Rob's tech blog...

Timezones ... hell on Earth at staggered intervals

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." - Ford Prefect The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Sometimes I wonder if my friends and colleagues across the pond in the US realise just how lucky they are? The majority of application languages are set by default to respect US date and time formats and a host of tools exists to work with these dates and times to calculate offsets and time spans and throw them in and out of databases*.

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How to access the font list in ColdFusion 8 ...

... without Java or authenticating against the CFIDE object! I've recently been working on a pure ColdFusion / CFImage implementation to generate dynamic title images in specific fonts. As part of the configuration of this particular code I needed to access the installed font list but the only method I could find documented required using CFIDE.adminapi.runtime which in turn requires that the code has the CFIDE admin username and password embedded.

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Alternatives to Mod.Rewrite under IIS6

I love Apache, if it were up to me the whole Internet would be served from Apache based servers running on a Linux based stack and website would never fall over, code would be clean and World Peace would follow shortly there after. Unfortunately, we live in the real world and part of this rather shocking wake up call is that we sometimes have to use IIS to serve ColdFusion websites. This isn't so bad, certainly after trying to get PHP stable under Windows Server 2003 and IIS ColdFusion is a doddle to install, stable and pretty much as good as its Nix based sister. But there are some things IIS 6 simply doesn't do well. One of these is URL rewriting.

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Getting started with ColdFusion Object Oriented Development - a real world guide

Object Orientation is one of those concepts that seems to be everywhere these days. A quick search will yield a ton of resources to introduce you to the concepts of OO and before you know it you'll be up to your neck in Encapsulation, Inheritance, Data Hiding, Instantiation, Invocation and a whole load of other terms that you'll be able to vaguely understand even if you can't spell most of them! There is something missing though, something that I've always found to be something of a stumbling block when attempting to flesh out my OO knowledge in any language (whether it be Python, PHP or ColdFusion). These concepts are very important to OO and you certainly have to understand them in order to design OO code but the examples given often stop just short of how to implement an entire web application using OO techniques.

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To Posterous, Love Metalab