Charlie Griefer

Mike Chambers has officially announced FlashCamp San Francisco for the evening of April 16th, 2010 at the Adobe offices on Townsend Street.

What is it?

FlashCamp San Francisco is a free one night event hosted by Adobe covering everything you need to know about about the latest Flash Platform tools and technologies, including Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Flash CS5, Adobe Flash Builder 4 and mobile design and development.

Not only do you get to spend an evening with some of the top Flash talent in the area, but food and drink will be provided as well. How much would you expect to pay for all of this? Put your wallets away. The entire evening is yours for free.

If my math serves, this will be the 3rd FlashCamp at the location (the first was actually called FlexCamp), and these events have traditionally filled up very quickly. There's a very limited number of seats available, so do not hesitate. Register today!

A little less than a year ago I made the switch to OS X and treated myself to a Macbook Pro. Just recently, I started working with the TextMate IDE on a current contract.

My first impression was less than stellar. Visually, TextMate is pretty spartan. Applications on OS X are supposed to be pretty (see Coda). TextMate is most decidedly not pretty. But as I'm starting to learn, she's got an amazing personality.

Sometimes it's the little things that hook you in. For the longest time, I put off learning jQuery. Didn't see the need. I'm pretty comfortable with JavaScript, and couldn't justify investing the time to learn a new way to write what I already knew how to write. Then I learned about .toggle(). I was sold. I hopped into bed with jQuery and I've not looked back.

Today, I was introduced to TextMate's equivalent of .toggle(). It may seem trivial, but it got me hooked, and hungry to learn more.

For a while there, I was in a groove. Not a Nadel or Camden-like groove, but I was posting frequently enough that I no longer felt pangs of guilt over my poor neglected blog. But it's been weeks since my latest entry. What's up?

As of October 23rd, I am no longer with Amcom. I enjoyed my time there, but their long-term goals were not in line with my long-term goals. After a series of discussions, we ended with an amicable parting of the ways.

The following Monday, I started a new job. A 3 month contract at Barclays Global Investors. The work is good, but I've gone from a 3 mile 10 minute drive to an hour+ commute into San Francisco. I really enjoy being in the city, but the close to 3 hour commute each day has significantly cut into what I laughingly refer to as my "spare time".

I expect that I should be getting used to the new schedule soon, and might be able to organize/tweak my routine to allow for whipping out a blog entry or two in the evenings each week. We'll call this entry the new beginning.

Next up, I'll be detailing another new endeavor... coming on as Co Editor-in-Chief of the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update magazine. Yes, I'm aware that you think it's dead/defunct/EOL. I can assure you that this is not the case.

Meanwhile, as mentioned above... the current job is a contract, scheduled to go through the end of the year. If you are looking to bring on a ColdFusion developer with 13 years of experience sometime in early 2010, or know of somebody who might be, please drop me a line.

A few months back, I started using Mozy for off-site backups of my important files and folders. Back then, I stumbled across a way to back up hidden files and folders (such as the apache folder on OS X).

A friend noticed that I had this set up, and asked how to do it, as Mozy, by default, will only allow you to browse to public files and folders when choosing backup sets. I had completely forgotten how I did it, and spent a few minutes googling before finding the answer.

I'm doing a fresh install of OS X today, and as I'm setting up Mozy again, I just spent another few minutes trying to figure out how to back up hidden files and folders. So, in an effort to save me (and hopefully you) some time in the future... here's how it's done.

To show hidden files, run the following command from the Terminal application: defaults write com.mozy.Config "BDSShowHiddenFilesKey" -bool YES (taken from http://support.mozy.com/docs/en-user-home-mac/guide/tasks/mac_hidden_files.html).

A question came up yesterday on the cf-talk mailing list. The question involved a user who is filling out a form and choosing a user name. The poster wanted to check in "real time" (after the blur event on the username input) that the name is unique.

As Steve "Cutter" Blades points out, this can be accomplished using Jörn Zaefferer's Validation Plugin for jQuery. This plugin is essentially the defacto standard for doing validations via jQuery. It can be implemented very easily to do the most basic validations, but it can also be extended to do any number of complex validations.

That being said, I thought it still might be worthwhile to see a quick example of how to build out that specific functionality from scratch. How can we use jQuery to give a user real-time feedback as to whether or not a username is available? Start with the markup below:

Finishing up some last-minute packing before heading off for Adobe MAX tomorrow morning.

Saving a few dollars (I think... the price of gas might actually prove otherwise) by driving instead of flying. I like the convenience of having a car at the conference. Provides a little bit of freedom for getting out and about.

I'll be picking up Sean Corfield at 9am. It'll be nice to share the ride as it's a pretty monotonous drive down I-5. Saturday night I'll be hitting a Dodgers game with Scott Stroz and Ray Camden, which should be a good time. I don't follow baseball, but I do enjoy getting out to a live game. I haven't done that since I went to a Diamondback game back in AZ.

Sunday morning, Scott and I are heading over to ESPN Zone to watch the Giants vs. Chiefs. Scott and I both grew up in NJ, and are both Giants fans. Getting to watch the game together is going to be a blast. If you're at the conference and want to meet up, we'll be there for the early game (10:00am). Depending on who's playing and who shows up, we may stay for the late games as well.

Sunday night is the Community Summit. This is my first year as a User Group Manager, and I'm really looking forward to meeting other managers and Community Experts.

Monday the conference starts in earnest. I expect that most of the time I'll be in the ColdFusion Unconference area. Ezra Parker and I are going to be doing what we can to help Ray make sure everything runs smoothly.

With the exception of the Max Bash on Tuesday night, evenings are open. I'm sure both open evenings will fill up. Scott and I talked about the possibility of a trip to Fogo de Chao in Beverly Hills. Maybe Monday night? Any takers?

If you're going to be in town, come by the Unconference area and say hi. I look forward to seeing you there.

Paraphrased from the jQuery mailing list:

I have a table with links inside of it. Each <tr> has a unique ID assigned to it. How can I get the ID of the <tr> that contains the link that was clicked?

The following code snippet was included:

<tr id="1">
    <td>Name</td>
    <td>E-Mail</td>
    <td><a href="#" class="accept">Accept</a></td>
</tr>

jQuery provides a number of DOM traversal methods. While the initial thought might be to go with parent(), that would get the <td> containing the link. You could double up on parent(), but that seems a bit kludgy (IMO).

A question came up yesterday on the jQuery mailing list where somebody wanted to effectively "embed" data into a link. They essentially wanted to call a function on click, but needed to pass arguments. Since jQuery is supposed to be unobtrusive (e.g. "Find Something, Do Something"), how can we tell jQuery that, when a specific link is clicked, there's specific data associated with that link?

The jQuery data() method allows you to do just that.

The long-awaited and eagerly anticipated (by me) conclusion to my 3-part tutorial on learncf.com on using jQuery to return JSON data from a ColdFusion CFC.

The tutorial can be found here. When all is said and done, you'll have built this page, and hopefully you'll have a good (better?) understanding of how it all works.

As always, hit me up with questions or comments.

You know the situation. You have a form with 'x' number of text inputs. Eventually, you realize 'x' may not be enough for all users. But in the interest of keeping the page clean, you don't want to arbitrarily continue to add these elements.

What you really want to do is show a minimal amount initially, and then give the user the option of adding as many more (within reason) as that particular user might need. You might go about doing that by creating 100 fields and setting their CSS display attribute to "none", while adding a slick JavaScript function to allow the user to display as many as they need. And that would work, but...

Why create any DOM elements that aren't going to be used? Wouldn't it be better to dynamically create an element and add it to the DOM as the user needs it? (Hopefully you're nodding in affirmation) Great! Let's do it with jQuery.