July 16, 2008

dr. horrible in the big mango!

got to hand it to the whedons. they had a problem with international viewers not being able to connect to the video. they publicly acknowledged the problem on the blog's blog and then i'll-be-darned they went and fixed the problem.

geez, they've left nothing to complain about ;-)


so be there or be square.

many thanks to stephen for pointing out the international issue was resolved.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 6:52 PM 0 comments

July 15, 2008

say it ain't so dr. horrible!

got up at the crack of dawn today to get on my bike and get my intervals out of the way early (nothing like starting the day with some physical agony, the rest of the day can only get better ;-) so i could watch the first episode of Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. to my surprise (especially since the blog was discussing the episode's timezones for europe and down under) this turned up instead:



ouch. but hey ok, there was a "download from iTunes" link. so hey ho, off to the iTunes store i go. a buck ninety-nine? a bargain. click the buy button, "content not available in thai store". geez louise. ouch again.

suffice to say i'm fairly disappointed, i was expecting something a bit more global from these fine folks.

ps: none of the links in that flash filler work.

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posted by Paul Hastings @ 7:06 PM 2 comments

July 11, 2008

be like me!

if you're a fan of Joss Whedon's work (like say buffey or firefly) you may want to know about Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. which of course has a blog.

note the release dates:
  • 1st episode july 15th
  • 2nd episode july 17th
  • 3rd episode july 19th

the free airings will get pulled midnight july 20th.

they've got a comic over on mySpace.



everything is, of course, done up in flash.

so remember, if you have a friend that excels in math and science, report them!

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posted by Paul Hastings @ 4:12 PM 0 comments

icu4j 4.0 hits the streets

the latest version of the super cool icu4j i18n library has been released. the big changes (to me) are:
  • that it has upgraded it's resource data to Unicode 5.1 and CLDR 1.6
  • added date interval formatting (ie Jan 10, 2008 to Jan 20, 2008 becomes Jan 10-20, 2008, 10:10am to 11:10am becomes 10:10-11:10am, etc.). downside is that currently it's only gregorian calendar)
  • added DurationFormat so you can now format over a duration in time such as "2 days from now" or "3 hours ago".
  • added "Locale Service Provide" support for core java's new locale service--many folks just want the filthy-rich and frequently-updated locale data that icu4j has and not the whole library. i wonder if there is a way to backdoor this into coldfusion's locales?


you can grab the jar files/api docs and read more about the new stuff here.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 10:32 AM 0 comments

optional SMS parameters

there were a few threads in the support forums over the last few days about figuring out how to send vendor specific optional parameters via coldfusion's oh-so-sweet SMS gateway. i'd never had to do this before (mainly because we'd managed to avoid SMS vendors who required them) and after pouring thru the docs it looked like the coldfusion team might have missed this. no biggie, i've used the logica java lib that powers the SMS gateway before (to debug some soggy SMS vendors) so i passed along some old coldfusion code.

to be thorough though i got in touch w/the head SMS honcho tom jordahl just in case and lo & behold the coldfusion team actually did think of everything--it just slipped through the usually stellar cf docs.

so to add any optional parameters to your outgoing SMS you just need to do something like:

params=StructNew();
params["0x1501"]=BinaryDecode("1a2b3c4d","hex");
params["0x1522"]=CharsetDecode("my value","utf-8");
outgoingSMS.optionalParameters=params;


where the "0x1501", etc business are vendor specific optional parameters. which is SO much simpler than the gobs (and gobs) of cf/java code in my approach.

note the use of the charset/BinaryDecode functions. the values for optionalParameters have to be byte[], which those functions return.

btw you could also use the following if you need to send along just the one parameter:

out.optionalParameter=0x1500;
out.optionalParameterValue="1,2,3,4";


note that's optionalParameter without the "s".

so yeah, they really do make the hard things easy :-)

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posted by Paul Hastings @ 1:41 AM 0 comments