Aberdeen web meetup on 15th August 2008

So the initial emailing of 10 people I knew to be interested has resulted in very positive feedback and interest from several others that I wasn't currently aware of.

To bring everyone up to date I'll be sending another email within the next week but I can confirm that the unanimous decision for the date it is to be held will be Friday 15th August. Details of the venue, and any other points will be in the email and also posted here.

This is an opportunity for those of you in the know to let others that I'm not in contact with to explain that there will be a meetup for those in and around Aberdeen to meet, chat, generally "geek out" and have some beer. At a basic level, if you can get me email addresses for others, i'll add them to the list of people to contact. I'm not too comfortable with the idea of basically "cold calling" people so this would really help.

Discussions are about to take place about some great ideas for the future of this event and I encourage anyone with any interest to pipe up and get involved too. This will be a worthwhile thing to be involved in if the current feedback is anything to go by so if you want it even better, get yourselves involved.

2 comments - Posted by mark at 9:34 PM - Categories: Meetup

Removing spaces from a string with coldfusion

Ran into this problem today and it seemed to take quite a long time for me to find a solution so I'm posting how it works here for the benefit of others. This method uses a regular expression to do it's bidding.

<!--- set up a test variable --->
<cfset mySpaceFilledString = "a brand new combine harvester" />

<!--- remove ALL spaces from the string --->
<cfset mySpaceFreeVariable = ReReplace(mySpaceFilledString, "[[:space:]]","","ALL")>

<!--- check it works --->
<cfdump var = #mySpaceFreeVariable#>

this returns "abrandnewcombineharvester" - all spaces removed from the whole string



To simply remove the spaces at the beginning and end of a string (a form field for example) it's much easier...

<!--- set up a test variable --->
<cfset form.myTestString = " mark mcaulay " />

<!--- remove spaces from start and end of the string --->
<cfset mySpaceFreeVariable = Trim(form.myTestString)>

<!--- check it works --->

<cfdump var = #mySpaceFreeVariable#>

this returns "mark mcaulay" - only the spaces at the start and end of the string have been removed

Hope this helps someone!

ﾠ

**UPDATE - Just for good measure, and of course, to keep James happy ;) here is the equivelent in php

<?php

// set up a test variable

$mySpaceFilledString = " a brand new combine harvester ";

// remove all spaces from the string

$mySpaceFreeVariable = str_replace(" ", "", $mySpaceFilledString);

// check it works

echo $mySpaceFreeVariable;

?>

this returns "abrandnewcombineharvester" - all spaces removed from the whole string

ﾠ

To simply remove the spaces at the beginning and end of a string (a form field for example) it's again, much easier...

<?php

// set up a test variable

$myFormVariable = " mark mcaulay ";

// remove spaces from start and end of the string

$myTrimmedVariable = trim($mySpaceFilledString);

//check it works

echo $myTrimmedVariable;

?>

this returns "mark mcaulay" - only the spaces at the start and end of the string have been removed

ﾠ

6 comments - Posted by mark at 7:50 PM - Categories: Coldfusion

Why you should upgrade to IE7

Firsly, I cant believe I'm actually having to write this post...IE7 has been available since 2006, IE6 came on the go in 2001...that's a LONG time ago in todays online world and IE8 is already available as a beta download so we can only assume that it'll be here prety soon....oh and the browser is free in case you were wondering.

So, why do I care which browser you are using? well, by trade I'm a web developer which basically means that I know a bit about how web browsers are rendering the websites that I and countless thousands of other competent web developers build for you.

Read more...

1 comments - Posted by mark at 9:36 PM - Categories: Ranting

Aberdeen meetup for web people

A few of us have been mulling this over for a while and decided that we should push ahead with it and have a social get together in a pub for people in and around Aberdeen who are involved with web design, development, programming, video, multimedia etc etc. A quick question to a few people I know show this to be a popular thing to attempt although it'll need someone to say "be here at this time", so, I've nominated myself to get the first one sorted and we'll take it from there...if I do a good job, i'll probably organise the second one...if not, someone will brush me aside and grab the reigns. This is a heads up for all those interested. If you want to post your interest here or contact me using the form on my "contact" page, we'll see what kind of numbers we're dealing with and then choose a date.

It should be noted that I currently attend an Aberdeen coldfusion meetup which I would recommend to anyone as well, although the focus is (quite rightly) coldfusion first, there are often a good mix of people with different skills in attendance and due to it's (slightly) more formal structure, there's the opportunity to see someone present on a subject and there's also a ton of discussion on geeky matters as well as huge scope for booze.

The main difference with this new meetup will be it's not tied to any one thing which will hopefully attract a wider base of people for informal chat etc, it's a perfect opportunity to meet others in Aberdeen working in the industry and figure out who's doing what...as well as the fact that we'll meet in a pub so there's even MORE scope for a beer or two.

Another thing we'll need is some kind of web presence, so if people want to start thinking about that, we can maybe form a little working group of volunteers to get that done too.

thoughts people?

4 comments - Posted by mark at 9:20 PM - Categories: Meetup

Install Eclipse on ubuntu

During my recent reinstall of eclipse(long story but all my own fault!) I decided to do a bit of searching around for the "right" way to do it and came accross the following post: http://www.ubuntued.com/?p=40. Just posting it here for both my own future reference and for those of others looking for a step by step method.

Using the above link I've just installed the latest build (3.4) with no problems what so ever. Hope it helps someone else.

0 comments - Posted by mark at 9:13 PM - Categories: Eclipse

Enthusiastic student

Today at ECI, we had a visit from a 1st year graphic design student from Aberdeen College who is after a work placement over his summer holidays. I don't usually post about these things but I was so impressed with this guy's drive and enthusiasm, I thought I'd share my thoughts a bit.

Read more...

2 comments - Posted by mark at 9:15 PM - Categories: Impressed