Techno-babble that isn’t of interest to normal people. When I spend hours at work trying to figure out how to do something on the computer, I’ll post it here so I can look it up more easily next time.
Hey cool– a function I wrote just got put up on cflib.org. Not that it’s juried or anything, but it’s still kind of neat to know that other people might get to use my code.
My function uses Java to do DNS lookups from within a Coldfusion page, and it supports sites which have more than one DNS record for the same hostname. It works in Coldfusion 5 or higher. It’s a reworking of an earlier function written by Ben Forta.
getAllHostAddresses
So, I just spent far too much time fooling with the Google Maps API when I should have been doing other things. Google has the best maps on the web, but their API has one crippling feature– every API key they issue can only be used in one particular URL directory. That means I can’t get an API key for chaplin-loebell.com, I have to get one for www.chaplin-loebell.com/david — and if I do that, the maps won’t work in any other subdirectory, so permalinks, archives, etc. will no longer show the map. I ended up getting a key for one subdirectory and doing some messing around in there. Then I can include the map in my blog post using an iframe.
I looked at the Yahoo API also, but they actually pretty much insist on hosting the entire map for you– Yahoo branding and all. You can put that in an iframe also, but it seems like it would be uglier for inclusion in a blog. Sorry, Jeffrey, I think I’ll go with Brand X.
What I ultimately want to do is create a series of blog posts with geocoding– where the post is about a specific place. Then, on a seperate page of the site, I’ll display a map (or maps) showing those posts and be able to take a bit of a geographic tour… it sounds like a cool idea, anyway.
I’ve been doing a lot of work on building some ActiveX controls to embed in web pages.
Now, this is basically a bad idea– unless you need some kind of hardware or OS access in an intranet application.
However, if you’re doing this, there’s some fun learning involved in Marking your control “Safe for Scripting” and then signing it.
I learned most of what I needed to know from this page - the best tutorial I was able to find on the subject.
Today I had to create a self-signed certificate for use during development on an IIS site. I realized I didn’t know
how to do this under Windows, so I did a web search. Apparently, the answer is “use Unix.”
These instructions generated a self-signed cert which works fine under IIS. The instructions say to use linux, but I ran them without trouble under FreeBSD. I bet they’d run under Cygwin, too.
http://eal.us/blog/_archives/2003/6/2/25109.html
