What should have been a fairly easy implementation turned into several frustrating hours. I was using the old Yelp API that is accessed simply by passing your yelp key in the url. But, I wanted to take advantage of some of the new functionality only available in their API version 2.0. Unfortunately Yelp API v2 requires an oAuth key/signature type access. Having already written similar code to access the Amazon web services with a signature I thought this would be a simple as reusing some existing code. Man was I wrong. Turns out a "correctly" implemented version of oAuth is much less tolerant than AWS is. Simple things, such as what characters in the URL must be encoded, invalidated the Yelp signature. After much searching and screwing around with various proposed implementations it became clear that the easiest and best implementation was to use the Java library provided by Yelp and simply access it from Coldfusion. To make this process easier I've consolidated th...

My Dell Latitue E6500 laptop all of a sudden started locking up. It didn't seem to be a windows problem because it locked up even in safe mode and even just at a command prompt. I couldn't tell if it was a memory problem or a hard drive failure. I called Dell tech support and they walked me through a built-in diagnostic program. By turning off the machine and then holding down the "fn" key while pressing the power button to turn the machine on it went into a low level diagnostic. It passed all the memory tests but failed on a hard drive seek test. They are sending me a new hard drive but I've decided to replace it with a solid state (SSD) drive - $400 for a 160gb from Amazon.

Canon Zoombrowser 20D nightmare I have owned Canon EOS digital cameras since early 2003. I currently own a 20D and I recently purchased a little Canon Powershot SX200 IS Point and Shoot for those times when I can't lug my SLR and supporting equipment around. The Powershot came with a new version of Zoombrowser which is the sofware I use to manage my rather extensive digital photo collection. Unfortunately, when I installed the new Zoombrowser software (version 6.3) it stopped working with my 20D! Here I am with 200+ photos from a gymnastics meet on my SLR and I can't download any of them. Going to the Canon site (http://www.usa.canon.com) provides for some pretty good support options in the form of software downloads. In fact, after navigating my way to the EOS 20D support page, the top download listed is an update for ZoomBrowser to version 6.4. Ah ha, they are aware of the problem and they fixed it. Not so. Turns out all the software on this page is listed here only bec...

Coldfusion 9 contains some great improvements, but what a pain it was to upgrade from my earlier version of ColdFusion. First of all the Adobe site state(d) that it was compatible with Windows 2000. Because our Coldfusion servers run Win2k this was good news.