Update: I found a workaround, although I am still open to other and better ideas. I have a panel that is being set to visible=false if a radio button is not selected. It works something like this: So when that specific value or button is not selected, visible is set to false and it doesn't show up, but the space that it would take up were it visible is still there just blank. So what I have done is added the height attribute, like this: So this will set the height to 0 if that radio button is not selected. works for me at the moment, although I still realize its not the best possible solution.

Another question I have about flash forms is, is there a way, similar to setting a panel visible="false", that you can make it not show up, and not take up that space? Where if its not visible, there is no hole, but if it is made visible that everything will slide down? Update: See the next blog post for my temporary solution.

We'll I have gotten some new experience this week with the new cf 7 flash forms. They are entirely awesome, but unfortunately, they gave me an inch, and im trying to take a couple thousand miles... I am finding that the applicable documentation is sparse at best. We are trying to do some pretty wild action script stuff, which I am almost certain is possible, but without being able to see some documentation or even examples about how something like this might be achieved, its sort of impossible. My cfwack books are useless, and even cfform.com doesn't have much on the subjects. So I am here to appeal to you guys, can you help? Here are a few of my questions: Can someone give me a applicable documenation resource for the properties of flash form controls? I need to know when I can use .text, .length, .selectedData, etc. Can anyone tell me why .text property of a

Posted on Tue. July 26, 2005 by Ryan Guill #

Well Google obviously listens to its customers! You can now add bookmarks to your personalized google homepage as well as rss feeds! More after I check it out some... Google.com/ig

Well Bush did not nominate a woman to fill the empty spot on the Supreme Court. Story from MSNBC. Bush announced tonight that he was nominating Judge John G. Roberts Jr. and is expected to be confirmed easily. To me its strange that he didn't fill the spot with a woman, to me that would have been a win-win for everyone and really have gained him some points, but nonetheless, Roberts is an expected canidate to fill the position from a Republican point of view. Its also possible that Bush is counting on being able to fill Judge Rehnquist's position still in his term, which is a good possibility. Roberts actually served as a law clerk for Rehnquist in the early 80's. He definately has the career and education. Lets see what he does with it.

COAL now has a google group mailing list! We will be talking about different things with COAL development, the development of the services for COAL, and any other questions or concerns. This will be the best place for the time being to post any bug reports or implementation questions, or just general discussion. Feel free to join to participate or just watch the list and see how things unfolds. You can subscribe by putting in your email address in the form at the bottom of the right navigation on the COAL website, or using the google groups link. It is completely secure, and you can unsubscribe at any time. Hope to see you there!

This just in, Greasemonkey has been found to have a very serious security vulnerability. Mark Pilgrim discovered and announced it yesterday. Greasemonkey has issued a warning both on thier blog (link above) and on the mozdev.org website, and recomend that you update to 0.3.5, although please note that there currently is no fix at all, and they recomend that you disable or uninstall greasemonkey completely until a fix is finished. Basically greasemonkey 0.3.5 is a *neutered* version (im quoting here) which lacks any of the GM APIs which make Greasemonkey scripts more powerful than regular html. Which means the 0.3.5 will probably render a lot of your scripts unusable for the time being. I still dont know a whole lot about this, but ill keep you posted as information becomes available.

I wanted to address a question that came up in the COAL presentation yesterday from Sean Corfield. He was questioning why in my example code of how to request a "service" from COAL why the init() was called everytime. The line looks like this: Sean made a very valid statement questioning that since a service is by very nature stateless, so there would be no need (and it would just be flat out wrong) to init() it. A service should not have any instance data, no properties and things like this. It is just a service, it gets information, it does something, it may return information, but thats it. Unfortunately I was a little nervous and couldn't quite get an answer out during the presentation to address this and intended to answer it at the end but forgot about it. The reason the init() is called when you request a service from COAL is that COAL services are not traditional services. Honestly the word "services" really isn't a good fit. I have gotten used to calling them services because COAL uses the Service Locator Pattern. But these are not necessarily services (although they most certainly could be and then there would not be an init()) but more like objects that you are requesting. So in this case, COAL is only returning objects for you to work with, not necessarily services. Now that may have been a little bit of rambling there, but I think that should about sum it up. I am definately looking into changing the terms used to keep from confusion in the future.

I just want to take a moment to thank everyone that attended my presentation on COAL today. I believe we had a pretty good turnout, and it seemed to generate quite a bit of interest, which is great! Unfortunately the recording did not work on the presentation, so I believe Steven Erat and I will be doing the presentation again soon and recording it for you guys that missed the presentation. If possible, I will try and let you guys know when that second presentation will be so that you can watch it live if you want. Also, if you want to see the slides from my powerpoint presentation, you can get the ppt here, and you can also view a swf of the presentation here. And again, if anyone else is interested in helping, please feel free to contact me. Also feel free to drop me a line if you want to know any more or have any questions. Thanks again for your support, and hopefully this project will mature into a great resource for the coldfusion community!

Hey guys just wanted to give you a quick reminder that my COAL presentation is today. If you are a member of the meetup.com coldfusion group, please run by and Register for the Event. If you are not part of the group but would still like to attend the presentation, thats perfectly fine too. Just go to http://macromedia.breezecentral.com/coal/ about 30 minutes before the presentation, click on the button that says Enter as Guest, put in your name or nickname, and you should be set. Wow what a big day this is! We have ColdFusion's 10th Birthday celebration, we have space ship Discovery returning to flight (hopefully), the coldfusion 7 cumulative Hot Fix 3 (is this merrimack??) was released this morning, Firefox 1.0.5 was also released this morning, the web developers/designers poker tournament is tonight, and to top it all off, you have my presentation of course ;) I should sleep well tonight ;)

Well, im back from the Gulf Coast, and I must say its sort of nice being back. It was a great trip, although a little hectic at times. We were in Destin, FL for the majority of the trip. We arrived to beautiful water and great beaches. Even with the recent news of shark attacks in the area, we weren't scared and had a great time. Then cindy came through and made her presence felt. At one time our entire beach, that raised up about 5 feet at the house and about 100 feet out was completely under water with some pretty high waves. The next day our beach had changed significantly but we still made the best of it. We ate around 20 pounds of shrimp in one sitting and at one time we had around 18 people in the house. Of course all of our attention was turned towards denis as it started to come closer. Me and two other guys left for biloxi, MS to go fishing on friday. We left out about 4:30 on saturday morning for the bay of Biloxi. The water was as smooth as glass. Toby said that on a saturday it was nothing to usually see 200-300 boats in a small area where we put in at. We saw two. I remember thinking that we were either the smartest or the dumbest people at the time. Turned out we were pretty smart, we caught all kinds of fish. I probably caught about 15 fish all told, and had a lot of fun doing it. Later that day we started to get ready to leave Biloxi and come back to memphis and the weather took a sharp turn for the worst as the first of the feeder bands of the storm started to come through. It was amazing really. The storm was still hundreds of miles off shore and we were already starting to feel the effects of it. We helped the family board up their house and drove through some of the hardest rain I have ever seen for about an hour. At one time I couldn't even see the nose of the car I was driving, much less the road. But we were going north and finally drove out of it. Now its raining here in memphis as denis roars past us and continues north. This storm has definately been awe inspiring for me. I want to go down to the coast sometime though and ride out a hurricane, just for the experience. It also looks like I was left out of the loop on a lot of news while I was gone. The london bombings, the satalitte hitting a comet, and lots more. Im still playing catch up, so if there was any other significant news of the week that I may have missed, please let me know. A week without any internet access at all will definately help it dawn on you just how dependant on it you are... Also, dont forget, in two days I will be presenting on COAL for the cf meetup.com group. Hope to see you there!