The blog of Steve Root

  • Brother Dave goes on a cycling holiday, we track his position live by GPS

    280-live-gps-track-via-internet-thumb-300x185-279.jpg Brother Dave decided to go on a cycling holiday, from Oslo in Norway to Copenhagen in Sweden. His Nokia phone has built in GPS and with a little software from http://www.mapmytracks.com/ and a not inexpensive data contract with O2 (mostly needed so we can pester him with work email while he travels) we’re able to watch where he cycles in real time. You too can see him cycle slowly up hills on a scrolling map the wizz down the other side.

    To find out where he is now, or where his last section finished, follow this link: http://www.mapmytracks.com/explore/author/davidjroot/latest , or visit his blog for anything else he uploads (he’s going to try and geotag his photos…..).

    Special thanks to the developers of mapmytracks.com, it wasn’t possible to link directly to the latest route yesterday so I sent an email asking for it to be added to the wish list. Less than 12 hours later and they’ve added it already!

  • Gmail default contact for a friend with more than one email address

    This is so I don’t forget, it took me a while to not find the answer via google, guess the solution successfully, and then read the solution by chance while looking at something else.

    I use googlemail (actually, google apps but let’s not get pedantic).
    I have a friend with several email addresses, (work, other, home, other, other).
    Recently she asked for emails not to go her work address (unless they’re really urgent).

    When I use gmail to write an email just to her, it’s easy to choose which address it’s going too (and I know roughly which address is most appropriate at the time), but I have a contact group set up with her in it and those emails were always going to her work address.

    There was no option when creating the group to choose which of her email addresses should be used by default. The address being used (work) was also the address that came up first when composing a message and including her specifically.

    I guessed that this apparent default email address was the first contact address I’d entered for her and when I checked it was showing on the top of the gmail list of addresses for her contact record. I replaced the top of list email address with the prefered ‘other’ address, added the work address to the bottom of the contact list. Created a new email and using the contact group and gmail used the ‘other’ address’ instead of her work address.

    I later read ‘googlemail defaults to using the first email address of a contact….’

  • Migrating Coldfusion to Open Bluedragon – form.FIELDNAMES

    This is a note for my future self, because something tells me I’ll come across the same problem again….

    The old server ran Colfusion MX 6.01, the new server is running Open Bluedragon, the near equivalent to Coldfusion 7 or 8. (Colfusion MX6.01 doesn’t work properly with Apache 2, or more recent linux operating systems and I couldn’t justify the upgrade cost to the latest version of coldfusion. My next big project will be to rewrite the Roots web site into an open source language though as Open Bluedragon runs coldfusion code and is open source, I might be able to develop rather than re-write from scratch, anyway, enough of that background).

    Things change between program versions and to my horror I found the shopping cart wasn’t working yesterday. The blame lies with me, I didn’t properly test and I should have spotted it before the server move. Hey ho, 3 hours to debug and fix, and the problem was with

    <cfset this = val(evaluate(listgetat(
   form.FIELDNAMES, listcontains(
      form.FIELDNAMES,"_ID_"))))>

    The Fieldnames are coming out as all lowercase, and the original code was written to handle the form.FIELDNAMES returning all uppercase.

    If i’ve a bottle of white wine at home, I’ll open it and have a glass to celebrate my satisfaction 🙂

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