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.

I’m a single visitor short of this being my most visited day ever. Or that is to say, I’ve tied my best day ever. Very encouraging after my seemingly long absence. And there are 2 1/2 hours left of the day in my time zone alone, so there’s some time yet.

Just throwing this idea out there, but if anyone wants to do any sort of link exchange, I’m open to it. I feel a bit weird going from site to site soliciting them, so I’m hoping if I just say I’m all for it that some of you will throw yourselves at me.

I almost feel like link exchanges are cheating, but that’s only because it’s a bit of a new field for me. And many of you are bloggers like me who crave the traffic or Google page rank, so you’re probably all used to it by now.

Thanks for reading

I recently decided to tackle a problem that has plagued me from the beginning in XBMC.

Some time ago, I changed the naming convention of my files to something that was cleaner and more logical to me. The format used to be like this example:

Burn Notice/Season 1/Burn Notice – 101 – Pilot.avi

I noted that having the name of the show was completely unnecessary, as was the season since I could infer from the number that it is season 1 episode 1.  So I spent some time renaming and moving things around to something more like this:

Burn Notice/101 – Pilot.avi

Much cleaner, no fluff.

The problem at first was that for some reason, this broke XBMC’s scraper’s fragile little mind, and thus it could not scrape episodes anymore. So I did some research and found that advancedsettings.xml offered a solution, which I mentioned in a previous post.

What I failed to mention in that post was that there was a single catch. One show I have is called “The 4400” which was tragically cancelled before its fifth and potentially last season. When I added the folder to the library, it would recognize the show title and apply a general synopsis I could view of the entire show, but the episodes contained within that folder refused to be scanned into the library database. I’ve suffered this for ages. Every time I reinstalled or upgraded or created a new instance of XBMC for PC or my Mac Mini, I copied over my custom advancedsettings.xml file to each.

As it turns out, the scraper problem has been fixed for ages, and my own solution was preventing it from working. Today I installed XBMC on my beloved laptop for the first time as an experiment, and I intentionally left the advancedsettings.xml file out. Sure enough, The 4400 scanned in immediately as well as all the episodes, synopses and screenshots.

So that’s that. I removed the “tvshowmatching” tag from the xml file and left my other customizations in place, as now the default setup works for me.

So I took some time off to get some work done. dColumbus and I cranked together some great work in record time. Having him do the forms in Flex in itself saved me days of work, and I must say the end product is something we’re both quite proud of.

But due to the downturn in the economy, several of my jobs have dried up, and thus the amenities I have grown accustomed to I can no longer afford. These being rent and food, primarily – and not to illicit sympathy, but this includes for my wife and two very young children.

Among other things I do contract work locally as a mobile tech, not unlike the Nerd Herd from NBC’s “Chuck”. However back in march, the workload dropped drastically from around 3-4 hours a day to now 1-2 hours a week.

I’m looking to continue my education in Coldfusion and general application development, but locally there is limited need and I find it mentally draining trying to compete with India on most of the freelancer sites available. So the question I pose to you, my colleagues, mentors, tutors, and readers: where do you find ColdFusion work?

Please, please, please comment.

I long for the days of the old Sierra and Lucasarts Classic adventure games. The Laura Bow Mysteries, King’s Quest, The Dig, Full Throttle, Monkey Island. It’s been a long time since there’s been a great adventure game. Developers such as Quantic Dream – the creators of Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy here in North America) and the upcoming Heavy Rain – and Funcom – the developer of The Longest Journey series – have been bright lights in a dark age of first-person shooters and “sandbox” games.

I mainly play games for story. If the storyline isn’t fun, the gameplay certainly can’t save it. I admit, I’m the guy most mainstream gamers seem to hate. I have patience for cutscenes that go on for several minutes. I’m not chomping at the bit to move on without knowing what the story holds – my primary motivation to continue. Truth be told, if I were to watch someone else play a game start to finish, I would be equally satisfied as if I had played it myself and there would be no need for me to play it over.

And so it is my pleasure to discover that Lucasarts may be ushering in the second age of Adventure games, starting with a remake of The Secret of Monkey Island, the original pc adventure, and releasing it on Xbox Live Arcade later this year. This will be a scene-for-scene remake with huge graphical and auditory improvements as well a fancy new hints system for the uninitiated gamer.

I daresay this could bring some intelligence back to the gaming world. One where puzzles don’t always involve shooting things in sequence, or moving heavy objects. A world where dialog isn’t an afterthought.

I am extremely excited about this and have been angry with developers (read: Lucasarts) because they stopped making adventure games altogether, opting instead to make some pretty mediocre ones – exceptions being the Knights of the Old Republic games, which are only a step removed from an adventure game so that’s ok. I hope that the world of gamers are with me in this, and I hope we can send a message to developers that says we are DYING for some good adventures. That there IS a market for it.

And then the floodgates will open again.

I’ve taken the week off of writing to get some work done.  I’ll return next week with some new articles.

Thanks for reading!