Anuj @ ColdFusion, Flex and some more….

I was trying to transfer all my emails (keeping the folder structure intact) from Outlook (on Windows) to Mac. I decided to go with Thunderbird as my email client on Mac (the 3 contestants were Mail, Entourage and Thunderbird).

To my surprise, it was not the most straight forward thing to transfer emails over (as I had thought). Apparently, Mail (email program on Mac) needs mbox files and you cant convert your .pst files easily to mbox files. There are a few apps out there that would do this for you but they are all paid ones. I didnt think it was worth it to pay for something so simple. After looking at a few options, the one I found to be the easiest was this :-

1) Install Thunderbird on your Windows machine and import email/settings/addresses etc from MS Outlook into Thunderbird. (might take a while if you have lots of emails,  took me about 20 mins to do this)

2) Copy the Thunderbird profile to a USB stick or drive.

3) Copy the profile on to your Mac and then if you prefer to use Mail , you can import the Thunderbird profile into Mail or if you prefer to use Thunderbird ( like I did ), you can just replace your default profile folder with the ones that you just copied over. Or you can restore the backed up profile. There is a program called Mozbackup which can backup and restore profiles for you and you wont have to bother about knowing where the profile is etc but unfortunately it only works for Windows. So, would work only for a Windows to Windows transfer.

Thats it, you should be done.  I found this to be the easiest and cheapest way to transfer emails over, I might be wrong though.

Anyone got any better ideas ?

Yes, thats the 100th post on my blog. It took me 7 months to get to 100 posts, which is not too bad I think. I have not been able to write posts in the past few weeks as compared to before, mainly because my new contract keeps me very busy and by the time I get home, I am completely knackered and there is just no time and energy for blogging. However, I still enjoy reading others’ blog posts.

I do hope to be more active at blogging though as I firmly beleive that when you write your thoughts out, you improve your own thought process because thats actually when you think how you could have done it better (atleast I do that) .

Thanks to all the readers who took the time to read my blogs and I hope to have the learning process going on .

Happy coding!

I know this has come up with a few times before but its something I want to blog more for myself so I could easily refer to it when required.

By default, cfpop does not support ssl and if you are trying to access your gmail account via cfpop, you wouldnt be able to do so straight away because gmail requires you to access its mail server using ssl. There are a couple solutions around (which can be searched via Google) but the best I found was that you can force socketFactory’s class to use ssl (which is not the default behaviour).

Just add the following few lines of code before your cfpop tag call and that should do it! And dont forget to enable POP access in your gmail account first.

As stated in my earlier post, I have got myself a Mac recently. There was no real reason for me to do so, but I just wanted to go ahead and try it and I had also heard some good things about it from a few people, so I thought lets get one then! Before this, I never really worked on any OS other than Windows, which makes it a bit slow when it comes to getting my head around some of the stuff.

So far, I only have gotten as far as setting up Eclipse/ColdFusion on the machine, install some IM softwares, install FTP client, setup my email and I think thats about it. In general, things seem to be taking more time than normal. I will try and put some of my initial thoughts on some of the things I notice and I know I could be completely wrong because of my lack of awareness in the Mac world.

Things I don’t like :-

1) Nothing is without a cost! - That seems to be the norm in the Mac world. Every little utility you need e.g. Text editor , ftp clients etc are all with a price tag. I am not against paying for softwares but , to be honest, coming from Windows, I am not used to it. Again, I could be wrong but if thats the case I would like to be corrected.

2) Some very basic things like making hidden files visible and vice versa is not part of the OS or atleast that’s what I found out from my little search on the subject. I would have expected this to be a simple toggle on/off config in the Finder window. Cant think of a reason why its not there.

3) I am not sure if I am right or not but I could not find a way to eject a CD/DVD other than ejecting it from the context menu. I was expecting a hardware eject button (spent a fair amount of time looking for it actually and finally said to myself, “get over Windows” !!)

There are a few other minor things but it all comes down to getting used to it I guess.

Things I like :-

1) I love the dock and the way the whole thing works! The way the dock elements start jumping when an app needs attention is just awesome!

2) I love the fact that I dont really have to worry about viruses when I am on Mac. Getting an Antivirus up and making sure its always up-to-date and occassional cleanup/system checks were just so annoying in Windows.

3) I also like that Apache/PHP is all built in and no extra effort is required to get those things up and running.

I like it overall as a better system to work with, its more stable and reliable and I beleive I just need to give myself some time to get used to it.

I cant wait to get my macbook pro. Apparently, it has been shipped and should be with me before the weekend. This will be my first ever non-windows expereince and I am getting ready for the adventure. I realize the migration from Windows to Mac is not an easy one and there will be some (may be lots ;)) hurdles along the way but I think nothing really major.

Any tips for regular Mac users on what / what not to do, would be really handy.

As mentioned in one of my earlier post, I am having to work on XHTML and CSS lately and because this was not really one of my best skills, I end up spending a lot of time reading about it and while I was doing that today, I got to this page (yes I am getting my hands dirty with Ext lately and using ColdExt as well, which by the way, simply rocks! ) . I have been using Firefox and Firebug all the time and I was not aware that there are tools that let you debug in IE as well, which, even if you dont like, you have to do.

So, I just thought I post about it here as this is a useful set of tools for any web developer. This is just an excert from the URL above.

Probably one of the best tool combinations for debugging your application is to use the Mozilla Firefox browser with the Firebug addon and optionally the Web Developer addon. Another very useful tool is Venkman - the JS debugger.

If you’re using Microsoft Internet Explorer you can try out the Microsoft Developer Toolbar plugin. There is also the DebugBar which is free for personal use.

For the Opera browser you can use the Opera Developer Tools or the alternative Web Developer Toolbar & Menu for Opera.

Safari users can use the Web Inspector to get an overview of the page or enable Debug menu in the browser.

Last night, I made some more updates to ColdFusiondocs.com, although minor updates again. I have changed the right panel to have a tabbed layout rather than a top and bottom layout, I think this gives more room for the actual content and both the documentation section and the useful url’s section should be easier for the eye.

Another minor change I did was to focus the search field on load and place the text caret in there. I cant seem to get it to work in Firefox though, would be nice to know if anyone has a fix.

On a side note, I am still struggling to get the deep linking to work mainly because of the fact that the way this app is written. I wil try some more when I get some time as I know its an important feature for this app.

Oh, by the way, as a reminder, you are more than welcome to go and add you CF related links to the app.

Here is the link. www.coldfusiondocs.com/app/

This might sound like a very old topic which has come up unlimited number of times before but its an ongoing frustration for every HTML/CSS developer and because I have always been a ColdFusion developer and also a Flex developer lately, I never really understood the intensity of the frustration. However, at my current contract, I am having to do quite a bit of XHTML/CSS, so I got a chance to experience the problem first hand. I really must say that it can’t get any more frustrating when you spend whole of your day (without a lunch break) trying to make sure that your code looks the same in IE and Firefox , just to find out at the end of the day that you must test your code in IE version 6.0 as well, which will make you look like a complete idiot because IE6 will mercilessly make your page look like a drawing board with random elements on it. More »

One of my mates just sent this through to me, so I thought this is definitely worth a post :-

The FLVPlayer is a non-commercial, conceptual AIR application, intended to simplify the video transfers from YouTube to computers and mobile devices like IPhone, IPod, smartphones.

It provides the functionality to download videos onto PC, MAC or Linux and transfer them to the device later on, so the device’s bandwidth is not used later to stream videos. Other useful functionality, is a video playback. It has been built with Adobe AIR and Papervision3D. The application can be installed on PC/MAC/Linux machines, by using the image link below:

I use WordPress as my blogging software and I just read the news that WordPress 2.5 has been released. I have been following some posts about this and there has been a lot of talk about this release. This is a major release with features like multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

So, I just went ahead and did an upgrade. My previous version was 2.3.2 . The upgrade went smoothly apart from the fact that one of my plugins named “Gregarious” stopped working after the upgrade. This plugin was handling the social bookmarking icons on the site including Digg and others. Not a big problem, I can try to fix this later, but the new version does look good indeed. For anyone currently on WordPress, its definitely worth upgrading.