Globalizing ColdFusionMX

sending multipart SMS

2010-06-24T00:44:00.005+07:00

let's see if i remember how this blogging thing works ;-) even in this age of twitter, SMS is still a popular form of mobile communication and one which ColdFusion handles quite nicely via it's SMS gateway. While it's shockingly easy to send and receive SMS via ColdFusion, one thing that i did struggle with recently was how to send a multipart or concatenated SMS using ColdFusion. hopefully

icu4j 4.01 released

2009-01-16T07:56:00.000+07:00

the icu4j project has just released version 4.01. its a regular maintenance release with the following changes (common across all flavors): Unicode 5.1 locale data: Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) 1.6 charset converter file size improvement date interval formatting (note only gregorian calendar is supported n this release) improved plural support specific

timezone spatial locator

2009-01-06T20:11:00.000+07:00

one of the challenges of trying to use timezones (tz) in an application is that there are so darned many of them--most of which aren't relevant to a given user. for example, have a look at the timezone CFC testbed. the list of tz just goes on and on (and on). you can narrow down the list somewhat if you know the user's location (maybe via geoLocation or, oh yeah, simply asking them), but big

new version of iText

2008-11-12T06:31:00.004+07:00

bruno's released a new version of iText, 2.1.4. You can grab the binaries from: core iText: iText-2.1.4.jar RTF bits: iText-rtf-2.1.4.jar RUPS: iText-rups-2.1.4.jar the source (in several different formats) from here. and of course you really want to read the release notes for this version. keep in mind if you want to use iText and keep cf's CFDocument bits you either want to repackage

unicode reading list

2008-09-18T09:21:00.001+07:00

the unicode consortium just released a recommended reading list. there's even a couple in french & german. i see one i don't have yet....off to amazon. you can never have enough books on unicode (or coldfusion for that matter) ;-)

case shennigans

2008-08-26T11:37:00.002+07:00

i really feel for our turkish cf brethren, they always seem to be getting the short end of the stick. a couple of weeks ago there was an issue in the support forums with someone using turkish locale (tr_TR) that was having problems getting case right using coldfusion's uCase() & lCase() functions. there's a couple of special characters, "i" & "ı" (that's small letter i & small letter dotless i)

set your time--or else!

2008-08-25T20:54:00.001+07:00

if you have servers/workstations in Thailand you probably should know that as of aug-23rd every business computer in the kingdom has to set it's time to the new TST (Thai Standard Time) or get fined a wheelbarrow full of money (from 100,000 to 500,000 baht, that's about $2500 to $15,000 US, yikes). i can understand the idea of using a timeserver to keep stuff in synch (really, who doesn't?) but

the end is nigh

2008-08-07T14:43:00.000+07:00

my hair and fingernails starting following out. their's a gray pall over the whole landscape. the summer sun feels weak, like mid-winter. birds are dropping out of the sky. even the bugs stopped buzzing. brett favre's a new york jet? oh my.

dr. horrible in the big mango!

2008-07-16T18:52:00.001+07:00

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.

say it ain't so dr. horrible!

2008-07-15T19:06:00.001+07:00

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:

be like me!

2008-07-11T16:12:00.002+07:00

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

icu4j 4.0 hits the streets

2008-07-11T10:32:00.001+07:00

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

optional SMS parameters

2008-07-11T01:41:00.002+07:00

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

whose june 17th was that again?

2008-06-17T17:23:00.001+07:00

june 17th has been touted as "firefox download day". while i'm a long term firefox user, this june 17th business just annoys me no end. june 17th where? what time? what timezone? i've looked fairly hard for any details but all i see is this standalone, kind of useless date of june 17th. how on earth do you think you can coordinate a global project by not giving folks useful info? geez. i've

a "mostly" compliant java based email parser

2008-05-14T19:05:00.000+07:00

if you've ever had to deal with email addresses you know it's sometimes a black black art to verify RFC-2822 compliance. ColdFusion's isValid() function is certainly handy for this but it's not 100% (actually i don't think anything is 100% RFC-2822 compliant, just have a read thru RFC-2822 to see what i mean). well today on the javamail list someone announced The only more-or-less-2822-

the death of codepages?

2008-05-06T06:55:00.000+07:00

mark davis, via the unicode mailing list, mentioned an offical google blog posting that shows that unicode "was the most frequent encoding found on web pages" since dec-2007 (unicode, utf-8, is the blue line on the graph below). wow. i guess people really do get it :-) reference: Moving to Unicode 5.1

math precision out your ears

2008-04-10T11:54:00.002+07:00

we very often have to deal with scientific data that's been gathered by various sensors or lab equipment, some of it needing math done with a fairly high precision that ColdFusion sometimes couldn't handle. flopping down to java BigDecimal was the usual way of dealing with this. but yesterday in the ColdFusion support forums, Hemant Khandelwal causally mentioned that cf8 had added a new method,

timely advice: exercise!

2008-01-02T12:18:00.001+07:00

not that anyone should need more reason to exercise but a recent blog post from the wonderfully named Terra Sigillata blog from science blogs points to another very good reason--especially at this time of year--exercise can help with alcohol related brain damage. and as we all know, coldfusion/flex developers need all the un-damaged brain cells we can find. you younger folks out there probably

icu4j 3.8.1 maintenance release

2007-12-13T10:05:00.000+07:00

not much new stuff here: updated to use CLDR version 1.5.1 updates to timezone formatting and parsing (haven't checked if the bananas tz update is included) some bug fixes detailed here in the readme file download the lib here: icu4j 3.8.1

another timezone two-step: venezuelan style

2007-12-04T09:33:00.000+07:00

in case you missed the news, the politician in venezuela or should i say the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, has decided to implement a half hour timezone (tz) change. The tz will change from -4 hours UTC to -4.5 hours UTC. the sweet part is that the change will supposedly occur next week, 9-dec-2007. i say supposedly because it was also supposed to happen back in september or maybe august.

in your face new york

2007-10-01T18:38:00.000+07:00

for me this has been a very interesting sporting weekend. first off i finally broke down and bought a road bike, a Giant OCR-3 (cheap starter bike, besides the price biggest plus is that the dealer is 5 minutes from my home/office)--since i've been riding a mountain bike for years i didn't want to blow a wad of baht on a road bike that i might end up hating. i've been riding in the "bush" less

icu4j 3.8 final released

2007-09-15T21:18:00.000+07:00

the final version of icu4j version 3.8 has just been released. to recap what's in this release: uses the latest cldr 1.5.0.1 locale data the long discussed rule based timezone changes which gives us the ability to read and write timezone data in RFC2445 VTIMEZONE format as well as also providing access to Olson timezone transitions! this is something many people have been needing for quite some

more coldfusion 8 cfquery goodness

2007-09-01T11:43:00.000+07:00

by now i suppose everyone knows about the new SQL goodness in coldfusion 8's cfquery. by using cfquery's optional result argument you can access identity (auto-increment) values if your database returns them (and of course you actually use them). one other useful bit of info returned in the result structure is recordcount which according to the docs returns the Number of records (rows) returned

icu4j 3.8 draft released

2007-08-09T07:22:00.000+07:00

a draft of icu4j version 3.8 has just been released. what's so hot about this release? well a lot actually: it uses the latest and greatest cldr 1.5 locale data the long discussed rule based timezone changes which gives us the ability to read and write timezone data in RFC2445 VTIMEZONE format as well as also providing access to Olson timezone transitions! this is stuff many people have been

wow, that was fast

2007-08-08T17:39:00.001+07:00

i submitted a bug to sun about australian and new zealand time formats being wrong compared to the CLDR on 18-may (CLDR & some common experience says it should be "h:mm:ss a", ie 12 hour AM/PM format, while core java thinks it should be "H:mm:ss", ie 24hr format). according to this (might require login) it was fixed on 21-may--funny thing is that i was only informed via the bug parade just "now"

PHP i18n

2007-08-02T02:00:00.000+07:00

normally i would say that PHP's unicode/i18n support is fairly lame compared to coldfusion (actually i'd call it a joke but i'm not trying to be controversial here). well i stumbled on an interesting line on the ICU site concerning how PHP 6 would be using the ICU library (icu4j's sister C/C++ library). i was sort of shocked that PHP was considering this (hey PHP is lame after all), so thinking

cf8 javacast

2007-08-01T20:33:00.001+07:00

another interesting coldfusion 8 upgrade that i've kind of glossed over before are the new data types that javacast supports: bigdecimal byte char short as well as the nifty new ability to cast Arrays (which has been something i'd actually requested a while back): bigDecimalArray=javacast("bigdecimal[]",cfArray); very cool.

scorpio's i18n changes

2007-07-26T21:30:00.000+07:00

in case you were wondering, the main i18n changes for scorpio (coldfusion 8) really revolved around upgrading coldfsion's JDK to version 6. what did that buy us? well core Java's first set of locales based on CLDR data: zh_SG - Chinese (Simplified), Singapore en_MT - English, Malta en_PH - English, Philippines en_SG - English, Singapore el_CY - Greek, Cyprus id_ID - Indonesian, Indonesia ga_IE

Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Grave

2007-07-24T15:39:00.000+07:00

the wonderfully named "moronland" site has a page for the 13 worst translation mistakes. most of these should be familiar if you follow tex texin's (the unicode bulldog) Marketing Translation Mistakes. the "moronland" page is kind of unique in that it coins the term Babelfished, as in I wonder if these companies just Babelfished the slogans into another language. another set of examples why

derby does unicode

2007-06-25T23:49:00.000+07:00

no idea why but i only just now got around to testing coldfusion 8's embedded derby database for unicode support. first thing i did was create a db using ben's going-to-get-even-easier advice to create a db in derby. i got a bit freaked out when i tried to create a table to test unicode strings using an Nvarchar data type and derby spit back a Feature not implemented: NATIONAL CHAR VARYING error.

coldfusion 8 minor flex annoyance

2007-06-01T09:54:00.000+07:00

if any of your coldfusion 7 CFC methods have a return type of "any" these will probably fail in coldfusion 8 and flex w/the dreaded TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference error. the public beta seems to have made type conversions to flex more "rigorous". you should also watch out for cases where your return type is "struct" and you're really

party like it's 1999

2007-05-21T09:15:00.000+07:00

there was a recent aticle in Time that once again reminds me that the world is a big, complex place. while at one time Ethiopia was probably best known for famine & despair and LiveAid (though i prefer to recall their great long distance runners & links to bob marley), come september 11 (yes, 9/11) they'll literally be partying like it's 1999 because in the Ethiopic calendar (also known as the

God helps those who help themselves

2007-05-19T23:57:00.000+07:00

since it looks like they'll be playing ice hockey in hell before ColdFusion makes use of the very cool icu4j library, i figure we better start helping core java get it's locale resource act together. so lets start somewhere near my neighborhood, australia & new zealand. core java's locale data for en_Au (Australia) and en_NZ (New Zealand) time formats is a bit off. it uses a format of H:mm:ss

icu4j 3.6.1 maintenance release

2007-05-02T11:19:00.000+07:00

if you're using icu4j 3.6 and supporting chinese locales you should grab this upgrade. specifically if you support zh_CN, zh_TW,zh_HK,zh_MO, or zh_SG you'll probably want this upgrade as the actual locale data is picked up from the ICU locale "zh" data bundle which does not contain any regional specific data such as currency. if i understand correctly, the locale data was keyed off scripts, for

g11n chapter: anything else need covering?

2007-04-28T14:14:00.000+07:00

in case you missed it, there's a new edition of the ever popular cf wack (ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit) on the way. and in case you don't already know, i handled the chapter on cf & globalization (g11n). given the timezone hell i recently passed through and the recent US and Australia DST changes, i plan on beefing up the section on timezones. and in keeping w/ben's idea to slim

get it while it's hot: javainetlocator library updated

2007-02-03T00:43:00.001+07:00

nigel, working from his mysterious secret base, has updated the javainetlocator library that powers the geoLocator CFC. if you use this CFC you need this update, lots of new IPs have emerged which the old library doesn't have data for. you can find the release notes (such as they are ;-) here.

sorry, new year's eve has been canceled

2007-01-01T10:25:00.000+07:00

bangkok has just experienced its first terrorist attacks since i've lived here (and that's more than 25 years). while it's not clear who is responsible (the two main suspects are the maniac islamic terrorists in the deep south and the last government's die-hard knuckleheads--ie morons of one sort or another), there are some reports that the bombs were loaded with shrapnel intended to kill and

buy this book

2006-12-19T00:03:00.000+07:00

if you do any work with iText, you need this book. bruno has done an excellent job explaining iText in all it's glory. it's got great details without the fluff and filler. loads of practical examples--while the code examples are mainly java, it's so well explained you can use it as a resource porting to coldfusion. and the cover's kind of cool too ;-) really, buy this book.

more timezone: timezones by country

2006-12-16T19:18:00.000+07:00

been way too busy to blog about anything lately but this might be useful to somebody, somewhere. the super cool icu4j lib has had a method to retrieve timezones by country for a couple of versions now. it's something i wish core java had, but here's the next best thing--a csv file of icu4j's timezone data along w/country. the data consists of "full" country name (Thailand), 2-letter ISO-3166

oh those crazy western australians

2006-11-25T11:17:00.000+07:00

after being rejected in three referendums (in 1975, 1984, and 1992), western australia's starting on a three year experiment with DST. great. fine. the trouble is they just passed the final legislative hurdle for this on November 21, 2006 and will start the experiment Dec 3, 2006! oh my. every monkey and his uncle is going to be scrambling to patch servers, workstations and heaven knows what

icu4j 3.6 hits the streets

2006-10-07T13:38:00.000+07:00

was too busy to blog this when it was actually released but icu4j version 3.6 was released on 1-Oct-2006. the release notes can be found here. note that that are two new "supplemental" jars, one for XLIFF conversion tools and another for charsets. to recap the new bits for this release: supports unicode 5.0 common locale data repository (CLDR) 1.4 globalization preferences, flexible container

heads up! DST changes coming

2006-09-29T12:34:00.000+07:00

in case you missed it, the US will have some significant DST changes in 2007. instead of DST kicking in on april 2nd, in 2007 it will start march 11th and end november 4th (instead of october 29th). those are the actual dates, the "Energy Policy Act of 2005" has the DST starting on the "second Sunday in March" and ending on "the first Sunday in November". hopefully ColdFusion 8 (aka scorpio)

icu4j 3.6 hits beta

2006-09-22T10:26:00.000+07:00

get it while it's hot, icu4j 3.6 has just had a beta release. see the read me for more info.

analysis of the olmec hieroglyphs

2006-09-19T01:18:00.000+07:00

michael everson, a virtual language encoding machine and leading light in the unicode world, has just posted a brief analysis of the recently discovered "olmec hieroglyphs". while the analysis isn't a "decipherment", i find the way michael attacked the analysis fascinating.

icu4j 3.6 hits alpha

2006-09-09T11:50:00.000+07:00

the ICU project has announced the release of an alpha version of icu4j 3.6. you can grab this cool java library here. so what's new for 3.6? according to the brief release notes: support for Unicode 5.0 25% more CLDR locale data in 245 locales in ICU a flexible date/time format generator has been added, allowing for multiple date and time format patterns to be generated that are valid for

when is a flex event listener not an event listener?

2006-09-02T14:47:00.000+07:00

as i mentioned in my last post, i'm porting a js UI lib over to flex/flash. one of the things this library does is provide several tools for working with images (well map images actually), it does stuff like measure distances, areas, and angles, rubberband zoom boxes (oh how i wish google map et al would wise up and add this functionality natively, click to re-center the map image then do a

hello flex builder 2, goodbye old workstation

2006-09-02T01:55:00.000+07:00

doing mostly ColdFusion work and doing it with cfstudio 5 and occasionally eclipse and lately cfeclipse, i was perfectly happy running an "ancient" workstation. how ancient? an intel pentium III (797 mhz) on an intel motherboard that maxxed out at 512 mb RAM (which i used to think was a lot). it's hard disks got bigger, win2k gave way to xp (way later than everybody else), WIFI supplanted 10T,

help localize ColdFusion info!

2006-08-09T15:05:00.000+07:00

tim buntel's looking for folks who want to help localize ColdFusion information including datasheets, whitepapers, and developer center articles. somebody in the Tawainese user community has already submitted some Chinese (traditional and simplified) stuff. and i'd also like to remind folks that dean harmon's looking for help localizing the cfreport builder application. so what are you

just the flex, mam

2006-08-02T03:02:00.000+07:00

relative to ted patrick's just mxml and ActionScript 3 site i guess us ColdFusion folks are verbose blabbermouths ;-) for someone new to Flex, i love it's simplicty and get to the point style. very cool.

me too....scorpio i18n wishlist

2006-07-28T00:44:00.000+07:00

i've never seen a bandwagon i didn't want to jump on, so i'm jumping aboard this round of ColdFusion wishlist blog articles with my own i18n one. but unlike the other wishlists, my i18n list is rather short and sweet. why? over the years ColdFusion has more or less answered the majority of my i18n needs. unicode capability? got it. java locales? yup. and the introduction of CFCs pretty much

OT: rolling rock moving to new jersey?

2006-06-09T13:28:00.000+07:00

one of the icons from my youth in pennsylvania, rolling rock beer, was recently bought by Anheuser-Busch (AB). as soon as the deal was closed AB announced it was moving rolling rock production to its newark brewery! from a beer drinker's standpoint, this is a bad thing. the brewery is different, the water is different, the ingredients will probably be sourced differently, geez louise how can it

there is such a thing as timezone hell

2006-05-28T01:48:00.000+07:00

and i know because i've been visiting there for the last 2 weeks or so. and yes, it is a few doors down from classpath hell. if you're outside the US but host in the US or if your ColdFusion application deals w/timezones, and accurate datetime data is important you might want to pay attention this. let me provide a bit of background first. ColdFusion datetimes are, i think,

BoardFusion's i18n bits

2006-05-16T01:35:00.000+07:00

just in case you missed it, the BoardFusion project (BF) has released a preview of the user interface (UI). and while the project accumulated a lot of useful comments, i'm posting this to solict some specific i18n feedback before we close the books on the UI preview. so this is the "last gas for 200 km" review. to recap: i18n is a zero level goal (that is the project won't leave home without it

norwegian locale A-Go-Go

2006-05-10T16:44:00.000+07:00

some recent work has me again turning over the rocks where core java locales are hiding and once again a closer look at what crawled out reveals just how sweet icu4j's locale support really is. according to several resources, such as ethnologue and the odin archive (gotta love that name), norway has two main written languages Bokmål and Nynorsk, with Bokmål being dominant. in core java there is

get it while it's hot: BoardFusion UI Preview

2006-04-26T21:36:00.000+07:00

it's rare that i get the chance to build an i18n application from the ground up, we're usually involved after the fact. the BoardFusion (BF) project is a different critter altogether. i18n has been a major goal for this project from the outset. we're going to use icu4j as the main i18n library as we currently plan on supporting non-gregorian calendars, locale-based collation, user timezones and

happy new year

2006-04-13T03:01:00.000+07:00

today (the 13th) marks the start of the traditional thai new year, Songkran. the new year was originally an astrologically calculated date (curiously the traditional thai calendar was lunisolar but the new year was based on solar calculations) but is now fixed on april 13th (i think some time during WWII). it marked the actual start of the new year in thailand up until 1880 AD. it became another

proposed timezone changes for icu4j

2006-04-05T18:45:00.000+07:00

in response to some RFEs, IBM's Yoshito Umaoka has proposed some interesting changes to ICU4J's timezone (tz) classes including methods to list tz rules as well as handle iCalendar's VTIMEZONE. to summarize from his from his email: com.ibm.icu.util.ZoneRule: an abstract class representing a tz transition rule. this class represents basic properties of zone rule such as raw UTC offset and DST

heads up: timezone CFC updated

2006-03-29T13:53:00.000+07:00

well, the icu4j versions were anyway. dan switzer seems to have turned up a problem with the icu4j version that i also encountered over the weekend. the icu4j version extended the core java version by simply substituting com.ibm.icu.util.TimeZone for the core java TimeZone class. unfortunately if you didn't explicitly pass in a timezone (tz), you were supposed to get the server's tz. however

stealth seems to be icu4j's middle name

2006-03-27T00:19:00.000+07:00

once again, icu4j has quietly slipped out another stealthy upgrade to version 3.4.4. this update fixes "crashing bugs in the data". i'm not really sure how critical this update is but better safe than sorry.

Australian DST change: a day late and a dollar short?

2006-03-26T15:42:00.000+07:00

while i should have been more than vaguely aware of this issue, it seems even Sun was laying down on the job a bit. Australia observes DST (Daylight Saving Time or Summer Time as they say down under) just like the US and other countries. DST in Australia normally ends March 26, 2:59AM (local time). however this year, to accomodate the Commonwealth games, the DST end date was pushed back to April

javaRB/RBjava CFCs updated

2006-03-11T14:25:00.000+07:00

i've added the new messageFormat method to the existing CFCs and re-arranged the versions a bit. you can download this tool here with a simple testbed here and a testbed for the new messageFormat method here. there are now six versions of the resource bundle (rb) tool, the three major versions include: coreJava: if you don't need other calendars, locales, etc. offered by IBM's ICU4J library.

"remote" classpath revisited

2006-03-07T06:49:00.000+07:00

i seem to have gotten myself into the habit of calling spike's cool "Loading java class files from a relative path" technique as the "remote classpath" technique--i guess i can blame christian cantrell for that. in any case, this technique works very well in most cases where you don't have access to a server's classpath (most shared hosts for example). where it tends not to work is, from my

MessageFormat or how not to read error messages

2006-03-06T19:35:00.000+07:00

in an earlier post i was babbling on about how neat the com.ibm.icu.text.MessageFormat class was. i was also on about how you'd need a java wrapper class to really make use it. i thought that because whenever i tried something like: ozLocale="en_AU@calendar=gregorian"; thisPattern="On {0,date,short} at {0,time,short}, I left {1} for the {2}. I took {3,number,currency}"; thisLocale=

an unstealthy icu4j upgrade

2006-03-02T00:27:00.000+07:00

IBM has announced a maintenance release for icu4j, version 3.4.3. among the goodies for this version are: Olson 2006a time zone data (just in time to get ready for the new DST in the US) corrects mistakes in the CLDR data found in icu4j 3.4.2 MessageFormat (like core java's but it can use icu4j's super cool ULocale class) upgraded to @stable" fixed bugs in DateFormat, SimpleDateFormat, etc.

good i18n practices really are good

2006-02-21T19:48:00.000+07:00

an i18n-related issue popped up on the cfeclipse list yesterday that reinforced (at least to me) that good i18n practices really are good. a user had their eclipse encoding setup as UTF-8 yet was getting their unicode coldfusion pages garbaged. my first look at this used code from our existing codebase and of course it worked. for the life of me, well for 2-3 hours anyway, i couldn't see how

BIG numbers in coldfusion

2006-02-20T13:47:00.000+07:00

mark kruger has an interesting post on his blog concerning formatting big numbers in coldfusion. in that post's comments sean corfield points out that the real issue is the precision of the float datatype that coldfusion uses under the covers. this issue has also come up a few times on the support forums and probably the best answer is (as usual) to dip down into the java underlying coldfusion to

unicode font madness

2006-02-18T18:20:00.000+07:00

ever needed a font to handle Berber language? or Khmer? while i most often use the massive Arial Unicode MS for our i18n work there are some rare occasions where it doesn't contain the glyphs we need. and other occasions where i simply like the way a font looks (like Tifinagh abjad used to write Berber). well, look no further. the Unicode Font Guide For Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems

2006-02-16T04:07:00.000+07:00

i seem to keep missing these....the super cool icu4j lib was updated 20-jan-2006 to version 3.4.2. it contains a few bug fixes (Chinese date format/calendar, currency rounding bug for de_CH locale, etc.) but the biggest deal is that this release dumps the dependency on core java timezone data. while i normally use core java's timezone classes this puppy has several methods that i find pretty

more on encoding

2006-02-14T11:12:00.000+07:00

encoding issues just never seem to end. after another week's worth of helping folks slog thru their encoding problems, i recalled that sun has recently published a pretty decent article on their SDN about encoding (even includes a nice mojibake example). and while it's mainly java/jsp it's worth the read for us cf folks.

SMS timezone gotcha

2006-01-17T16:11:00.000+07:00

been spending some time lately researching SMS technology. first off the whole industry is great, never seen so much jargon in my whole life (anyone doing i18n work will tell you, we simply love our jargon): SMSC, MT, PDU, MSC, HLR, MSISDN, yadda yadda yadda, bing bam boom, i could go on all day ;-) this stuff just rolls off your tongue. one kind of subtle gotcha i've run into was timezones (tz)

icu4j stealth upgrade

2005-10-31T16:10:00.000+07:00

no idea why i missed this (i guess it was never publically announced) but icu4j was recently updated to version 3.4.1 (a maintainance release from 3.4). not a whole lot of changes, i guess the most significant is a fix to the new CharsetDetector class. anyway, grab it to keep in lock step w/IBM's ICU project.

language matters?

2005-10-25T20:50:00.000+07:00

you bet it does. just ask the 20 poor slobs who had to cough up 100 new turkish lira (about $76US) each for using the letters "Q" and "W" in kurdish language placards in turkey. it seems that these letters aren't in the turkish alphabet and there's a 1928 law ("Law on the Adoption and Application of Turkish Letters") that requires all signs and what not to only use turkish letters. in case you

g11n gotchas

2005-10-24T14:46:00.000+07:00

a couple-three emails i got recently prompted me to think (again) about what globalization means to the average coldfusion developer. coincidentally mark davis, IBM's front man for g11n and president of the Unicode Consortium, is putting together a presentation for the next Unicode conference dealing with "Globalization Gotchas". i highly recommend cf developers doing i18n/g11n work to review

NSA granted internet location-tracking patent

2005-09-23T20:20:00.000+07:00

the NSA was granted patent #6,947,978 on Sept. 20, 2005. this geo-location patent, invented by stephen huffman and michael reifer, with the NSA as it's assignee differs pretty significantly from other geo-location patents by Digital Envoy and Quova/Microsoft in that it relies on measuring the latency between a bunch of different internet locations to build a "network latency topology map." in

help localize cfreport builder

2005-09-08T19:44:00.000+07:00

dean harmon, who looks after cfreport, has reported on his blog that you can easily localize cf report builder into your own language. the language files (located under the cf report builder install dir in the Languages dir) are sort of simple key/value pairs with the values being utf-8 encoded. the key/value pairs are delimited using "tab-equal sign-tab" for instance dragAndDrop[tab]=[tab]drag

make cfselect your sock puppet

2005-08-30T14:11:00.000+07:00

i had the need to keep a cfselect synched up w/other cfform objects like grids and trees that were being changed by user inputs (managing IMAP mail folders for instance). digging around the flex docs again, it seems cfselect is part of the mx.controls.listclasses package and you can indeed manipulate it quite a bit using that package's DataSelector/DataProvider class methods. for me the

serendipitous flash forms

2005-08-28T16:35:00.000+07:00

as most of the coldfusion/arcIMS usergroup knows, i have a thing about xml. i don't know why (perhaps too many fast balls to the head, one too many falls off my mountain bike, too much tequila in college, who knows) but whenever i see any complex xml my brain just freezes. try as i might, i just can't seem to get my head around anything but the most simple xml. it got to the point where i ported

thou shall not....

2005-08-20T18:06:00.000+07:00

use illegal ActionScript (AS) in flash forms. i'm posting this as it might save someone else time and frustration. in order to keep a lid on how wild you can get w/the super cool flash forms in cf7 there are certain AS keywords which you aren't allowed to use (in any way, shape or form): __proto__ createTextField loadMovie attachMovie Delete New createChild duplicateMovieClip registerClass

somewhat less cheesy flash forms trick

2005-08-15T21:27:00.000+07:00

everybody's doing it. you know you want to. so why not go ahead and get on the flash forms bandwagon? it seems like pretty much every cf developer on the block has now developed a penchant for using cf7's new flash forms. quite a large part of this popularity is due to the ActionScript injection gravy that's been posted on AS Fusion,cf_pim and cfform. who would have thought a few lines of

i18n calendars updated

2005-08-08T11:12:00.000+07:00

i've updated the i18nCalendars CFCs to include the new coptic and ethiopic calendars added to icu4j 3.4. and that makes a total of nine calendars. i don't imagine having any use for either of these calendars right now but given the recent focus on africa and ethiopia in particular, you never know. if you're interested in using icu4j's new AcceptLanguage method, you'll need to wrapper it. this

more timezone stuff

2005-08-06T20:41:00.000+07:00

i got an email from a coldfusion developer in iran (Behrang Noroozinia) complaining that my timezone CFC wasn't casting to his timezone (tz) correctly. double checking i found that was i was using decimal hours with cf's dateAdd function which only accepts integers. i guess nobody else noticed as most users live in tz w/whole number offsets from UTC. in iran however they have an offset of 3.5

hot hot hot: icu4j 3.4 released

2005-08-02T02:12:00.000+07:00

version 3.4 of icu4j, the super cool i18n java library, has just been released. if you do i18n work in coldfusion or java, this is the library. you can download it from here, it's readme file can be found here. and since i'm on a timezone craze this week, i also noticed that the timezone class has added generic timezones (like "Pacific Time", "United Kingdom", etc.) that should help simplify

ESRI webservices

2005-07-29T19:32:00.000+07:00

ESRI, one of the really BIG guns of the GIS industry, has stealthily released a public, non-commercial version of their extremely cool ArcWeb Service. as far as i can tell there aren't any limitations to its use beyond that it be non-commercial and they promise that it will be permanently free of advertising. we've used their SOAP APIs to talk to ArcWeb from coldfusion--it was a breeze. you can

oh boy, timezone DST info

2005-07-29T02:48:00.000+07:00

info concerning DST (daylight saving time) is one of the more requested additions to my timezone CFC. many folks have wanted to know when a particular timezone's DST starts and ends, what are it's rules, etc. i've resisted adding it as i thought the only "good" way to get at this data was via the Olsen timezone data which is kind of soggy and hard to light. a couple of days ago somebody in the

are you fit enough?

2005-07-22T18:04:00.000+07:00

if you're looking to get your ColdFusion MX 7.0 Certification, there's no better way to get "fit" for the actual exam than CentraSoft's CFMX Exam Buster 7.0. a boatload of questions (875 questions w/answers too ;-) covering pretty much all aspects of the actual exam, sort of like a workout w/mike tyson in his hey day except no ear-biting. and in case you're wondering, brian simmons, who built

get it while it's hot: icu4j 3.4 beta

2005-07-02T12:41:00.000+07:00

IBM just announced the beta release of icu4j 3.4. some of the nifty new stuff in this release includes: updated to Unicode 4.1 collation engine updated to UCA 4.1 fully conformant with CLDR 1.3 charset detection framework (which looks very useful) message formatting apostophe solution additional usability APIs new currency listing API more API for accessing CLDR data Coptic and Ethiopic

utf-7

2005-06-23T17:00:00.000+07:00

as you might already know utf-7 is not a supported java (and hence cf) charset. it does however exist in the wild, mainly as part of bounced email systems and sometimes used in webmail like hotmail (well mainly hotmail, i've never seen it anywhere else to tell you the truth) as well as MS Exchange. folks have been complaining off and on about this for years, many mistakenly blaming macromedia for

eat your heart out core java

2005-06-04T11:57:00.000+07:00

the unicode consortium has announced the release of version 1.3 of the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). this release pumps up the locale data from 230+ to 296 locales (96 languages and 130 territories). this release's highlights include: a complete set of POSIX-format data generated, along with a tool to generate different platform versions. the addition of new data to support localization

turkish cf forum

2005-05-29T23:12:00.000+07:00

the turkish CFUG has just started up a turkish language cf forums. as you might know turkish is particularly difficult to handle. this is probably a good place to look for help when thos edifficulties rear up and head-butt you. via Oğuz Demirkapı's blog.

goowy does unicode

2005-05-05T15:48:00.000+07:00

the newest webmail kid on the block goowy has just implemented unicode in their super-cool flash based webmail. originally the beta didn't support unicode and as usual, i was complaining a blue streak about them not supporting unicode and even gave them a public "bah humbug" for that. gary benitt, one of the founders of goowy, publicly stated they would be implementing unicode this week and by

cf book support forums

2005-05-03T21:03:00.000+07:00

ben forta has put up support forums for his books. the Advanced ColdFusion Application Development book (with my chapter on globalization) forum can be found here. if you have any questions or find any errors or just plain crazy stuff please let us know.

new sun i18n content

2005-04-28T11:08:00.000+07:00

sun has released the latest version of its eGADC Newsletter for folks "who want to know about the latest internationalization and localization developments at Sun". among the more interesting content: how to make utf-8 HTML pages which is a good read even if it does contain a bizzare note about windows notepad and the BOM. determining a file's encoding most notable for it's advice, basically use

advanced CFMX 7 book released

2005-04-27T23:43:00.000+07:00

on the off-chance you didn't know already the Advanced ColdFusion MX 7 Application Development book has been released. i was one of the co-authors along with a boatload of very smart people (Ben Forta, Dain Anderson, Jeff Bouley, Ray Camden, Adam Churvis, David Churvis, Ken Fricklas, Sam Neff, Sarge Sargent, Robi Sen,Lucas Sherwood, and Jeff Tapper) with the whip-cracking Angela Kozlowski as

cldr 1.3 goes beta

2005-04-23T14:11:00.000+07:00

the unicode consortium has announced the release of cldr 1.3 beta version. chief among the new stuff is data to support timezone localization, data for UN M.49 regions (including continents and region), and some number and data tests to help you verify your implementation. the only thing i'm not yet seeing is a clear/standard indication of writing system directionality. you still have to read

charsets galore

2005-03-24T16:27:00.000+07:00

after researching charsets for the [expletive deleted] time to help somebody on the forums, i decided it was time to create a tool to do away with some of that kind of tedious labor. so building on the API for java.nio.charset.Charset i whipped out a small CFC to poke and prod the charsets available on a given server (or to be more precise, charsets supported by cf's JRE). you can see it here. it

diversity as wallpaper

2005-03-21T09:21:00.000+07:00

starting off with the idea of printing all of unicode's characters on a 36 inch by 36 inch poster, ian albert ends up with 6 foot by 12 foot wallpaper printed at Kinko's. imagine that, most of humanity's writing systems printed at Kinko's for 20 bucks. i wonder what the clerk made of it?

cultural bias, leaping leap years batman!

2005-03-08T11:57:00.000+07:00

pretty much everybody knows what a leap year is and when one occurs. and in case you don't, coldfusion has a function isLeapYear() that will tell you if a given year is a leap year in the gregorian calendar. in fact most calendars have the concept of a leap "something". the chinese and hebrew calendars have a "leap month" but apparently no concept of a leap year (though the icu4j HebrewCalendar

persianCalendar update

2005-03-05T14:27:00.000+07:00

a few days ago Dr. Ghasem Kiani updated his persianCalendar class to be "more" icu4j like. i wrapped it up in CFC and added it to the i18nCalendars package (which now contains 7, count 'em, 7 calendars). you can see it on it's own in a simple testbed here. you can download the persian calendar class from Dr. Ghasem's sourceforge project. note that this version of the persian calendar uses a "

rokuyo

2005-02-22T13:44:00.000+07:00

i seem to have datetime on the brain this month. one of the trickier things i've been trying to get a handle on was how to calculate japanese "rokuyo". what's "rokuyo"? well, let me tell you.... a lunar calendar was used in japan from the 14th to the 19th century. that calendar had a six day week and those six days were known as rokuyo. and like any other calendar system, each day had a name and

gonzo journalist gone

2005-02-21T13:40:00.000+07:00

CNN's reporting that one of the icons of my youth, hunter s. thompson, committed suicide at his home in colorado on sunday. oh my.