Welcome to Sorcerer's Isle, a weblog covering a multitude of topics, ranging from programming to 3D graphics; photography to gadgets; tutorials to tinkering.
Within Sorcerer's Isle are three sub-blogs, which each focus on different aspects:
At Sorcerer's Tower you'll find programming and web dev; Midnight Isle covers photography and digital art; and with 100% Geek you'll find gadgets, gaming, technology, and more.
Articles may appear on just one of the weblogs, or across multiple, but every article posted will always appear on this one.
I have just pushed an update of QueryParam Scanner to GitHub, containing various improvements.
This update is on the rc0.7.5 branch, and it'd be nice if people could take it for a spin and make sure there are no issues with it. (There is a zip download for anyone without git.)
The visible changes which you might notice are:
However, there are also significant under-the-hood changes. I removed my obsolete "Java Regex Utils" library (replacing it with the object part of cfRegex), and made a number of little code clean-ups.
A result of these changes is that qpscanner rc0.7.5 appears to be almost twice as fast as previous versions.
If you have any feedback, please feel free to contact me via GitHub, and similarly if you find any bugs then please raise them on the issue tracker.
It's been over two and a half years since my last "why railo" post, and - despite Railo "only" being 0.3 versions on - there's been a lot of improvements!
In fact, because it's been so long, a few of the things here are not new with v3.3 (though they are all new since the previous article), but are still great features that deserve mentioning!
So, what are my ten favourite new features? Read on to find out.
If you've ever looked at the CFML related articles on Wikipedia, you can't fail to have noticed that, especially when compared to other programming articles, they're not very good.
When somebody puts "coldfusion" or "cfml" into Google, they will almost certainly see the respective Wikipedia pages amongst the top three results, but when they follow those links they're unlikely to get a very good impression!
If you agree that the CFML presence on Wikipedia can and should be improved, and it's up to the CFML community to do it, then read on to find out how you can help fix it.
The cfRegex project is two things. Firstly, it is a complete regex implementation for CFML, providing more functionality, flexibility, features and power than the existing CFML RE functions. Secondly, it is a drive to encourage people to properly learn and make use of regex.
Read the rest of this article to find out more.
Tonight, prepare yourself for the beginning of a new era, as one man - and his keyboard - begins his journey in an epic quest to save the world.
The team behind the StackOverflow Q&A programming site have created a place for people to propose new Q&A sites to be created - once enough people have voted in favour of a proposal, the site gets created.
Although it has plenty of flaws (which I'm happy to point out), the Stack Exchange platform is still a good way of getting quick and comprehensive answers to questions, and it's much better than many of the forums out there.
So, there are two of these proposals which I am following, and if you are into either photography or 3d graphics you should definitely consider checking out these links, and following the proposals too:
These sites will only be created when enough people have followed/committed to them, so please spread these links to anyone else who might be interested.
It's 1st June 2010 today, and that means we're celebrating for the third time the annual International Regular Expressions Day.
Ben Nadel kicked off this event two years ago, in order to promote the use of Regex, especially amongst those who might consider them something scary and obscure.
As before, Ben is running a contest, this year's prizes being some O'Reily Regex books and IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro licenses.
Entry to the competition requires writing some code, and the deadline is today, so if you're interested then hurry up and read the blog entry to find out more.
It's nearly a year on from my last Railo blog post so it is well overdue that I write another - just in case there is anyone still sitting on the fence, unsure if they should use Railo - or indeed, anyone who might be unaware of Railo's very existance!
So to start with, a quick summary of what Railo is:
Find out why Railo is the perfect choice for your next development project.
I've recently been working on a gallery website for my brother, a brilliant artist and illustrator. The site is still under construction, but he's already got some great examples of his drawings and sculptures on there, and it is definitely worth checking out.
Head over to eldavo.co.uk to take a look, and if you like the work take a look at his blog where he has more of his art.
On the technical side, the main site is pretty simple, so far, with extra complexity coming later on. It runs on Railo and uses jQuery. The (private) admin part of the site was my first opportunity to use cfimage functionality, allowing thumbnails to be generated from uploaded images. I used jCrop for the client-side crop selection.
It's been far too long since I last posted anything, so I'll kick-off what I hope will be the start of more frequent posting with a couple of photos taken down on the UK's south east coast last month, immediately after some incredibly stormy weather.
The winds were still very strong and the evening sky nice and atmospheric, allowing me to create these two images:
