Something that has been on my mind for a long time is the concept of being passionate about software. I often use this to measure how good software is before I buy it. If a company is not passionate about their software (according to a few metrics I've come up with), then I don't want to use their product. So how do I know if they are passionate? Here are a few things I look for:
I was reading the articles mentioned in this Ben Forta blog entry and decided to make a timeline of PHP and ColdFusion releases. The reason I was thinking of this was because one of the articles said that one of ColdFusion's selling points is frequent releases. This made me curious how often CF has been updated when compared to PHP. So I created this time line.
I haven't seen this mentioned a lot, so I want to help get the word out. Integral just released FusionDebug 3.0, which brings full support for Railo 3.1, both the open source and enterprise versions. I think this is big news! For the first time ever, we have a CFML debugger that you can use for 2 of the major CFML servers. And if I were a betting man, I'd put my money on a future version of FusionDebug that supports OpenBD and BlueDragon.
One thing that has long bothered me while playing warfish is that when creating a tournament (or joining one that lets you invite players), they don't have an option to select all players with zero boots on their record. Well, I finally decided to write a JavaScript bookmarklet to accomplish this. If you drag the one or both of the links below into your bookmarks, when playing warfish and inviting players, if you click these bookmarks all of the players with zero boots (or less than 3) will be selected.
I know most of my readers won't care about this, but I wanted to post it here for future reference.
I was very pleased to find out that CFQuickDocs won this year's Community Achievement Award in the Best Online Reference Site category. Especially considering the other awesome sites that were nominated. Thanks everybody! :)
Most of you probably won't care about this find, but I'll share anyway. I am debating if I should update CFQuickDocs to include the ColdFusion 9 documentation. To do this, I would need access to a local copy of the doc pages (tags and functions). In the past Adobe has been helpful to me with this, pointing out places I could look. I only mention this, because some of you might think that Adobe wouldn't like what I have done with CFQuickDocs, but on the contrary they are very supportive (at least, they have been in the past).
When I created the ColdFusion 8 version of CFQuickDocs, I used the ColdFusion Eclipse plugins, which included a full copy of the tags/function doc pages as individual html pages. So I would need to find something like this to update CFQuickDocs to ColdFusion 9. Today I found that the new ColdFusion builder has the doc pages in individual HTML pages, but it wasn't easy to find.
If for some reason you need something like this, look in your ColdFusion Builder installation directory, and in the plugins directory there is a file named com.adobe.coldfusion.help_1.0.0.240773.jar. Depending on when you are reading this, the numbers in the file name might be different, but you should see one that starts with com.adobe.coldfusion.help. If you open that Jar with your favorite compression utility, you will see a whole mess of .html files. Each of these files represents one doc page for the ColdFusion 9 help files included with ColdFusion builder.
I am liking CFBuilder (CFB) more and more as I get used to it. I have been using CFEclipse for a few years now, so I was already pretty happy with CFB. But I keep finding new things that improve my approval.
Firstly, I realize that there are Firebug knockoffs available for IE (IE 8's developer tools are supposed to be pretty cool). But if you don't want to use those (or if those options don't have a Firebug feature you want), you can still use Firebug in Firefox to track down IE rendering issues.
I did this the other day when a div was running off the page in IE. In Firefox, I used Firebug's Inspect tool combined with the CSS explorer to find the CSS class and attribute that was probably causing the trouble in IE. Then I tweaked the CSS and tried the page in IE. Sure enough, that fixed the problem. I LOVE Firebug! :)
Also, I should note that Firebug has a version that works in IE and other browsers, Firebug Lite. But I haven't tried this yet so I'm not sure if it's as helpful as the other IE debug tools. But looking at the site, it looks like the Lite version has a lot of the same cool Firebug features.
I just got wind of a new CFEclipse release, via the CFEclipse mailing list. It's been a while since we've seen a new release, so this is very exciting news! :) They fixed a boat load of bugs, and added some new features. Here are the highlights that were posted to the mailing list by Randy:
Also, they have tested this new release with Eclipse 3.4, as well as 3.5 which was also just released today!
So fire up your Eclipse Updater and give this new release a spin. :)
I have to get this off of my chest. Firstly, yes I am a big Linux fan because it's the only operating system I've used that offers configuration down to the anal retentive levels I prefer. But sometimes Linux makes me want to scream. Installing from source is one of those times.
So I like to use Ubuntu desktop because it is a LOT easier to use than any other Linux distro I've tried (and I've tried a number of them). In general, installations are a breeze because I can open up Synaptic Package Manager and search for the program I want (and 9 times out of 10 it's in the repositories). But on occasion the software I want is not in Ubuntu's repositories (nor any of the "universe", "please don't go here", "you will die if you use this" repositories I've enabled). So I am forced to use the old fashioned methods. This is where recursive masochism begins. I'm sure many of you Linux fanboys have suffered this scenario:
Com'on, Linux developers! You can't honestly make fun of Windows developers when they figured out user friendly software installation years ago, but in 2009 you guys are still swimming in dependency hell.
And for those wondering about all the bleeped out 4 letter words in this post...it takes a lot to make me swear. Linux's dependency hell can bring that out in me.
Ok, I feel better now. :)
Jake Munson
36 Yrs old