monkey love coldfusion
Two months of studying paid off today. I took my ACE exam for ColdFusion 8 and passed with a 98%, which also means I qualified for the Advanced status. The Web Application Construction Kit is all you’ll ever need to become a CF Ninja. For the exam I’d recommend reading the first volume cover to cover. Additionally I found the ColdFusion MX 7 Certified Developer Study Guide to be very useful. Even if you don’t need it for your job challenge yourself and go for it.
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I’m test driving the Aptana Studio plugin for eclipse.¬ It looks very slick.¬ Just a quick “how to” note for hiding files (like Dreamweaver .lck files, hidden system files, etc) in the project window.
Pretty simple.¬ So why did it take me an hour to figure it out 😐
So I took some database training with Global Knowledge last week.¬ My office paid for the training.¬ Apparently that “back end” training may be all for naught though since my front end programming language is on life support.
Today’s Global Knowledge newsletter letter informed me (in very cheeky fashion) that ColdFusion is # 5 on their “Dying Technology” list:
“If any of these skills are your main expertise, perhaps it’s time to retrain.”
Here’s the whole article: http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/generic.asp?pageid=2347&country=United+States
The notion of ColdFusion being dead has been debated into the ground so I’m not going to belabor it.
IMHO, ColdFusion is the best thing that ever happened to me from an IT standpoint.¬ If you want to get things done quickly, easily and reliably use it.¬ If you are thinking of ColdFusion along with COBOL, Netware, Flannel Shirts and “Grunge” Bands From Seattle, and¬ you might want step outside your house more.¬ It’s not the mid 90’s anymore.
Yahoo has officially pulled the plug on Geocities.
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/03/rip-geocities/
I learned HTML making my Geocities site. I would love to see that brilliant collection of animated gifs and snazzy javascripts, but alas, I cannot find it anywhere in my archives. Even though the site I had there was terrible, I did learn some of the very basics constructing it.
Although I had long forgotten Geocities I definitely felt a little nostalgic when I learned of its demise.¬ Via Con Dios, Geocities.
Anyone else a little misty eyed?
Part I
I finally took the plunge and bought the upgrade to CS4 yesterday from Adobe.¬ Downloading the gi-normous 4.8 GB file was like watching my cat try to eat a chijuajua.¬ Painful.¬ I guess I could have downloaded all the trials and entered the license code, but it just feels more “official” to download the single file.¬ At $599 I need “official”.¬ Update: I moved my downloading operation to my work computer since it was dying at home.¬ Once I finally got the file downloaded though I encountered a second problem.
Part II
I have a Sandisk Cruzer (8 GB).¬ However, after trying to put the 4.8 GB file on it 10 times and getting “The disk in the destination drive is full, please insert a new disk to continue” each time I finally did some googling and realized that the problem was that by default the Cruzer is formated to FAT32 and the maximum file size for FAT32 is 4GB.¬ Here is how to reformat to NTFS.
I have finally joined the world of dual monitors.¬ Finances and standards at my office have thwarted my quest for two years to have a dual monitor setup.¬ My propensity to multi-task and staring at a fairly small (by developer’s standards) monitor for many hours a day has made this a painful defeat.
But at last… victory.
Meet the USB2VGA from startech.com (purchased via Dell).¬ This little guy finally allowed me to win the battle of not having to “open the box” to install any hardware.¬ It works quite well, is cost effective, and best of all… easy to configure.¬ If you can plug a device into a usb port then you have skills to set it up.
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I¬recently received a¬request from a management member to put “United States of America” at the top of the countries dropdown list for our user registration process.¬ While this may seem an innocuous change to that person we do have a lot (maybe 1/3) of users not born in the U.S.¬¬ I know it used to be popular to put the good¬ole¬U S of A atop of dropdown lists for its vast superiority “convenience” but it seems somewhat “politically incorrect” or “imperialistic” to me.¬ Any thoughts?
I have struggled for some time now with an expanding workload.¬ I direct a lot of projects for a couple of different business entities.¬ Since I have yet to find a way to disrupt the time space continuum and add more hours to the day I am ever searching for ways to stay focused and cram more into a 24 hour day.
Enter the OPPM.
The OPPM (One Page Project Manager) is the most effective tool I have found yet for project tracking/communication.¬ The real genius of it is its simplicity.¬ It literally is a one page document that can be easily interpreted by the boss, the project stakeholders, the managers, or just about anyone.¬ All you need is about 2-5 minutes to explain it to them once.¬ Where can I get more information you ask?
The OPPM (One Page Project Manager) website is a good start.
Then buy the book and read it.¬ The one I read is the one specifically geared for IT projects.¬ It’s about 125 pages and you can read it (and more importantly digest it) over a weekend.¬ Actually, once you read the first two chapters of the book you’ll be up and running.¬ Although I recommend reading the whole thing to learn the finer points.¬ I found the analysis of team member personalities very interesting (I’m the one with lots of unfinished books on the nightstand).
“But dude”, you say.¬ “I just dropped a wad of cash on MS Project.”¬ Don’t fret my friend.¬ You probably still need it to manage the nitty gritty.¬ And don’t throw out your Outlook task lists.¬ You can still use them.¬ The OPPM is meant to augment standard project management tools and methods.¬ The power of OPPM shines in meetings when people actually UNDERSTAND what is going on with the project without having to be a PMP.
Get it.¬ Use it.¬ You will be glad.
When I was a kid I idolized athletes. In college I idolized musicians. As a middle aged dude I idolize superior programmers.
Today I achieved something I am very excited about. I got a couple of lines (and one of those is a comment) of code included in one of Ray Camden’s projects at RIAForge. The project is GoogleCal. It’s a ColdFusion CFC for interacting with Google’s Calendar service. My tiny, wee contribution: helping to submit an “all day” event. It is such a small, small, small, small, small (keep going), minuscule piece of Ray’s project, but just to be able to contribute ANYthing to someone who gives so much to the CF community is freaking AWESOME.
I had a BIG problem recently at a hosting company for a project I work on. They had “something go wrong” during an upgrade to ColdFusion 8 and they lost our site’s settings from ColdFusion 7. Rather than wasting valuable time trying to get them to restore a backup and redo the upgrade I forged on trying to set everything right.
One of the problems I came across was that the hosting company set the mail server to be a different one than what we had for CF7. Why did this matter? Well, there were about 300 messages sitting in the “Undelivr” folder that needed to go out. In each of those messages was the old (now incorrect) mail server info. Since I was under the gun to get the mail out I pulled them all down via FTP to parse through them with Dreamweaver.
I used this article to configure Dreamweaver to edit my extensions.txt file to be able to open and perform search and replace on .cfmail files:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_16410
Here is a what the extensions.txt file looks like:
Once I got all of the .cfmail files updated, I FTP’d them back into the spool folder for re-processing. No dice. ColdFusion moved it all back to the “Undelivr” folder with a cryptic error:
The ColdFusion Mail Spool Encountered An Invalid Spool File In The Spool Directory. The invalid file MailXXXXXX.cfmail was moved to the undeliverable directory.
The next step… Hot Fix. Read about it here.
After the Hot Fix I again dropped the .cfmail files back into the spool folder for re-processing. This time… Sweet Success.