All my Windows geek friends have nifty taskbar software that indicates the temperature of the CPU and other useless but interesting geek information about their systems.
iStat Pro is cooler than any of the tools they have. Developed as a dashboard widget, iStat Pro displays CPU temperature and fan speed, but also duplicates all the information in Activity Monitor, displaying typical geek Unix system info, like active processes, memory usage, and so on.
All in a dashboard widget, and all for free (donationware)!
I know I grow continually more irritable at the rumor sites, because I can’t help but read them because there may be some ounce of golden truth in the sands of fabrication. But the way AppleInsider handled the news of an orange iPod Shuffle is just irritating.
“Look! Here is a ‘new’ iPod Shuffle that looks and operates just like the old iPod Shuffle, except it is orange. And here are 21 high resolution photos for you to look at the same old thing…in orange.”
One or two photos, fine. Oh cool, look, it’s orange. But 21 supersized photos. One term. Over-zealous.
Okay, I admit. I came into that article already agitated. Why? Because of irritating headlines like this: New Apple Products coming TOMORROW? I am so tired of headlines like these. Meanwhile, the article suggested the possibility of 8-core Mac Pros and other nonsense. Yeah, it just ended up being that amazing orange Shuffle. Here’s another term. Fiction.
There’s no professional prognostication going on there. It’s pure story-telling. Yeah, an 8-core Mac will undoubtedly come out someday. Yeah, Apple will eventually revamp their displays. But there is no news or scoop to back up your speculation.
I just wish the rumor runners would practice my final term for this rant. Discretion.
If you’re not using Scriptaculous yet, start using it!
And once you do, you can reference this awesome Scriptaculous Cheat Sheet designed by Amy Hoy of Slash7. She did a great job at covering the basics, keeping it simple.
From time to time, you need to make your web app pause for a number of milliseconds or seconds. The need isn't often, but it does come up. There is no ColdFusion function or tag that accomplishes this currently, but you can do it with the following code snippet:
<cfscript>
thread = CreateObject("java", "java.lang.Thread");
thread.sleep(4000);
<cfscript>
This example will sleep for 4000 milliseconds, or 4 seconds.
This isn't news. There are many blogs out there that mention this extremely useful tidbit. Again, I don't mean to add to the echo chamber; I just use my blog as my initial reference point for little technical tidbits, so I had to throw it in there.
This is useful when ColdFusion needs to wait for a task to complete. For instance, I'm working with Active Directory today, and if I change an account in the directory with a DSMod command and then immediately make an LDAP call to load that account's updated information, the directory doesn't have time to react to the change and sends the old information in the LDAP query. If ColdFusion pauses about 2 seconds before querying LDAP, however, the updated information will come through, because the directory has time to catch up with the DSMod command. This is just one example of the usefulness of "putting ColdFusion to sleep".
