How I got started in ColdFusion…

I’m a day late to the party but, at Steve Bryant’s suggestion here you have, less a quick overview of my CF origins and more a comprehensive history of my time online and in code.

Please don’t default to GPL

This post may seem odd to anyone who knows me. I’m a massive advocate of open source software and free (as in speech or beer – hey it’s free) technologies. I’m no FSF zealot but I do believe that sharing source code, development tools, libraries even the platforms on which they run is a great way to encourage innovation and produce amazing projects.

That said I’m increasingly running into issues with one of the most common open source licences – GPL (v2 or v3). One of the main implications of the GPL is that including code licensed under this model requires that the calling application be licensed under the same model. For ColdFusion this has some interesting and awkward implications.

Scotch on the Rocks 2011

The first official day of the conference was, for me specifically, a bit of a nightmare. Due to the remarkably pedestrian service at breakfast I was late down to the keynote and so didn’t get a seat and work intervened after lunch to mean I missed sessions 3, 4 & 5.

That said, the two sessions I did manage to a) arrive at in time to get a seat and b) see where pretty darned awesome!

In a new format for this year I’m writing up the sessions individually and linking to them from this post:

Day 1

• KeyNote – Adobe
• Requirements and Estimating – Peter Bell
• FW/1 – The Invisible Framework – Sean Corfield

Day 2

• Easy Validation with ValidateThis – John Whish
• Scotch on the Rocks 2011 – Day 2 – Building a Video Platform: ColdFusion, HTTP Dynamic Streaming and OSMF – David Collie
• AJAX Longpolling with ColdFusion 9 and BlazeDS – Stephen Moretti
• Expand your mind with noSQL and then relax on the CouchDB –  Mark Drew

Calming down

Friday I was angry.

No real reason for it, just a combination of a stressful few days with no real time to recharge the batteries, a couple of minor annoyances and crappy weather combined to produce a very grumpy state of mind.

I’ve learned to recognise these moments, these moods for what they are; pointless reactions to factors beyond my control and have a routine in place for managing them until such time as I can genuinely relax and reset.

Friday lunch time I went for a walk. I walked hard, fast, and made an effort to pick out the elements in the world that would raise a smile: the little girl playing with her teddy bear whilst her mum pushed her up the high street, the oh so serious businessman in a very large, black 4×4 with a stuffed gorilla sitting on the dashboard, the elderly couple braving the drizzle to eat al fresco, laughing as they poured each other wine.

I wasn’t walking aimlessly. My goal was the same as it always is when feeling this way.

I walked straight into the local bookshop.

And immediately felt calmer, less angry and less likely to tear the head of the next person who did anything to aggrieve me.

There’s something about the smell.

Tron Legacy – Sequel Spectacular or End of Line?

stunning visuals ... lack lustre plot

Just to get this out-of-the-way …

SPOILER ALERT!!!

If you haven’t seen the movie and are planning to then please don’t read on as I won’t be held responsible for ruining the film for you.

28 years in the making, Tron Legacy has seen CGI in movies shift from the occasional eyebrow raising addition to a mainstream technique powering entire films.

Given that the CGI element was core to the original film’s appeal (despite the majority of the movie owing more to creative set building and old school post production than computer imagery) Tron Legacy has a major void to fill.

We’re used to Transformers-esque epic CGI these days. Heck most of the top grossing films of the past decade have made extensive use of CGI technology to bring their worlds to life.

Not forgetting that, for a host of geeks, nerds and 80′s generation kids, Tron holds a special place in our hearts. The original film invokes fond memories and has a cult following that makes the reboot approach so very very risky. Get it wrong and Disney risk bringing the wrath of a host of Tron Lovers down on their heads.

So what does Tron Legacy bring the table that makes it worth watching?

ColdFusion CachedWithin & Max Rows – bug or feature?

Recently a colleague and I have been working through the beating heart of our flagship application to try and improve performance and throughput. There was nothing wrong with the performance we were getting but we’d got some time to spare and so figured tweaking the code to get the absolute maximum out of it would be a fun excercise for a Thursday afternoon.

One of the areas we looked at was caching some of the common MySQL queries that are called on every request using the CachedWithin attribute. Having merrily rolled this out we fired up our test site expecting pleasing improvements in page load times and instead found that the site was pretty much completely borked.

1 score and ten

Ever since I can remember I’ve used patterns and nearest approximation in my mental arithmetic.

8 * 9? Start from 8*10 and lose an 8.

I’ve always enjoyed finding quick routes to calculate the results of all sorts of problems. I suppose I mention this because my age has always been one of the easiest things to work out and therefore project.

I was born in 1980 and from as far back as I can remember I have used this as a basis to calculate my own age.

1990 meant I was 10

1994  I read Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 and I knew that I would be 21 when the events therein came to pass (or not)

1998 saw me reach legal drinking age

2001 graduated and an adult of 21

2010?

July 2010 is upon us which can only mean that I’ve now left another decade behind me. My 20′s were of mixed fare, some of the events of the past 10 years I will still consider to be the worst in my life to date. Others are amongst the best. I’ve loved, lost, kept, cried, laughed, danced, worked, played, made some really poor decisions and taken some amazingly fruitful risks.

I’ve made my way through the professional world and over the course of 6 jobs have built a skill set and career that lacks only the paper to prove I’ve done it.

I’ve bobbed through my personal life in mostly good form, making new friends and losing old ones.

I would count myself as lucky in that, over the space of 10 years, I have yet to be directly affected by the kind of crisis that the world has cruelly cast over some of the people I know.

I’ve learned to drive, bought my first & second cars, travelled across Europe and made a new home for myself in a less than appealing location.

It seems fitting that I should start this new record, a personal journal of thoughts and memories, 10 years after I started my first online home. I’ve worked on plenty of websites in that time, for others clearly defined by contract and for audiences less tangible, defined only by statistics and the occasional comment.

But this site? Well as the URL  suggests, this site is just for me.

I’ve enjoyed the last 10 years, and the 20 before that. This next period, conveniently defined by the procession of a blue green rock that has seen more of my lifetimes than I care to imagine, well this next 10 years look like being better still.

My third decade; older (definitely), wiser (hopefully) and happier …

well …

time will tell.

Scotch on the Rocks 2010 – Day Two

ColdBox Platform 3.0.0 : Developing Sustainable ColdFusion Applications  - Luis Majano (Ortus Solutions)

As a firm believer in roll your won code I’ve always viewed large frameworks with some suspicion. Especially when Mike in his caching session pointed out that a framework with 1000’s of CFCs before you even start writing your own code is chewing into much needed heap space.

The iPad – Less than it should have been

It has to be said that, in my search for Gadget Nirvana, I’ve frequently flip-flopped over which vendor or sector was more likely to provide the ultimate, all in one solution to … well … everything!

Circa 5 years ago my money was on open source (hardware, software, flapjacks, whatever!) to combine my massive list of entertainment, communication and connectivity requirements into one, affordable, hackable, workable device.

With the purchase of my first MacBook Pro I shifted over to Apple as the possible saviour of we the fickle, techno devout members of the Nintendo generation.

With the release of Android, Google OS, the Nexus One and their awesome web-based tool kit, my allegiances shifted to Mountain View for a while – they promised the answer to all my needs (well, almost all) in a shiny fun a clearly “Not Evil” package.

And now?

ColdFusion – Half a Year Away

It’s been 6 months since my first encounter with ColdFusion primarily version 8 with a smattering of v9 beta thrown in for good measure. Since comparisons of ColdFusion seem to be en vogue at the moment I figured it worthwhile to take a moment to record my thoughts of CF – 6 months in.