how much easier it was using CF. When the Adobe acquisition occurred there was some concern here over what might happen to CF since Adobe hasn't really had a developer focus in the past. The interview below suggests that everything will be OK :)

Exclusive CFDJ Interview: Where's ColdFusion Headed Under Adobe? @ COLDFUSION DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL

l33t $p34k

For all you n0n-h4x0r$ out there.

BBC - h2g2 - An Explanation of l33t Speak

Google: Ten Golden Rules (Newsweek Article)

Interesting take on "corporate life."

"Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to business success for the next quarter century. Here's how we do it at google."

read more | digg story

A Preview of Flex Beta 1

I know it's all over the blogs already but here's a link to the new features in the Flex 2 Beta 1 release.

Mark Anders' Blog: Flex Friday Demos: A Preview of Flex Beta 1

CSS Templates

Found this on digg. Looks like good stuff, I hate wasting time trying to line things up just so. I'm all for anything that will make that easier :)

intensivstation :: CSS Templates :: Templates

OMNOVA Design Center Ver. 2.0

Well we launched phase 2 of the OMNOVA design center today. It didn't go quite as smoothly as we hoped but then again, it never does. The new version has a second product line with about 4500 SKU's and some pretty cool new features. Check it out at the link below.

Design Center

WiFi Sniffing

Good story about WiFi sniffing at a coffee shop I frequent. Be very carefull what you do on public WiFi networks.

Network Intrusion / Invasion

Sony BRAVIA - The Advert

Got this link from a friend today. Very cool, they didn't use any CGI, it's all real bouncey balls.

Sony BRAVIA - The Advert

Study Predicts Political, Economic Turmoil If UN's Internet Governance Schemes Succeed - Yahoo! News

Not sure how big of a threat this actually is but it sounds pretty scary to me. The UN has enough problems of its own, they don't need to worry about controling the Internet.

Study Predicts Political, Economic Turmoil If UN's Internet Governance Schemes Succeed - Yahoo! News

Here's a quick tip for ya....

If you're encrypting querystring variables and then pulling them into Flex (I think Flash will do the same thing) be sure to check your string for a plus sign ("+"). We spent over two hours this morning trying to figure out why a web service call was bombing. Turns out Flex will replace a "+" with a space (" ") so the id it was passing to our web service had a space in the middle of it which caused it to fail. To fix it we did a replace on the back end to put the "+" back in. Good times....

XD: Design for Devices

I've been interested in working with mobile devices for a while now but I just haven't gotten around to actually doing it. Not to mention trying to find a mobile phone here that supports Flashlite, isn't exactly the easiest thing to do. Anyway, here's a good article on design for multiple devices...

XD: Design for Devices

Macromedia Flex Apps

OMNOVA Solutions - Design Center

Active Dashboard

Here are a couple of Flex apps we've built so far. My co-worker is a Flash/Flex genious, he built all the front end stuff. I mainly built the back end. The data is all pulled using .NET web services and SQL server databases. I think they turned out pretty well. Our biggest problem initially was figuring out how to make Flex read in the data from the web service. We eventually learned that the results set had to be structured as an array of objects. In the future I think we'll be using Coldfusion to write the web service and CFC's. It's a lot simpler :)

Macromedia XML News Aggregator

Macromedia XML News Aggregator

Great source for Macromedia related news and events.

My New Tech Blog

Seems like everyone else has a blog about usefull stuff so I guess I should try to also. My goal is to use this space to talk about projects, post code snippets and ask for help. Hopefully someone out there will find this stuff helpful :