Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin Dies

About one half-hour ago, the news agencies began reporting that Steve Irwin, known to most as the crocodile from several shows on the Discovery channel, as well as a couple of movies, has died. During the filming of a documentary, he was apparently stung by a sting ray, the ray's stinger piercing his heart. This hasn't been confirmed and two of the three stories available at this time are unreachable.

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Dynamic Picture Generation Using ColdFusion

I had an unusual problem to solve today. One of my applications generates signed documents using Microsoft Word. The user clicks a button and is prompted to open or save the word document. The signatures are important ones, and stored outside the webroot.

I solved this by referencing a coldfusion file in the src attribute of the image tag in the html that outputs the document. The file is called dynpic.cfm. So the image tag looks like this:


<img src="https://someserver.someschool.edu/production/someapp/dynpic.cfm?pic=chair" />

Steorn: Free, Clean Energy (and a myspace oops)

As blogged by my good friend Jeff, Steorn, an Irish company, has apparently come up with a method of producing clean, free energy. This has come with some scrutiny being that it defies a basic law of physics, the one that says energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. It can only change in form. This is exciting as it means never having to charge your cell phone, electricity would be virtually free, and cars could run on electricity without having to recharge.

XMLHttpRequest Problem In Firefox Part 2

I've noticed another odd behavior in FireFox while using the XMLHttpRequest object. When posting to a page on a server that requires authentication, the first post will go through just fine. But the second post, without refreshing the page, will cause the server to want authentication. I'm not sure if this behavior was present in the previous version and this behavior his not present if the object is querying a page using get. Using post works fine using IE 7.

Deleting Online Predators Act Of 2006

On July 26, 2006 the House of Representatives passed the bill titled Deleting Online Predators Act Of 2006 (House resolution 5319). This bill aims to block the use of online chat rooms and social networking websites in schools and libraries, basically federally funded institutions. A website has been started dubbed saveyourspace.org with the goal of collecting one million signatures in hopes of pursuading the senate to vote this bill down.

XMLHttpRequest Problem In Firefox

The latest version of Firefox seems to have broken the XMLHttpRequest object. Specifically, if the asynchronous flag is set to false, the object will no longer function. I haven't done much research into this. I just wanted to jot a quick note. Set the asynchronous flag to true and everything should be fine.