Ben Forta | Blog

Blog posts made in June 2010

At the request of a reader, I created an OpenOffice Base version of the example database used in my Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes. The file can be downloaded from the book page.

To use this, you'll obviously need OpenOffice. And as it turns out, Base is actually a really nice database to experiment with, as it features a built-in screen that lets you simply enter and execute SQL. So, once you have OpenOffice installed, here's what you need to do:

Open the book database with OpenOffice Base
Select the Query tab on the left
Click the "Create Query in SQL View" task to display the Query Design screen
Type your SQL in the window
Click the Run Query button (it has an image of a green check mark on top of 2 documents) to execute your SQL, you can also just press F5 to run
Your results will be shown above your SQL code (unless you generate an error)

Thank you Roy (no last name provided) for the inspiration.

YouTube weighs in on Flash and the HTML5

While HTML5's video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don't support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs. Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube's video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it.

Ted Patrick demos Flash Player 10.1 on the Android powered Motorola Droid X.

Fellow Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow will be a guest on CNET Live's Android Atlas Weekly on Tuesday June 29th at 2:00pm Pacific / 5:00pm Eastern. You can submit your own questions for Lee in the comments on this Ask Adobe Your Mobile Flash Questions post.

Title says it all, Tour de ColdFusion is now available for download.

Jean-Baptiste Queru is a lead on Google's Android Open Source Project where he drives releasing Google's contributions to the open source world and importing public contributions into Google's releases. He has a guest post on the Android Developers Blog entitled The Froyo Code Drop. This is a great read, and provides insight into the details and complexities involved in a project like Android.

Check out this 10 minute Motorola Droid X video featuring Google, Verizon, Motorola, and Adobe's own Shantanu Narayen:

Love the highly animated Apple centric questions and the artful answer dodging! This one is fun to watch.

Running Flash on your mobile device? Visit http://m.flash.com/ to access the Flash Showcase for Mobile.

I don't really like ColdFusion .NET comparisons. A better comparison would be ColdFusion to ASP.NET, or ColdFusion + Java to .NET. But, having said that, ColdFusion developer Jose Diaz works for a company that migrated from ColdFusion to .NET (yep, I know, not overly smart). And Jose, having been exposed to the simplicity of ColdFusion before being forced to do things the hard way, created cfdot.net to compare code for common tasks.