It looks like Firefox 3 is officially released. The servers are a bit overwhelmed at the moment, so you need to use a little perseverance to get the download pages to come up. I think there may be some delays in propagation of the actual Firefox 3 download page as well.

This is not a new tip, in fact I'm pretty sure I've blogged about it in the past, but the fastest way to open a file is via the "Open Resource" dialog box. Pressing [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[R] opens the dialog box, which allows you to free form type a search string that will show you all the files that match your search string. This is extremely handy when you know the name of the file you want to open and have lots of resources or just tons of files in your projects.

Raymond Camden blogged about a question someone had about getting the folder path for the current template. While Raymond addressed how to get the OS path, how would you get the URL path? So, if you had your user was on the URL http://www.example.com/some/folder/and/file.cfm, how would you go about getting the "/some/folder/and/" path? While there are always many ways to solve a problem, I've tried to come up with a solution that should work for any version of ColdFusion from 6.0 and above.

I had the need to convert a ColdFusion date/time stamp to a JS Date Object. I thought serializeJSON() function would handle this, but it turns out it treats CF date/time variables as strings. The toScript() function will convert CF variables to JS Date Objects—provided that the date/time variable is in ODBC format (i.e. {ts '2008-05-02 13:32:16'}.

I'm working on a project where I'm trying to create thumbnails for documents the user uploads. Since CF8 has introduced the <cfpdf /> tag, I thought it would be pretty straightforward to turn page 1 of a PDF into a thumbnail image—turns out I was wrong. While the <cfpdf /> does work, it was causing me to jump through some various hoops some of which I could easily overcome.

I recently discovered a bug in Safari (Mac and PC) related to use the :hover pseudo class in conjunction with an adjacent sibling selector. The problem is that the mouseover event correctly changes the adjacent sibling's style, but when the mouseout event occurs the style is never reset. This means if you have the selector ul li:hover + li the adjacent selector's (+ li) style will be changed when the user hovers over the element, but the style is never reset once the user mouse's out of the element.

Smashing Magazine recently posted a an article on 35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets. There's a number of sets I haven't seen. The one that immediately caught my eye was pinvoke's PI Diagona Pack. It comes with 200 unique icons in two different sizes (10x10 and 16x16.) It has a similar look to the famfamfam set of icons called Silk. Here's what the icons look like: It seems the pinvoke site's getting a lot of downloads at the moment, but I was able to find a mirror of the pi_diagona_pack.zip file.

Simon Whatley had a good post yesterday on operating precedence in ColdFusion. It's important to understand the priority in which statements are evaluated, but what I think is more important is to explicitly define the precedence by using parenthesis. This makes the code much easier to read and much less likely to be misinterpreted. Take the equation: x = 3 + 4 * 5; What is the value of x? The correct value is 23, since the multiplication operator takes precedence over the addition operator.

I'm working on a dropdown menu based on the <ul /> tag. The menu can have an unlimited number of children menus and I decided the "suckerfish" method was a very effective method for achieving my menu structure. One of the problems I ran into was trying to implement a drop shadow layer for the menus. While there are many ways to implement a drop shadow, I thought the most straight forward method was to use a shadow <div /> with the same dimensions of the menu it's shadowing.

[UPDATED: Monday, February 18, 2008 at 10:24:01 AM] I've been playing around with e - TextEditor this weekend to see if maybe it'll replace Textpad for me. I've always liked the speed of Textpad and it does a really good job on large files. I use Ec...