Brian Fitzgerald

Here's a blog specifically to help folks with the cfchart part of coldfusion

You know you want one

Link

The "Giant-Ass Image Viewer" is a very similar project that is demonstrated and explained.

Here's 7 simple steps that describe the blogging process (publisher to reader).

I've been to a few conferences where "poster sessions" have been offered, but I've always been a little confused by the title since I have never seen a poster at these sessions. Here's a post I found that gives good tips for presenting a poster session and a definition of what one is (they are supposed to have posters).

iPodder (the free, open-source podcast client) is really maturing nicely and the newest version, 2.1, is the first that would have me considering it has a primary means of managing subscriptions. The great effort may be coming to an end however as we await iTunes 4.9 with it's podcast support.

Steve (CEO of Pixar and Apple) addressed the 2005 graduating class at Stanford University this spring.

Will Richardson contemplates what Wikipedia means to research papers.

Pay pal has a page showing some ways to spot fraud emails. Good thing since they are so common and so authentic looking.

Jobs finally announced it yesterday around noon, central time. Apple will be starting to include Intel chips in its systems. I’m pretty excited about this. Apple released the PowerBook G4 a long, long time ago and there is no G5 in sight. It seemed that with IBM’s new chip production facility that the stall may be short-lived. It seems apparent now that there are no major speed-bumps in sight (at least for power-book chips) and I’m sure that IBM is more excited right now by the prospect of delivering chips for the XBOX 2, PlayStation 3 and the new Nintendo game systems.

Apple needs to get on track with something that is going to deliver consistent improvement over time and the only logical partner is Intel. A few of the articles I have read see this as something that will confuse customers and drive them away. I don’t see it that way. Did UNIX scare customers away? Unless someone fires up a terminal, there is no hint that UNIX is sitting under the hood. It’s not an issue. Likewise, as long as Apple uses the new chips in the same way that it has used the PPC chips, there should be no issues. Apple has already said that it will not allow OS X to run on non-apple computers. This eliminates a lot of compatibility issues. The hacks out there won’t like it, but Apple computers are what they are largely because they are a closed system. Apple knows, for the most part, exactly what is in each computer and they can design the OS accordingly. Apple is not going to address the compatibility nightmare the Microsoft does with Windows.

I just hope that the next wave of PowerBooks doesn’t have a goofy Intel sticker on them.

CSS3 promises the ability to have multiple columns (think newspaper layout). Exciting.

Looks like XHTML2 is coming soon and it sounds great!! Here is a presentation about it and here is the working draft.

I had never found a great Fireworks forum, but there seems to be good discussion here at geekforum.

Wikis, getting bigger and bigger, are featured in a Time article.

Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha has a podcast called Radio WillowWeb.

Nokia and others think that mp3-enabled cell phones will overtake the iPod. I think that, for the time being, they are nuts. As long as you have to buy phones from only your vendor and buying a phone usually happens only when getting a new contract, people are not going to race out and get these phones. While they may sell 12 million phones a year, I would sure be interested to know how many of those are the $500+ models. I can’t think of anybody I know that has a real fancy phone, although there are certainly many available. Additionally, you don’t need your mp3 player everywhere while you may choose to take your phone everywhere. Why allow your phone take on that additional heft for something you don’t always need?

This is a good article on how to get started listening to podcasts.

Adobe has announced the future availability of a new piece of software called co-author. It is to GoLive what Contribute is to Dreamweaver. I'm sure this product has been in the design phase for quite a while, but I question the value of introducing it now. Contribute is a well-liked, version 3 program. Why release a version 1 product that will overlap a product that you know you will be acquiring?

ZD Net's David Berlind has some ideas.

Take a look at this column (support materials) discussing the iPod shuffle's audio supremacy.

Webnote

The Sith Sense

Wow. This is going to be big. CFAjax is the AJAX implementation for coldfusion. It allows javascript to directly call ColdFusion methods without refreshing the page. The possibilities of not having to submit and request pages blows my mind.

What is Netscape? As far as I can tell, it's been reduced to nothing more than an ISP and it's new browser is just one more branded application. The new Netscape 8 browser that came out yesterday drew some attention early as it was going to be based on Firefox, but has drawn more attention in the last couple of days because it also uses the Internet Explorer engine for other sites. Less than a day after it has been released they have issued a security patch for it. It's really sad that such an important name in the history of the web has been reduced to a messed up browser shell put out by a net-zero competitor.