tpryan

Added MT-Notifier

After putting it off for awhile, I finally got Movable Type notifications to work. I now know when comments are posted instead of having to obsessively check my blog configuration page. After that I figured it wasn’t that far a stretch to open up notifications for everyone else.

To that end, I installed MT-Notifier from Everitz Consulting. If you would like to subscribe to a particular post, just check the “Subscribe to This Entry” box on the individual entry page. You have to confirm your desire to do so, but then you’re in business.

You see, I don’t suffer from delusions that everybody is eager to subscribe to Aarrggghh!!. However occasionally people ask questions in my comments, and I’m never sure what the etiquette is. Do I email them back, or do I just comment back and let them find it when they feel like it? Now, I don’t have to worry, the reader can make that decision for themselves.

Jim Davis for Govenor (Florida)

I’m happy to share with everyone that ColdFusion is being used to make the world a better place… or at least to make Florida Democratic again.

The crew at Jim Davis for Governor ’06 have created a good looking site that uses ColdFusion, and blogging to reach the state of Florida. The cool thing I like about it is that the main blogger, Matthew Thornton, (disclaimer: a good friend of mine, who comments here from time to time,) gets the blogging medium. If you read the blog, it reads like a blog. It’s got a the right tone and content, as opposed to other candidate blogs that are just a collection of press releases. It’s not just me that thinks so. This guy said it too..

Congratulations to Matt, and the whole crew at the Jim Davis campaign. Now it’s time to win.

Future of Flashpaper

The Internets are a twitter with talk of the now finalized merger of Adobe and Macromedia. Now can I get an answer to the question I’ve wanted to ask, but knew no one would answer:

What’s going to happen to Flashpaper?

I get that pdf is the defacto standard for sharing documents. However, Acrobat Reader is such overkil for reading documents on the web. On the other hand Flashpaper is such a fast, lightweight, and effective way of consuming specially formatted documents on the web. Up until yesterday, I assumed that Adobe would incorporate a superior product into the fold, and make a Flash version of Acrobat Reader or something for consumption on the web. But after Coke broke my heart yesterday, I’m not so sure that superior products win out.

Now that forward looking statements are no longer prohibited, somebody out there better spill it.

ColdFusion and Valid Code

I ‘ve gotten oddly obsessive about webstandards and valid XHTML. The problem is that many of ColdFusion‘s features that make web development easy also make very unstandard xhtml. In order to get this site to validate I had to:

Replace Flash <cfform> tags with properly styled XHTML forms.
Remove all <cfdump> tags
Replace all embedded Flash with Flash embedding using the Satay Method.
Clean all Movable Type created content.

Finally when all was said and done, I have one page left that won’t validate. It’s a page on which I use <cfchart>. Nothing I’ve been able to do seems to fix that. I know there are plenty of people who don’t think validation is vital but a large company like Macromedia should shoot for valid output.

Yet Another New Design

As you may, or may not have been able to see, this site has been redesigned. Nothing big, I just got bored of the old look.

I’ve removed Sifr. Not because of a problem with the technology, just because I didn’t need it.

Explore. Enjoy. If anything looks wrong (or I didn’t format for your browser) drop me a line.

Determining Cluster Node

Every once in a while I get asked, “How does one determine what node of the cluster the currently running code is on?” One of the easier way to find out is to poll the registry.

Max Day 3

I opted not to go to my first session, a hands on session, because I have given up on hands on sessions. Nothing else appealed to me so I went back to the hotel, downloaded the Flex Builder Alpha, and built something. So no waste there.

I made it back for Understanding Flex Security with Erick Lee. I’m glad I went to this, finally there’s some instruction which talks about securing both the server and applications. I highly reccomend the materials to anyone who does Flex Development.

Then, I wandered into Architecting Flex Applications by Matt Chotin. If nothing else this finally convinced me that MVC architechture is worth looking at. I’ve seen code examples of it before, but Chotin did a great job of explaining why you would do it. The rest of it was okay.

Break for burgers from In and Out, and to get Janice settled.

I ended the day Next Generation Flex: Data Services with Christophe Coenraets. One of co-workers walked out of this with his mind blown, so I had to go to it. Man, was this cool. They really are looking to make collaborative data processing easy to do. It seems like a lot of what you could do with Flash Remoting, they built into Flex Enterprise Server. Except that it takes two or three lines of code to do it.

All in all this was my best day in terms of content quality.

Max Day 2 – Addendum

The day finished with two events for me.

First I went to Sneaks and Peeks. There were a couple of cool things here. A competitor to Google Earth completely driven by vector-based images, by ESRI. That was impressive. Captivate stuff was interesting, though I have little use for it. I left after the CFEclipse and RDS demonstration.

Second, I went to a reception for Government, Education and Non-Profit customers. It was just a cocktail hour. So it was good for networking, but not really useful. But it was fun.

Max – Day 2

I started the day with a bout of issues. I assume they have to do with my choice of eatery last night. So I missed my first session.

I did make it into ColdFusion Enterprise Integration taught by Sean Corfield, who looks nothing like the picture on his site. This was fantastic, if for no other reason than it validated a lot of what I do with ColdFusion. Namely backend processes, not viewed by users. It gave me a lot of good ideas about what to do to make these processes more robust. If you do this type of work, check out this class either tomorrow, or in the materials.

The keynote was ok, although I had an aisle seat which helped a bunch. The skit thing was a little silly, and didn’t add much to the experience. Both Adobe and Jermey Allaire had incredible presentations that kinda over shadowed Macromedia. I guess this isn’t so bad though, as Allaire’s new product was based on Flex, and Adobe will be the brand soon so no big deal there.

After lunch, I found out that Leveraging Cold Fusion Components in ColdFusion MX 7 was a little to basic for me. So I walked out, and rescheduled to take Creating BLOGs Using Dreamweaver, which I also thought was a little slow. I figured my ego needed deflating so I took the certification exam for ColdFusion MX 7. I passed.

My ego was in full swing when I strode into RIA Design Best Practices: Implementation with Flex. I left after 20 minutes because it was pretty much the RIA Design Best Practices: Theory for Developers I took yeasterday, but with the occasional code example.

There is still more to do tonight, so I’m off.

Max Day 1 – Addendum

Last thing I did for Max today was go to the Birds of A fether session for Cold Fusion. Tim Buntel and Damon Cooper did a really good job of dealing with an audience that went a little feral on them. I can’t figure out why. I mean no product is perfect, but people were pretty advisarial with them. Some of the people on the panel got defensive early, but I think that was going to happen. Nothing really that new was divulged, either which disappointed me.

Oh well, as disappointed as I was with it, I don’t think this one was the presenter’s fault.