Pretty much everyone has a digital camera now and everyone just loves to takes snapshots of their friends, belongings, evets, etc… But what do you do with them afterwards? Not all are print worthy but you still want to display them or view them. So, why not use them as screen savers!

The “My Pictures Slideshow” screen saver that comes with Windows XP is *okay*… But it’s kind of boring. There are much better options out there and for the price of FREE, you can’t go wrong!

The first one is similar to the Apple photo screen saver, and is called Nostalgic. You set where you want the photos to come from (by default your “My Pictures” folder), and how often you want the photos to change. Other settings include how long to cross fade between photos, how much you want to scale the photos, and even the resolution you want set on the monitor (you can set different ones for each monitor you have if you have more than 1).

The next one I just found today, is called Slickr. Similar to Nostalgic, this screen saver can be set to pull images from a folder on your computer but has the added bonus of being able to use images off of Flickr. You can select images from Flickr by user, group, or everyone and then narrow it down even more by choosing if you just want recent images, by tags, or interestingness and if you REALLY want to narrow it down, you can even select a specific date. With Slickr, you can even set how you want the images to be shown, whether or not you want to use fading, panning or zooming, or show file info. If your user has access to private photos, you can authorize Slickr on your account to be able to access those as well.

The great thing about both these screen savers is that they’re multi-monitor friendly unlike the Windows XP  one which utilizes all monitors but only treats it as 1 and even then the image ends up only on 1 of the monitors. These two will actually utilize all your monitors and show different photos on each which is nicer in my opinion. Check them out!

I’m not certain how many of you guys out there are programmers, let alone Coldfusion programmers… But I’ve had this problem for a while now and haven’t been able to figure this out so I’m reaching out to my readers to see if anyone has any ideas.

What I’m trying to do is build a templating system in Coldfusion where I would replace a variable with the contents of another processed Coldfusion file. So let’s say I have two files…

hello.cfm

<cfset message = "Hello World!" />
<cfoutput>#message#</cfoutput>

caller.cfm

<cfset bodyText = "this is some text from hello.cfm :: %hello%" />
<cfoutput>#bodyText#</cfoutput>

So what I want now is to replace %hello% with the output of hello.cfm so that in the end, I’ll get the output “this is some text from hello.cfm :: Hello World!

Hope someone out there will see this and have an answer or at least some ideas to get the juices flowing

Thanks!!

UPDATE: LOL, okay so I figured it out.

caller.cfm

<cfset bodyText = "this is some text from hello.cfm :: %hello%" />

<cfsavecontent variable="varHello">
  <cfinclude template="hello.cfm" />
</cfsavecontent>

<cfset bodyText = replace(bodyText, "%hello%", varHello, "ALL") />
<cfoutput>#bodyText#</cfoutput>

Now I just need to make this cleaner so that I load just the files I need instead of all of them and assigning them to variables. Any comments would still be greatly appreciated!

While this was written with more of a freelance/contract worker in mind, this can still be applied to anyone who has to deal with clients in general. FreelanceSwitch published this great article on the many types of clients that one would encounter through out their working life along with the pros, cons and how one should work with them. It almost seems like it should be made into a handbook everyone should get when jumping into the freelance tech pool.

So, let’s hear about which types you’ve encountered and your experiences with them!

No, I didn’t speeell it wroung!

Picnik is a neat web application which allows any person to quickly and easily edit their photos online! I didn’t upload an image of my own to play with but I did get to mess around with some of their preloaded images and found it to work quite well.

In addition to regular editing options like cropping, red eye reduction, brightness/contrast, etc., Picnik also has a set of “creative tools” which allow you to add borders, rounded corners, and fun tonal effects.

Back in February, Adobe announced that they would try to release an online version of their popular Photoshop program so we’ll get to see how they compare when it’s out.