A ComboBox works in a similar manner to a traditional HTML <select> field. The difference is that to submit the valueField, you must specify a hiddenName to create a hidden input field to hold the value of the valueField. The displayField is shown in the text field which is named according to the name.

this.add([
	{
		xtype: 'combo',
		name: 'suffix',
		hiddenName: 'suffixId', // post this name
		hiddenValue: 0, // default value
		fieldLabel: 'Suffix',
		mode: 'local',
		store: this.suffixStore,
		valueField: 'key',
		displayField: 'display',
		triggerAction: 'all',
		forceSelection: true,
		allowBlank: true
	}
]);

Adding a hiddenName and a default value in hiddenValue does the trick, the default value (0) is set in the hidden field until a user chooses a different value. Unfortunately this breaks when the ComboBox is set to allow blanks and the user tabs over the field. When this happens, the hiddenValue is set to a null string and the user is never prompted to select a value.

Upon form submission, the hiddenField (suffixId) will be set to neither the default or a valid value.

One solution is to listen for the focus and blur events to reset the value of the hidden field when it has been set to a null string.

this.add([
	{
		xtype: 'combo',
		name: 'suffix',
		hiddenName: 'suffixId',
		hiddenValue: 0,
		fieldLabel: 'Suffix',
		mode: 'local',
		store: this.suffixStore,
		valueField: 'key',
		displayField: 'display',
		triggerAction: 'all',
		forceSelection: true,
		allowBlank: true,
		listeners: {
			'focus': this.handleSuffixChange,
			'blur': this.handleSuffixChange,
			scope: this
		}
	}
]);

handleSuffixChange: function(field) {
	if (field.value=='') {
		field.hiddenField.value = '0';
	}
}

Upon form submission you will be guaranteed a valid value, which is especially beneficial if you’re using the form values to populate a server side bean object.

“While American politicians and intellectuals have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision. Tyrants denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are the chief supporters of reduced private property rights, reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly. They are pro-control and coercion, by the state. These Americans who run Washington, and their intellectual supporters, believe they have superior wisdom and greater intelligence than the masses. They believe they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Like any other tyrant, they have what they consider good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. A tyrant’s primary agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Markets imply voluntary exchange and tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning and regulation, which is little more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite. We Americans have forgotten founder Thomas Paine’s warning that ‘Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.’” –George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams

Reposted from The Patriot Post Brief, March 8th, 2010

George Orwell defined doublethink as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

I wonder if there are some out there who still believe this bullshit.

Have you reset your PRAM and NVRAM lately?

After a bit of Googling for a fairly recent and verifiable solution I decided to reset the machine’s parameter random access memory (PRAM) and nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM) as suggested by some folks and Apple’s technical support site. It works!

Try this before you declare your SuperDrive dead and go out and buy a new one.

While I agree with the basic concept that broadband providers should not place restrictions on users, I believe strongly that a company is entitled to create products that result in better value for their shareholders.

I am sure there are good intentions behind “net neutrality,” but the unintended consequences could be disastrous for anyone using the Internet as a business platform, including providers and consumers, since government intervention typically results in increased operational costs. More often than not those costs are passed down to consumers in the form of higher premiums and lower quality of service.

My position on the issue is one that places the consumer directly in charge of researching the best available service offering for his business. One where the consumer addresses the service provider directly and forces the provider to create better services at the customer’s direction. While this could be a slow and painful process, new smaller businesses will sprout up to innovate and promote competition while stodgy providers will risk going out of business.

I believe net neutrality is destined to become another boondoggle that will simply add a layer of bureaucracy to an already bloated public sector.

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

Here are two quick steps to avoid unnecessary risks:

Turn off user registration

This one is simple. Just log in to your administrator screen and visit the “General Settings” screen (listed under Settings) and make sure the checkbox labeled “Anyone can register” is not checked.

Block access to your blog’s admin area

This can be accomplished with simple authentication.

If your site runs on Apache, you can create an .htaccess file in your /wp-admin/ directory to require authentication before the page is displayed. This post provides the necessary steps.

What I Like

• I’m really excited about CF9’s support for Object Relational Modeling. I think thorough testing must take place to make sure it scales properly under load. I imagine it’s solid since it’s based on Hybernate, but I’ve seen a few promising ORM frameworks flame out before they had a chance to be adopted due to their inability to scale.
• Access to server variables is also good. There is nothing worse than having to create service initializer hacks to pre-cache components in a clustered load balanced environment (think 4 physical boxes with 7 instances each) after server/instance restarts.
• Multi-server admin tools. Enough said.
• Although I prefer to code JavaScript applications separately from CFML, I am glad Ext-JS (3.0) continues to be the official JavaScript framework that ships with ColdFusion.

Not so Hot

I don’t think the new “local” scope adds any value. It seems we’re trying to hard to allow people to write inefficient code by being careless about scoping. Using “var” is fine with me as it is similar across multiple languages. “local” will just add another thing to remember when coding in CFML.

The Jury is Still Out

I’d like to get more testing done with the IDE, ColdFusion Builder, before making up my mind. I’ve been a fan of Aptana, the Eclipse-based IDE, for working with my favorite JavaScript frameworks, PHP and HTML/CSS. I hope the tool is both capable and fast, which has been tough to achieve with Flex Builder.

ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder Now Available on Labs

Feel free to improve it, and leave a comment if you find it useful.

Install

// ==UserScript==
// @name			YouTube HD-fier
// @version			1.0.0
// @namespace		http://claude.betancourt.us/greasemonkey/youtube/hdfier/1.0.0
// @description		Modifies links to enable HD, when available.
// @include			http://www.youtube.com/*
// @license			(CC) Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
// ==/UserScript==

// Add jQuery
var GM_jQuery = document.createElement('script');
GM_jQuery.src = 'http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.2.6.pack.js';
GM_jQuery.type = 'text/javascript';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(GM_jQuery);

// Wait until jQuery has loaded
function GM_wait() {
    if( typeof unsafeWindow.jQuery == 'undefined' ) {
        window.setTimeout(GM_wait,100);
    } else {
        $ = unsafeWindow.jQuery;
        GM_ready();
    }
}
GM_wait();

// Once document and jQuery are loaded
function GM_ready() {

	var selectors = [
		'.video-short-title a',
		'.video-mini-title a',
		'.clipper a'
	];

	HDify(selectors);

}

function HDify(selectors) {
	try {
		$.each(selectors,function(i,s){
			var l = $(s);
			$.each(l, function(i,a){
				a.href += '&fmt=18';
			});
		});
	} catch(e){}
}

Details about server-specific implementations already being maintained can be found here.

Ext.Direct is a new package in Ext JS 3.0 that helps alleviate many of these issues by streamlining communication between your client and server. When using Ext.Direct, you can expect to write 30% less code by eliminating common boiler plate code.

The Ext.direct namespace introduces several new classes for a close integration with the server-side. New classes have also been added to the Ext.data namespace for working with Ext.data.Stores which are backed by data from an Ext.Direct method.

Ext.Direct uses a provider architecture, where one or more providers are used to transport data to and from the server. There are several providers that exist in the core at the moment, for example a JsonProvider for simple JSON operations and a PollingProvider for repeated requests. One of the most powerful providers is the RemotingProvider.

Read the rest here.

The prolific team at DIY Themes has released the latest version of Thesis, the best theme/framework for WordPress. See what customers are saying about their Thesis experience!

Seen at the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog.

The task becomes a lot easier under Apache. So I threw away the plugin code and added the following rule to the Apache configuration:

<directory "/public_html/mysite.com">
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1	[R,L]
</directory>

The directive above can be placed inside a VirtualHost or Directory directives, but this usually requires access to the Apache server configuration, which is not typically possible in a shared hosting environment — in that case, the rule can be added to the .htaccess file.

Alternatively we could have used the SSLRequireSSL Apache (2.x) directive, but this would only block access to the non HTTPS address. In our case we want to automatically redirect the users instead of displaying an error message.

This template is based on a WordPress theme by Minmin. Unfortunately the original theme doesn’t behave uniformly across multiple browsers. Don’t worry, that’s where Thesis comes in.

How Much?

It’s FREE. All I ask is that you leave the attribution link in the footer intact to link back to this site.

If you who already own Thesis, download the template (from SVN or as a zip file) and replace your custom folder with its contents. For more details see the README.txt file part of the distribution.

Don’t Know Enough About Thesis?

Learn all about it here then click “Get Thesis” to buy it today.

Further Develop my Freelance Business

I decided it was time to start consulting again so I did set up a DBA, this time to do short term freelance work. While I did some fun work for an outfit in California, my full-time responsibilities took precedence and business slowed down towards the end of the year. Right now I’m doing some non-profit work and expect to find new clients soon.

So drop me note if you need help with your web development projects.

Read more books

Here are a few on my queue:

• The Brass Verdict — Michael Connelly (January)
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design — Jason Beaird (January)
• Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters — Meg Meeker (February)
• Extreme Measures — Vince Flynn (April)
• Guilty — Ann Coulter (May)
• Liberty and Tyranny — Mark Levin (June)
• Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications — Toby Segaran (In Progress…)
• Mastering Regular Expressions 3rd Edition — Jeffrey E. F. Friedl (In Progress…)
• The Last Days — Joel Rosenberg (In Progress…)
• Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand
• Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja — John Resig
• My Grandfather’s Son — Clarence Thomas

Learn Something New

• Pick up an MVC framework for PHP. Currently playing with CodeIgniter.

  Finished in April — I developed a messaging application for work. It allows feeds, blog entries, press releases and customer notifications to be aggregated, categorized and tagged for public consumption. CodeIgniter rules!
  Libraries used: SimplePie for super fast feed parsing and Arc90’s Twitter API Client.

• Develop more .NET applications.
• Rediscover Java.

ITunes began crashing on Super Bowl Sunday after I upgraded my iPod Touch to the latest firmware, version 2.2.1 — Since then I have reinstalled iTunes, did a factory restore of the iPod to no avail.

A few minutes ago I was looking through the Apple discussion groups and came across this fix by Jeff McCord. It is a simple one when you think about it:

1. Deauthorize your computer
2. Authorize it again
3. Visit the App Store and “Buy” a free app
4. Sync up

I am a happy camper again. All my music, movies, videos and audio books are back!