Community Member Profile

A little bit about me...

I'm currently working as a contractor at the US Small Business Administration. Now that I've said that, I also have to say this:

I don't speak for the SBA. The Agency doesn't endorse any particular products. The Agency's use of particular products is not an implicit endorsement of those products. Your mileage may vary. Any opinions I express, especially those that contain profanity, are my own. And when I see "we", I'm referring to myself and other peons who also don't speak for the Agency.

That said, the SBA's a great place to work for exploring new technologies. There's a political party who resents our very existence and is always looking for any excuse to get rid of us. (See previous paragraph.) So we always have to exhibit success with everything they throw at us. We've really pioneered a lot of the Federal Government's entry into Service Oriented Architecture, E-Authentication, etc, and ongoing stuff (CF, CSS, HTML 5, jQuery, etc), and even the web itself. When we got into putting applications onto the web, only NOAA's NWS (to my knowledge) beat us to it. When other agencies need to see a prototype of success in a new congressional mandate, we're often it. Challenging and fun like you wouldn't believe.

So you see why I like Ben's blog.

Recent Blog Comments By WebManWalking

• Movies As A Religious Experience

  Posted on May 15, 2012 at 6:03 PM

  @Ben, I don't know whether you'd consider this a religious observation, but it seems to me, in a sense, movies multiply how many lives we get to have. Each movie is like a little extra life we get to live, if only for a short time.... read more »

• ColdFusion 10 - Don't Use Dynamic Query Values In CFLoop

  Posted on Apr 19, 2012 at 7:03 PM

  @Ben, Can cfcase value attributes be dynamic in CF 10 too? Really tedious maintaining a long string cfcase value that you can't even break up with ampersands. I didn't see it in the CF 10 beta PDF, but then, I didn't notice dynamic query attributes either.... read more »

• Calculating CSS Selector Specificity Using ColdFusion

  Posted on Apr 17, 2012 at 9:24 PM

  P.S.: Thanks for this post. I already knew how specificity was calculated, but I hate it so much, I never bother explaining it to anyone. :-) You've done the fledgling CSS coders a great service. Might be worthwhile to comment rules with your calculated values: read more »

• Calculating CSS Selector Specificity Using ColdFusion

  Posted on Apr 17, 2012 at 8:57 PM

  @Ben, Don'tcha just hate it when you add a class to something, and it doesn't work, and you end up having to add that stupid "!important" to styles in the rule? Well, I do. The problem with the specificity rules are that we don't compose selectors for specificity... read more »

• ColdFusion 10 - Parsing Dirty HTML Into Valid XML Documents

  Posted on Feb 28, 2012 at 7:07 PM

  @Ben, This may give XHTML the biggest boost it's ever gotten! Rapid Application Development + cleanup = actual use!... read more »

• ColdFusion 10 Beta, Apache Tomcat, And Symbolic Links On Mac OSX

  Posted on Feb 23, 2012 at 12:05 AM

  @Dik, Thanks. I've had the Lion installer for a while now. Your post has inspired me to go ahead and do it. But first... How did you install the Java Runtime if it's not included in the Lion installation? Where'd you get it from?... read more »

• Printing To The Primary Output Stream From Within A ColdFusion CFThread Tag

  Posted on Feb 8, 2012 at 9:03 PM

  @Ben, Soon I'll be implementing my bad guy scenario, doing (cfcontent reset="true") without saving the content first. In the process, I've discovered something pretty interesting (and dangerous) about calling cfcontent inside a custom tag: It's as if the (cfcontent reset=&q... read more »

• Building Executable Scripts For The Mac OSX Command Line

  Posted on Jan 11, 2012 at 6:06 PM

  @Eapen, You're right. About the only amazingly cool thing that Terminal has going for it is drag-and-drop of files and folders into the terminal window for command line completion. Another cool terminal app for Mac is X11 from Apple (/Applications/Utilities/X11.app), which convenient... read more »

• Building Executable Scripts For The Mac OSX Command Line

  Posted on Jan 9, 2012 at 6:59 PM

  ... assuming the 2>/dev/null occurred in the script too that is. (Sheesh, mixing shells can get confusing.)... read more »

• Building Executable Scripts For The Mac OSX Command Line

  Posted on Jan 9, 2012 at 6:57 PM

  P.S.: That's how you specify shell outside the script. If I had specified it in the script, the bash -c would've been unnecessary.... read more »

• Building Executable Scripts For The Mac OSX Command Line

  Posted on Jan 9, 2012 at 6:53 PM

  @Ben, You're right. bash is indeed the default shell for the most recent 2 or 3 versions of Mac OS X. Snow Leopard and Lion for sure. Not too sure about Leopard. Pretty sure Tiger and all preceding big cats defaulted to tcsh ("tee cee shell"). tcsh is very similar bash but Apple w... read more »

• Disabling Auto-Correct And Auto-Capitalize Features On iPhone Inputs

  Posted on Jan 5, 2012 at 4:37 PM

  @Ben, I hate that bad-guessing autocorrect so much, I disable it on all my iDevices. But it STILL sometimes highlights a word [in pink] to suggest an alternative from time to time. If I don't notice it instantly, before I type the very next character, it throws away everything it highlighte... read more »

• A Book Apart: Mobile First By Luke Wroblewski

  Posted on Jan 4, 2012 at 8:26 PM

  @Ben, Just found the simplest scrollbars solution (because we already have jQuery Mobile here): http://jquerymobile.com/test/docs/pages/touchoverflow.html For non-jQuery-Mobi... read more »

• A Book Apart: Mobile First By Luke Wroblewski

  Posted on Jan 4, 2012 at 1:51 PM

  @Ben, There seems to be some chatter on Twitter lately about roll-your-own scrollbars. I'll let you know if anything seems promising. We have 15 years' worth of web pages with scrollable divs or iframes, too many to refactor anytime soon. So I'm thinking of adding a special warning a... read more »

• A Book Apart: Mobile First By Luke Wroblewski

  Posted on Jan 3, 2012 at 8:51 PM

  P.S.: I have my own solution for tooltips: http://www.webmanwalking.org/examples/accessibility/dsp_tooltips_on_ipad.cfm My solution requires a special-purpose ser... read more »

• A Book Apart: Mobile First By Luke Wroblewski

  Posted on Jan 3, 2012 at 8:46 PM

  @Ben, This approach (most difficult situation first) reminds me of Designing with Progressive Enhancement by the Filament Group. (They're the accessibility specialists behind jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile.) That book talks about the "x-ray perspective", which means seeing t... read more »

• How Client-Side Validation Is Changing The Shape Of Server-Side Validation

  Posted on Dec 29, 2011 at 5:44 PM

  @Gary, @Cutter and @Martijn are right. But it's not all screen readers. The group that used to turn off JavaScript more than any other was users of the JAWS screen reader. At one point in time, JAWS just couldn't handle JavaScript. That's changed a lot. Have a look at read more »

• Preventing Links In Standalone iPhone Applications From Opening In Mobile Safari

  Posted on Dec 28, 2011 at 3:03 PM

  @Doug, jQuery.post() can do an HTTP post request, so you can code an onsubmit that does that, then returns false. I'm such a creature of habit. I originally ended the previous paragraph with a semicolon.... read more »

• Scalable And Modular Architecture For CSS (SMACSS) By Jon Snook

  Posted on Dec 12, 2011 at 9:32 PM

  @Ben, Notational comment: You can "AND" pseudo classes the same way as you AND classes (@Daniel's examples): selector:pseudo_class_one:pseudo_class_two That said, watch out for "::something". It looks like it contains some sort of null pseudo class, but actu... read more »

• Printing To The Primary Output Stream From Within A ColdFusion CFThread Tag

  Posted on Nov 18, 2011 at 7:25 PM

  @Ben, I'm really having a problem with this very thing (the output stream that's been generated so far), because of getting ready for MSIE 10. The problem is, MSIE 10 won't support conditional comments, and conditional comments are how I dealt with all the problems of quirks mode. Wh... read more »