Web Architecture, Web Production, Web Marketing

I’m finally getting around to cleaning out dreamweaver LCK files from a large website. We have one developer that uses dreamweaver so these files are useless. So we’ve got these LCK files all over the place in this site. I’m just sick of looking at them.

Enter a shell one liner …

find . -name '*.LCK' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f

That command recursively looks in and under the directory I’m in for any files with the LCK extension and removes them.

Here’s a shell script you can save that will prompt you for an extension name to remove.

#!/bin/sh

echo "Enter Extension"
read filepattern
echo "Files matching *.$filepattern will be removed."
echo "Is this correct? y|n"
read confirmation

if  [ $confirmation = y ]; then
	find $PWD -name "*.$filepattern" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f
else
	echo "quitting"
	exit;
fi

Or if you don’t want any confirmation of the file extensions you’re about to delete.

#!/bin/sh

echo "Enter Extension"
read filepattern
find $PWD -name "*.$filepattern" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f

I’m new to Flex but still enjoyed the Mate framework presentation from Laura at asfusion.com.  I know that I need to think ahead of time how I’m going to organize all the events in my application.   This could simply be a design pattern.  The Mate framework has the idea of an Event Map to organize events in a central location.  Larger applications with multiple function sets can have multiple event maps.  I like how Mate and the Event Maps are organized.  I don’t feel like there would be much of an additional learning curve to start using Mate.  It looks pretty lightweight too.

If you’re looking into Flex, Mate is worth a look.  The site is well organized and has solid documentation so far.  This alpha version of Mate has well written, clear documentation and an api reference.  The documentation for users of many frameworks and apps is clearly an afterthought.  I really appreciate the Mate team spending time on their docs.  Additionally, I’ve enjoyed hacking up the FlickrBook example app to get a good idea for what’s going on with Mate.

cfvideo scenes

I think the idea of a cfvideo tag would be a solid feature for the future. In particular I’ve wanted to be able to pull off something with streaming video like is done on ted.com. The overlay at the bottom of each video that shows scene markings is very useful. It would be nice if as a developer or content producer if all I needed for navigation within a video were timecodes and optional chapter/scene titles.

cfvideo subtitles

I have a use right now for being able to programatically add subtitle overlays to video files. The anatomyofchristianity.org wordpress blog I developed has flash videos that I would like to integrate Bible references into at specific times. I already need to make a list of the timecodes and references. If I could just take that list and feed it into a script, that would save me tons of time of using Final Cut for busy work.

cfvideo tag for lazy amateur editors

Storage is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, cameras are cheap. By the time CF9 is released, the cost of storage, bandwidth and cameras will open up working with video to a huge market. Video files will only get bigger and more irrelevant. Something like the iMovie 08 takes a step at making simple editing for lazy amateur editors but that’s still too much for some people. Being able to have a cfvideo tag that could make cuts, even if they were non destructive for performance enhancement could go a long way in making some cool webapps.

cfvideo transcoding with user specified tools

I don’t think adobe would be able to provide a solid transcoding product without getting into a nightmare of licensing issues. Maybe I’m wrong. It would be nice to just specific some arguments and point cfvideo to ffmpeg for example.

Here’s some notes I took from the cfObjective community giving feature requests to the Adobe team for ColdFusion 9. This list is incomplete. Some requests were hard to catch and I came in a bit late. But here’s a bunch that were talked about. I’m bolding items I felt were particularly well received. Of course, this is totally subjective.

• parse action script 3 natively within coldfusion (compile it into java) … there was passionate discussion here, in my opinion though it seems very difficult and something that wouldn’t provide enough short term profit for the effort.  I could be missing the big picture though.
• ability to throw exceptions in cfscript
• cfscript should do all of the language construct
• ktml support for rich text editor … ktml sounds doubtful as this is a retired product
• ability to flatten pdf forms, so forms can be created, sent to customer and customers cannot edit.
• add <cffinally> tag as in try, catch, finally
• transaction managers for nested transactions
• a packaging system to easily distribute cf apps as single file, like java has jar files
• tags that generate html would have the capability to use html 4.01 strict not just xhtml
• compress javascript files
• cfhtmlfoot tag to write content immediately before closing html tag
• onrequstend that stops breaking cfcs … I may have misheard this one
• trusted cache and turn it on or off per application
• being able to cache parts of a page only
• ability to strip down whitespace so html is a single line, aggressive whitespace management
• name elements by attributes and be able to clear specific elements in cache
• be able to cache something until change
• better dealing with null values
• info in server monitor about unit tests of code to show code quality to management
• ability to script to photoshop, indesign
• hibernate, jpa, orm integration
• cfvideo tag like cfimage, ability to add chapters or cut longer video into clips