The Lighter Side of Code

Have you ever Windows users noticed that you have to click into a certain perspective to scroll?  You know what I mean, you are looking at some code and you have to click on the browser to scroll to the debug info?  Well, I learned about KatMouse, that problem went out the window.

This is a simple lightweight little utility that does a awesome job.  So, here’s what it does.  If you have ever worked with a Mac you will know that you can scroll any window without clicking on that window.  It is very handy when you are comparing two documents to each other and debugging.  Well, this is what KatMouse does.  You can hover over any window and scroll.  Simple, but once you use it you will thank me.

Let me know what you think, cheers!

I am a fan of Google Chrome, but recently I installed an update and it totally jacked up my install.  Now when I launch Chrome I get the about:blank page and can’t go to any sites.  Has anyone else experienced this problem?  I originally thought that the problem was with my firewall or anti-virus, but after going through all of their options and logs, I have ruled that out.  If anyone out there know what the deal is, please help!

ClipX – This gem of a program is along the same lines as CoodClip, but not as buggy.  ClipX will save text and images to the clipboard and keep it all saved for later.  This program is sick, especially when you are testing accounts for large systems.

AutoHotKey – AutoHotKey is a new arrival to my list of programs.  I found this app when I saw my manager log into a system with a hotkey.  I was sold, since I am constantly logging in and out of accounts during testing.  You can also use this program to do automatic mouse clicks and even drag and drop.

Fiddler – For those who can not use Firefox in the office, I found this app.  It works much like Firebug does, and can be very helpful when debugging AJAX.

Check em out, hope it helps.  Cheers.

I was looking around the net for ways to dump queries into excel and I ran across this post on Todd Sharp’s blog <cfsilence>.  I thought it was pretty cool, so I looked up the specifications on Microsoft’s site.  Anyway, thanks to Todd for the inspiration.  I had to take one or more queries and dump them to excel, so I decided to make CFC and share it with everyone.  I hope this saves someone some time in doing something like this.  Cheers.

ObjectToExcel

You can also download it on the great RIAForge!

I was working with jQuery today and I had an unusual issue.  Some users were getting incorrect data when using the app and others had no problem at all.  After checking the code and the queries I started looking at the app using Firebug, the best plugin ever.  After a few minutes of trial and error, I was still stumped.  I could not understand why only a few people were getting wild results.  Well, the final straw was when we changed the caching rules in the browser to automatically reload data and never load new versions of the page.  That was when I finally was able to reproduce the problem.

It turns out that ajax calls will cache your requests unless you append a different value at the end of each request.  You can also stop the cahcing if you use the jQuery post method instead of the get method.  I had no idea that ajax did that, but thanks to Ken Foubert’s blog post for clearing that up.