I promised earlier that I would elaborate a bit about why I changed over from the Waterswing Blog to the new Trond Ulseth blog.

Wrong company profile
Waterswing Studio is a company I've been running on my spare time for more years than I care to remember. However, mostly due to lack of time/priority, and partly due to problems with 3rd party server providers, it was never a money making business, and I am now just totaly leaving it behind. At the same time I'm working as full time employee (and part owner) with IDLmedia AS that is where I do most of my CF and web development. And it just felt a bit weird to blog about stuff that came up in that job on the Waterswing site. So hopefully the change will lead to more blog postings.

End of anonymity
As Charlie Arehart blogged there are many who participate/contribute to the CF community but do so anonymously. I myself was a sinner in this regard. Many people knew that I was the guy behind the Waterswing blog, but so many more people did not. I just want people to know who I am and who is talking, partly because I plan to participate in more and more conferences in the future, and I think it's better to know who you're meeting. For the same reasons I am now trond|ulseth in #Coldfusion on Dalnet, as opposed to dnort (my earlier nick there). I'm also trond[at]ulseth.no on MSN, and trondulseth on Skype and Gmail. So here I am! This is me!

A chanse to update blogCFC
Ok, this I could have done on the old blog as well, but it was more fun doing it on a new blog.

Clean up entries
Due to a move of server provider, I had to migrate the database from the old blog. Something went wrong, and a lot of the entries ended up being double posts. With the move to the new blog I cleaned out all the double posts.

Hi everyone, and welcome to my new blog. New design, new url and a new version of BlogCFC. However I migrated the content over from my old blog (www.waterswing.com/blog).

The reasons for the move, and what this hopefully will result in, will be explained in a new post coming soon (when the aggregators have tuned in to my new blog).

As a long time musician, and fan of such artists as Steve Vai and  Joe Satriani I was highly amused by this site where you can be a Guitar God. Go into the Lesson & Jam section and follow the instructions. Soon you'll be making that guitar wailin' and screamin', and you'll even get to duel a demon.

ps. You don't have to bring your own guitar.
pps. On a more on topic note - this is a very well done Flash site :)

Microsoft has anounced Blinq - a scaffolding tool for ASP.NET. They don't use the word scaffolding, but as I understand it, that is what it does.

You just point Blinq at a SQL database, and it creates the websites for displaying, creating and maipulating data.

I'm not doing any ASP.NET development, and I don't plan on starting anytime soon. But I thought this could be of interest for some. You can read about it here.

 A couple of months ago we bought a "new" car. Nothing overly fancy, a 2000 model Peugeot 406 station wagon. On Friday a lamp started glowing in the dashboard, and a quick look in the instruction manual told me that this is the self diagnosis lamp -  "contact sertified Peugeot repair shop"

So I made my self an apointment and was there today. After hooking up to the cars computer and doing whatever they do I got the message that nothing is wrong with the car. There was a list of 5 passing faults in the computer, like that there might have been some low voltage on the battery at some point. None of the faults was still present. But the list still triggered the lamp to glow.

So basically I had to pay about $130,- for them to delete the 5 faults from the car computer. Duh...

The Finnish band Lordi just won the Eurovision Song Contest some minutes ago with the song "Hard Rock Hallelujah". If you're not familiar with Lordy and their visual apearance (I was not before this contest) you've got to check them out. Their official site seems to be down at the moment but you can read about them at metal-archives.com, wikipedia or google for images.

It started with the Norwegian band Wig-Wam last year. And this year Lordi takes it all the way to the top. Rock music has finally entered this traditionally dull song contest. And if it's one word you can not say about Lordi, it's dull.

In the words of Ronnie James Dio: Long Live Rock'n'Roll

It's not often I alow myself to go off topic on this blog, but when I do it now it is about two milestone events happening in my life right now.

First of my wife and I are going to Haifa in Israel on a Bahá'í pilgrimage. This is a huge thing for us. Haifa, and nearby Akka is where the founder of the Bahá'í faith is burried, as well as his son and his forerunner. If you've not heard about the Bahá'í faith before and you're curious (I would be) I advice you go to www.bahai.org to find out more (you can also find more information about the Bahá'í World Centre in Haifa there).

The second milestone is that we bought a new house yesterday. After living in a 58m² house for the last 4 years (even smaller appartment before that) we finally found our self able to aford a "real" house.

The plus sides are that it is relatively central in our town, it has huge space around it (lots of space for kids to play, arrange barbeque parties etc.), it has two garages (only one can be used for car, but the other is perfect for bicycles, lawnmover, snow showels etc.). And there's a kind of "side basement" which I plan to make into a band rehersal room, and get together some of the guys from "old times" when we were rocking on the local scene). Also there's a basement (dry!) with lots of storage space.

The downside (and why we could aford the place at all) is that the inside rooms are old. However we took a extra loan to build a new bathroom before moving in, and we've done (and enjoyed) putting new floors, painting walls and such before. So we don't really see it as a down side at all. And while the inside is old, the building structure etc. seems to be in very good shape.

So needless to say we are extremly excited and happy these days (and busy). We saw the house just day before yesterday, so we had really short time before the trip to Israel. But it just felt so right the moment we saw it, so even if the price got up a bit because of a hefty price fight (several others saw the same plus sides and potential as we did), we deceided to go for it.

These two events are so huge and exciting for me that I might come back to them even if this is primarly a ColdFusion / Web Development blog (it's still my blog, so I can write what I want right? Besides I like to read a little personal info from the blogs I read, kind of to get to know the people behind the names).

However I promise to come back to continue the Object Oriented Blog Process, and tell about my experiences with Model Glue on the www.adobeusergroup.no site. I also plan to change this blog over to the Reactor/MG blog by Doug Hughes.

So long!

From the ashes of a non-activity MMUG we've been working (and still is) to get an active Adobe User Group up and running here in Norway.

We've now launched a new website at www.adobeusergroup.no (if you by any chanse are a Norwegian reading this you should rush over and register - it's free).

Hopefully by time we can be a huge and active group of Adobe users, meeting, learning from each other and socialising.

PS - This is a simple, close to static, out in a hurry solution. The "real" one I plan to be a MG application based on the "Headstart" application announced by Joe.

John Dowdell blogged about a cool Flash implementation of Google Maps and MS Virtual Earth made by Paul Neave.

If you click the link below you'll be able to check it out - and at the same time see where in the world I live.

Here I am: http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=63.121149&lon=7.757129&z=13.1&r=0&src=0

I just learned something new that saved me from pretty much work, so I thought I'd share.

I had the following situation; I'm making a Learning Management System in my daytime job. The system has clients (companies), which again have several users. And each user has several courses. I had made a DELETE method in a CRUD file for deleting clients, but naturally I also wanted the clients belonging to that company to be deleted, and each of the relation to these users courses to be deleted as well.

Now I was thinking, what is the way to do this that would a) make sense and logic in my model, and b) make use of as few queries as possible. I had a few ideas in mind which would avoid the queries within loops that I would have gone for in my earlier years of coding (very bad practice).

I mentioned the "problem" to a developer in a company sharing office space with us, and he said "Are you using a relational DB that supports cascading deletes". My reply was along the lines of "I have no idea what you mean, but I'm using MS SQL Server for this application". To make a short story even shorter, he showed me how to do cascading deletes in a MS SQL Server using Enterprise Manager.

If you are still reading I guess there's a chanse you don't know how to do this as well, so I'll explain. The idea is that if you have your relations set up corectly, whenever you delete a record - all records in a related table with that record as a foreign key will also be deleted. When you are inside a table in design view, right click and choose "Relationships...". If the relation is not defined from before you can also do that here (I'll not cover that here). Now check the choise for "Enforce relationship for INSERTs and UPDATEs", and then check the choise for "Cascade Delete Related Records".

By doing this both for the user/course relation and the client/user relation I could now just use the DELETE method in my client CRUD component, and the database would take care of "cleaning up" all the underlying "mess".

Excelent technique that already have, and will continue to save me a lot of work. However, I'd like to say: "Use with caution!"