It’s that time of year again, of particular importance this year due to the fact that business has been agonizingly slow for the last year, but has now picked up to the point that it has become necessary to travel south of the border. South of the Canadian border, that is. I’ll be spending a week or so in a hotel in San Diego locked in a room with my two business partners while we hammer out some ideas on a gargantuan whiteboard.

I’ve had further opportunity to play with ColdFusion 8/9, but I haven’t discovered anything particularly noteworthy aside from finding that I suck at cfscript. I vastly prefer tag syntax, but I’ve done a bit of reading on it and it seems like something I’ll need to know, even though it is similar to JavaScript with I have a hate/hate relationship with.

I have enjoyed using ColdFusion Builder Beta. I don’t generally need “Live View” from Dreamweaver anymore – I am quite comfortable using a simple text editor so Dreamweaver comes across as a bit bloated at this point for my purposes. ColdFusion Builder has just what I need and it seems to do it well.

This last week has been prep work for a project that has been looming without funding for quite a long time (and has recently been funded). I fly to San Diego tomorrow morning and after that I suspect there will be plenty to write about; I only hope I have time to do so.

I just discovered I’m not even in the top 10 pages of Google results when searching my name.  How disappointing. Will have to remedy this soon and crush all other Andrew McLeans in the way.

One of the projects I’m working on has a number of disk space requirements and I decided to play around with CFCHART to give me an “at-a-glance” idea how much space is left on the drive without having to go into the server backend. I mostly used tips from Ray Camden’s site here.

Not much to it – like I said, it’s just an experiment so I didn’t jazz it up at all, but it works.

<cfset fileOb = createObject("java", "java.io.File").init("/")>

<cfset usable = #fileOb.getUsableSpace()#/1024/1024/1024>
<cfset total = #fileOb.getTotalSpace()#/1024/1024/1024>

<cfset used = total-usable>

<cfchart format="flash" chartHeight = "300" chartWidth = "600" foregroundcolor="Blue">
<cfchartseries type="pie" colorlist="blue,red">
<cfchartdata item = "Available" value = "#round(usable)#">
<cfchartdata item = "Used" value = "#round(used)#">
</cfchartseries>
</cfchart>

I’m working off my laptop with a 220 GB partition, 60 of which is taken. It says 161 free because it’s rounding, but the numbers are essentially right. The repeated use of 1024 simply bumps the value up from bytes to kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes. Everything else is pretty self-explanitory. Good thing Ray Camden is around because I never would have figured out that frst line for myself.

Edit: In case anyone wonders, the first line in which I put “/” can be replaced with a specific drive such as “C:/” or “D:/” but I chose to use the webroot. Any linux path will also work.

If anyone visited the site and was greeted by a “domain deactivated” message over the weekend, it’s just a bit of a hiccup with my hosting provider, it’ll be taken care of within a couple days.

Well things were touch and go for a while there, and stress was shared by all, but I’m back to programming again. Funding for both an old and a new project is imminent and so I returned to work eagerly. Of course nothing ever happens on time so the artificial deadline three weeks past is long gone, but I’d rather wait on funding for a contract than work for the Man.

I created a warm-up app for internal business use. Essentially it activates users for a service without them needing to pay for it. It was something we had to do manually before and was getting to be a pain. But those days are gone now and I’ve had a chance to get back into things, and in the meantime was reminded of the fact that linux is sensitive to camelCase SQL queries.

I went tubing in a river a couple days back, and with my wife out of town it was all too easy to blow off the sunscreen. Three hours later everyone tells me I’m really pink and I don’t believe them. But I sure feel it now.

It’s been a week since I last wrote here, and for that I apologize. Work has dried up and has taken with it much of my motivation to write. My wife is out of town visiting some family – a trip I opted out of due to financial concerns and the strong possibility of funding coming through for a big project this weekend (which would immediately have prompted some pretty serious work). But nothing has happened yet and so I’ve had a lot of time to kill.

In the meantime I’ve been catching up on some TV Series, specifically I finished Rome and most recently The Tudors. Great shows and in the case of The Tudors, incredibly accurate historically. And portrayed by some very well cast actors. So well, in fact, that I’m still reeling from the death of both Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell. It’s a shame I’ll have to wait another year to see the next season.

As far as ColdFusion goes, I’ve been playing around with CF9 and ColdFusion Builder, and have been impressed overall. There are things that need polishing in CF9 but it is of course still in Beta.

Among my other projects, dColumbus has agreed to learn German with me using Rosetta Stone. A few months back I started the first year curriculum of three. I made it about half way through before getting overloaded with work – something I almost miss now. I’m essentially in Kindergarten (ironically a German word), only able to form small simple sentences like “Mein Auto ist blau” (my car is blue) and “Ich haben ein katze” (I have a cat). Rosetta Stone really is an amazing piece of software, though. I’ve retained nearly everything it’s taught me, no exaggeration. dColumbus wanted to learn a new language but was leaning more towards Spanish, Italian, or even Latin. I told him if he learned German with me first then when we finished the lessons I would move on to a second language of his choice. Having someone to converse with in a new language is invaluable, so a deal was struck.

This probably isn’t new but it’s new to me.

Developing Adobe ColdFusion 9 Applications

A new document released to assist in development of CF9 applications. It has today’s date on it, so I’m pretty sure it’s new.

I’ve been looking around at jobs available all over North America, and one thing in particular has stood out as a glaring problem.

No one has any clue what they want let alone how to ask for it.

I came across this issue as a Systems Admin once, too. Gone are the days when you had a Server Administrator, Webmaster, Network Admin,  Network Engineer, Network Cabler, Database Administrator et cetera. In my last position, I was all of these things and more, and was paid about half of any one of them should pay.

What I’ve been seeing in job ads more and more is Job-posters asking for the world. Must-haves: Masters Degree in Computer Science, Oracle, MySQL, Java, ColdFusion, CSS, XML, ActionScript, Flash, Flex, PHP JavaScript, experience with Robust Web 2.0 and must know frameworks for each operative language.

First off let me shoot down the Computer Science Degree. I have worked with many people in the government who carry such degrees, yet they manage to not know how to work their computer. They know just enough to get through their day in their career of choice, but beyond that, they are lost.

Secondly, I was always under the impression programmers made for terrible designers 99% of the time. One exception, of course, being my good friend dColumbus over at dColumbus.net, who is something of a rare hybrid. But in most other cases, why are job posters expecting a one-man panacea?  And how often is one person an expert in more than two languages besides maybe HTML and SQL? In truth, more and more it seems job posters are expecting some form of deity to program their applications for them. And they expect this coding god to do it on the cheap.

Then finally there is the disturbing trend of using buzz words like “robust” and “web 2.0” which basically mean nothing. I mean yes they mean something in some circles and possibly in the dictionary, but as far as a job posting goes, it means nothing.

It reminds me of grade school when everyone wanted to be like the cool kids, so they started using words like them without understanding what they meant. Or like in Austin Powers when Dr. Evil said “I’m Hip. I’m with it” and proceeded to butcher The Macarena.

I am an apprentice programmer. A ColdFusion Padawan. I realize that now.

Up until recently, if something code needed writing, I simply wrote it. I did not consider whether there could be another way, or if I was duplicating code. I simply wrote it and tested it until it worked.

I was first introduced to the concept of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) by some workmates back when I was a systems admin. Sometimes when we had some downtime, I’d get a few quick lessons in programming techniques in Java, most of which went way over my head. Struts, beans, model view controller – alien terms.

It has become apparent that I am sorely lacking in jargon, for starters. Simply having a work conversation with my designer/business partner makes this obvious. This is one of the drawbacks of being self-educated. I refer to the “thing” and I struggle to find the word. He throws his hands up in frustration.

A few days ago, he started looking in to Mate, which apparently is some sort of framework for Flex applications. I was vaguely aware of frameworks from when I developed in PHP – specifically the Zend Framework, which I played with for about an hour before giving up. Bad, I know.

Anyway nothing bothers me more than not knowing things that I should. It’s something of an obsession, really. So I decided that I should look into grasping the full thrust of OOP and frameworks, specifically as they apply to ColdFusion. I imagine the concepts are universal, so I could take it back to PHP if I ever needed to. I have a feeling that some of the things I’ve been doing already fit within the OOP best practices, but I gather I could improve things further. And such is my knowledge that I’m not sure what I’ve done that is or isn’t OOP. At the very least, I’d like to be in a state without these doubts.

The first resource I’ve found for this is cfOOP.org, which appears to be fairly new but once it gets fleshed out could be exactly what I need. And as far as frameworks go, I’m leaning towards Mach-II as it is reportedly the most “mature” framework, as well as the most easy to use – which again is a relative term since some of the concepts are still new to me.

Does anyone out there have a suggestion of reading material, or another practical resource I could use? Perhaps even suggest an alternative to Mach-II that an apprentice might better learn from?

I say bi-annual but for the first year I never did it, simply because I’d done such a good job of keeping it tidy. But many of my personal projects lately have muddied the waters with one-off installs for small tasks that my already installed programs could not tackle.

To facilitate simplicity in wiping my system regularly, I make use of Windows Home Server to take a base image of my system at the perfect state where all of my absolute necessity programs are installed and all the updates are applied, without the clutter that months of intense use naturally collects. Windows Home Server also affords me the luxury of not having to PXE boot my system with an RIS setup through my other home server – which, although fun to set up, is a bit of a beast and is largely unnecessary for such a simple implementation.

It is a great feeling having a clean slate computer.