I have successfully got coldfusion talking to a Filemaker 9 database. It turned out to be pretty simple really.

I enabled ODBC/JDBC in Filemaker server. Installed the latest SequeLink on the coldfusion server. Setup a System DNS and pointed to it in the coldfusion admin. The only odd thing I ran into is in Filemaker field names can have spaces so when I do an insert into a field I have to put double quotes on the field name.

I have done this before when the data was clean and when I only needed to worry about one ID by just adding or subtracting one from the ID value. On my photo album pages I wanted to create a way to view my photos without lytebox. I have 2 IDs photo album and photo. Also my data is not the cleanest for example in my Denver photos I do not have a photo 1. I came up with a solution, not the most elegant I will admit. My work around for this problem includes looping the query to set the row number to a variable than instead of displaying against the photo ID I display against the row number. To create the next and previous I just add or subtract 1 from the row number. I also had to put a cfif to check to make sure my previous row variable was not -1. The code is below. You can see it in action here.

Continuing my week off playing around with cfimage, I am thinking this is fast becoming my favorite new feature in Coldfusion 8. This morning I was thinking it would be cool if Coldfusion could watermark images for me. After about 30mins playing around I came up with this.

First 2 lines I basically give both images a name. The reason the watermark is a png is I want to have the ability to use alpha channels. Next line I paste the watermark onto the image at 0x and 0y. I cheated and created the images the same size, but you could easily read the image info get the size then calculate where you want the watermark to be. The last line writes the image to the browser in the format of a jpeg. You can check it out in action at my CFwatermark page.

I have been playing around with the new cfimage tag in coldfusion 8. I am very impressed with the resize capability. Coldfusion 8 seemed to do a great job resizing my images into thumbnails. I created a tutorial here.

Here is a little bit of code to create thumbnails.

Update: My Using CFIMAGE to Generate Thumbnails tutorial was published at learncf.com

My Photoshop NTSC action is now on Adobe Exchange. If you have not check out the Adobe Exchange it is a great place to download tons of mostly free stuff for all of the Adobe products.
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=1304020

I have been playing around with Ray Camden's BlogCFC for the past few weeks. I am planning on moving over from BlogCFM. One think that I really wanted with my new blog was the ability to easily update links in my blog roll. BlogCFC did not have this out the box, but I came up with a very easy whay of doing this. Using BlogCFC's Textblocks feature I created a textblok called "blog roll". Next I created a pod called blogroll.cfm and called my blog roll text block using

Now all I have to do is update the links in my blog roll textblock, refresh blog cache and my blog roll is updated.

I discovered this great video how to on the net. It demonstrates how to setup remote desktop on the Macintosh for free, no need for apple remote desktop. It also allows you to control your Macintosh via a Windows machine. I have configured my Macintosh this way and it works great. I setup everything on a thumb drive so I can take it with me anywhere.

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Bruce the Yak in Final Cut Pro 5.1. To get to this easter egg, Open up your video scopes (tools menu - video Scopes) Control click on the vectorscope area then choose magnify do it again then control click and double click on magnify. If you do it just right a little patch of grass will come out and then along will come Bruce the Yak. If you are patientBruce will bubble up some words of wisdom.

I installed Coldfusion 7.0.2 and my TSX Avg MPG chart would not display in IE. It would display fine in FireFox and Safari. After doing some searching I found a trick that worked for me, under your web root create a folder named CFIDE inside of it create a folder called Scripts. Do a search on your hard drive for cf_runactivecontent.js and copy it to the CFIDE/Scripts folder you created. It is working like a charm for me now.

I have been a Tivo fan for a while so I was excited today to see the UPS man left my new dual tuner Tivo. First thing I have to upgrade it 80 hours will not do. I got a 300 gig HD from Compusa for $57.00 after $10.00 mail in rebate. I got the Tivo from Amazon.com for $45.00 after a $20.00 coupon I had and a $150 mail in rebate from Tivo. Now on to the upgrade, I have documented the very easy process with pictures and instructions after the jump.

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