Are you an engineering manager or DevOps engineer supporting teams working in a monorepo? Do you happen to use GitHub for source control? If you answered yes to both those questions, read on! The Need We have recently migrated our monorepo from self-hosted BitBucket to GitHub. As part of the migration, we were looking for… Read more: Using Automatic Labels in Your Monorepo

The daily scrum stand up meetings need to end. – Me, for the last 5 years There, I said it. Actually I’ve been saying it for a long time but most in software engineering leadership and project management don’t want to hear it. The vast majority of the daily scrum stand up meetings that organizations… Read more: It’s Time to Retire Your Stand Up Meetings

Technically, automation actually broke the day first, but if it weren’t for the automation and backups, I would have been in a world of hurt. Let me explain. I currently have a Docker Swarm consisting of 6 Ubuntu server VMs spread over 2 physical Dell servers. This is my “production” cluster that run things that… Read more: Home Lab: Automation and Backups Save the Day

This post is part 2 of a series on how you can take advantage of processes and tooling that large public open-source projects have developed to build a foundation that will help you scale your engineering organization and better take advantage of each engineer’s talents to meet your engineering goals. You can read the entire… Read more: Removing “Golden Fences” From Your Engineering Organization

I’ve been a geek for the vast majority of my life. My family got our first computer when I was 13 (a Commodore 64 to date myself). I started my “programming” journey by typing in pages and pages of code from the C64 magazine. Along the way I learned how to debug what I’d typed… Read more: Why I HomeLab

This post is part 1 of a series on how you can take advantage of processes and tooling that large public open-source projects have developed to build a foundation that will help you scale your engineering organization and better take advantage of each engineer’s talents to meet your engineering goals. You an read the entire… Read more: Scaling Software Engineering Teams

There’s an inside joke among software developers that goes something like “naming things is hard.” That’s certainly true. I can’t count the number of times I’ve stared at my screen trying to figure out the perfect name for a variable, document heading, team name or any number of other things over my career. As I’ve… Read more: Software Engineering – It’s All Hard

Well, at least partially. Since there are so many different ways that could be interpreted, let me explain. I’ve worked at home almost all of the last 14 years as both a full-time employee and freelance programmer–a good chunk of that that time in both roles at the same time. That means a LOT of… Read more: Gettin’ off my duff

Wowzers! It’s been 10 months since I create a post on my blog! There is a good reason for that, I promise. I’m obviously not a prolific blogger like Ray Camden or some of the other folks that seem to be able to churn out blog posts as often as some of us sneeze, but… Read more: Reason for the Silence

Unless you’ve been coding under a rock since ColdFusion 4.5, you’ve likely noticed the massive momentum behind object-oriented design and development in the ColdFusion sphere over the last 2 to 3 years. I love the idea of designing apps using object-oriented techniques–so much so that I’m presenting a session titled “OOP: What is it and… Read more: Can you be too object-oriented for your client’s good?

After separating from active duty with the US Air Force in early 1998, I took a job working at a telecommunications company located in Brentwood, TN as a desktop and server support IT guy. About 6 months after I started, the company advertised an open position for their first full-time web developer. I applied and,… Read more: How I got started in ColdFusion

For those of you that normally come here for technical information, this post is completely non-technical and I’ll understand if you decide to spend your valuable time somewhere else. As the title of this post suggests, I made it through what some people refer to as the “black birthday” yesterday. According to some statistic I… Read more: I turned 40 yesterday…Here’s to the 2nd half

I’m writing an application that uses ColdFusion’s ORM features heavily. Various fields in my database deal with Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and need to be encrypted to meet regulatory requirements. I’ve been mulling over the best way to deal with keeping the data encrypted while in the database but have it be readily usable when… Read more: Automatically Encrypting and Decrypting Data with ColdFusion ORM and Annotations

For the last year or so, all of my ColdFusion development projects have been built using the Model-Glue MVC framework. Over time, you get to where you know the most commonly used methods that are used to interact with the framework by heart. Sometimes there are lesser-used methods that you have to go look up.… Read more: Adding ModelGlue’s Event API to ColdFusion Builder’s Code Insight

Day two of our first trip to CES went much like day one. We walked and walked and walked! Yesterday we spent most of our day in the South Hall exhibit areas. Today we went through the smaller Central and North halls. In addition to the fact that these two areas were each smaller in… Read more: Observations of a CES Newbie – Day 2

My wife and I experienced the International Consumer Electronics Show today for the first time. The first word that comes to mind is just WOW! We saw maybe 1/4 of the entire exhibit space today and even then my brain was completely overloaded. We spent most of our time today in the South Exhibit Hall… Read more: Observations of a CES Newbie – Day 1

Here’s hoping you all have a very Merry Christmas and a super New Year

There have been some lively discussions on Twitter today centered around the adoption of open source CFML engines in various types of businesses. I can’t speak to any kind of trends anywhere, but I wanted to share my experience with a project I was involved in last year that used Railo as the CMFL engine.… Read more: Converting One Company to CFML Using an OSS CFML engine

This is a rather long post detailing some of the things I learned this weekend while creating my first “real” Adobe AIR application that joins my love of programming with another hobby that I have enjoyed for several years. Those of you that know me very well might remember that one of my hobbies is… Read more: Experimenting with HTML and Javascript Development in Adobe AIR

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed that my hourly Time Machine backup on my Mac Pro has been backing up almost 2GB of data every time it runs. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what could be changing that much data each hour and Time Machine is less than helpful… Read more: Dropbox and Time Machine Don’t Always Play Well Together

I’m a relative novice using ColdFusion’s ORM features having done just one “real” project so far that took advantage of it. I’m working on an application that needs to be able to set the datasource for each request based on the URL that the customer is using to access the site.  For example, if a… Read more: Dynamically Set ColdFusion ORM Datasource

Last week I was working on a client’s project that makes heavy use of ColdFusion 9’s ORM features. Everything we’d done with ORM up to that point had been going really well and I continue to be impressed by the amount of time ORM saves me in development. I had gotten to a point in… Read more: Returning ColdFusion 9 ORM Objects with JSON

I’m not sure how I missed this before but among the long list of things added to ColdFusion 9 is the ability to create a CFC using the “New” syntax. Up until now, to create a new object from a CFC we’d use the createObject() method like so <cfset Team = createObject(“component”, “model.Team”) /> </pre>… Read more: Embracing “New” in ColdFusion 9

Well, not quite yet, but since I’m going to be out of pocket the next several days, I wanted to put this out now.  Monday, March 22 will mark 10 years since I began my “journey” with ColdFusion.  That day in 2000 was my first day in a class called “Fast Track to ColdFusion”. The… Read more: My ColdFusion Anniversary

That’s what I’m doing today thanks to a relatively freak accident with a staple gun yesterday. I won’t bore you with the details (that would confirm what a bonehead I can be sometimes). Just suffice it to say that, it could have been a lot worse.

One of the really nice “fixes” included in ColdFusion 9 from a developer’s perspective is the inclusion of an implicit “local” variable scope into which variables created within the body of a <cffunction> tag are placed by default. Previously, developers had to manually add a “var” keyword to variables that should only exist within the… Read more: Be Careful With the ‘local’ Scope When Migrating from CF8 to CF9

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m working on a pet project in my spare time. It uses jQuery in various places including in the site design template that I purchased to use with the site. The template uses jQuery to expand and collapse menu items in the left sidebar to show sub items… Read more: jQuery Head-Scratcher and Lesson Learned

Like a lot of developers, I’ve got this pet project I’m working on in whatever spare time I can find between client engagements, home maintenance, family obligations, etc.  I’m using it as an opportunity to work with some of the new features of ColdFusion 9 (ORM mainly), ColdFusion Builder Beta and features in development for… Read more: ColdFusion 9 Caching Settings to Watch Out For

This week I was working on a proof-of-concept for a customer in which we wanted to extract attachments from a fillable PDF form after its submission. After trying the usual CFPDF tags, reading the documentation, and getting nowhere, we decided to try to attempt to use the iText PDF library for Java from within ColdFusion… Read more: Going Beyond CFPDF with iText

Have you ever been curious about building CFML applications using the ModelGlue framework but just not had time to sit down and learn it on your own? If your answer is yes, then October 24th is your lucky day my friend. That’s the date for the BFusion half of the BFusion/BFlex conference in Bloomington, IN.… Read more: Want to Learn ModelGlue….for (nearly) free?

I’m so looking forward to heading out to the 360|iDev conference in Denver in a couple of weeks (Sept 27-30). This will be my first foray in to the world of Apple Development and I’m really excited. ColdFusion  is the technology that puts a roof over my head and is like that best friend that… Read more: Two Weeks Until 360|iDev

For the last few months, I’ve had this idea that I wanted to try a linux desktop machine as my main development computer for a while.  With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 in April, I decided to put together a machine and give it a try.  Unfortunately, I had to wait a while in order… Read more: My Short Foray Into Linux on the Desktop

Registration for CFinNC is now open! CFinNC is a free web development conference held in Raleigh, North Carolina during the weekend of October 17th and 18th with an International line-up of speakers presenting on timely and relevant topics on web development. Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors and the creativity of the planning committee,… Read more: Registration for ColdFusion in North Carolina 2009 Conference Now Open

I am super excited to announce that I’ve been selected to present a session at the CF in NC conference in Raleigh, NC in October. This will be my first time presenting to a conference setting and I am really looking forward to the experience.  Just last week I gave my first ever technical presentation… Read more: I’m Presenting at the CF in NC Conference in October

Last week I gave a presentation to the CFMeetup group showing how I use Eclipse and Tomcat to develop CFML applications across any of the current CFML engines (if you missed it and are interested, here is the link to the [meeting recording][1]). One of the aspects of my environment that we didn’t have time… Read more: Followup to my CFMeetup Development Environment Presentation

Charlie Arehart posted this to the CFMeetup site this morning so I thought I’d announce it here too. I will be speaking to the CFMeetup group on Thursday, August 20th at 12:00pm ET. We are going to be talking about one way to set up a development environment for ColdFusion application development that will use… Read more: Speaking to the CFMeetup Group on August 20

In response to a call for opinions on NAS devices by Dan Wilson, Oğuz Demirkapi and I exchanged a few tweets regarding RAID and backups and how we each use them to try to ensure we don’t experience any data loss.  It’s hard to explain this type of setup in 140 character chunks, so I… Read more: Conversation on Backup Strategies

I ran into a situation this week while working on a MachII project I’m doing with my brother that I’m sure many of you have encountered before. We have our view pages broken up into small chunks that we render inside a “pod-like” layout on the screen. Many of these view pages are using a… Read more: Using the New HTMLHelperProperty in MachII 1.8

The title alone may offend some folks that read this post, but, please, hear me out before you close the browser window and go away muttering “this guy has no idea what he’s talking about”. I was talking to a developer friend of mine today and he made the statement “there is no such thing… Read more: There Is No Such Thing as Perfect Code

For the last 5 weeks, I’ve been working on a proof-of-concept application for a client using ModelGlue Gesture. This was my first “real” experience with ModelGlue. My only other exposure to ModelGlue came from watching a Breeze (as it was called then) session from Joe Rinehart where he built an entire blogging application in 7… Read more: ModelGlue 3: First Impressions from an MG Newbie

I use Subversion for my source code management needs.  Every project that I work on gets put into my Subversion account at my hosting provider even if I’m the only one that will ever work on it. Using Subversion has saved me from significant loss of work on a number of occasions, so there’s no… Read more: What’s your favorite Subversion repository organization scheme?

Most of us that have been around programming for a while have heard the arguments for separating content and layout in our applications numerous times. Likewise, most of us have nodded our heads and generally acknowledged that it’s a “good idea” or something similar. Over the last few days, it’s really hit home for me… Read more: What I’ve Learned: MVC Frameworks are Worth It

For the past couple of months, I’ve been running my CFML server engines (yes engines, plural) on top of Tomcat on my local development environment. This offers me, as an independent developer that works on a number of different client projects, a great deal of flexibility in matching a particular client’s production configuration.  Also lately,… Read more: Configure FusionDebug 3 Beta for Use with Railo 3.1 on Tomcat

As web developers one of the most frequent things we’re tasked with building is some sort of form to capture data from our visitors.  As we’ve all learned (some of us the hard way), putting a form out there and trusting that our visitors will use it exactly the way we design it every time… Read more: Standardizing HTML Forms With the cfUniForm Custom Tag Library

One of my current clients recently commissioned me to write a feature for their site that allows visitors to listen to snippets of MP3 tracks that they sell directly from within the product’s “detail” page. In my particular situation, one of the requirements was to use the design commissioned by a separate design firm. In… Read more: Free and Easy Way to Play MP3 Files in Your Web Pages

I dodged a very large (metaphorical) bullet yesterday. I’m not in the habit of trying to find bullets to dodge, but this one found me because it turns out I didn’t plan as well as I thought I had. It all started yesterday morning when a client asked me to make some batch updates to… Read more: Database Bullet Dodging and Lessons Learned

Every small business has issues with accounting and billing.  As Dan reported in an earlier blog post, we were in search of the “perfect” solution that included the ability to get data into the system from a variety of devices and covered time tracking, invoicing and accounting. What we have found is the “perfect storm”… Read more: The Elusive All-In-One Financial Package

In my last post, we went through a brief introduction of ColdSpring and how you can use it to make configuring your application’s objects much easier. We discussed how objects (beans) are declared in ColdSpring’s XML configuration file and how you can pass any number of values into ColdSpring to be used in configuring those… Read more: Making Configuration Even Easier with ColdSpring’s Hidden Gems

Over the last two years or so I’ve been working hard to really “get” object-oriented programming as it applies to ColdFusion development. Like a lot of ColdFusion developers that have been around a while, when I started trying to create applications using CFCs, I essentially had CFCs that were collections of UDFs. Before long, after… Read more: ColdSpring: An Answer to a Problem You May Not Know You Have

In my last post I mentioned that I had been toying around with using Tomcat as the only servlet container to deploy all my ColdFusion applications to, regardless of what ColdFusion engine you needed to use for a specific project.  My goal in trying to get this working was actually 3-fold: Learn more about how… Read more: Configuring ColdFusion Applications on Tomcat with Apache Web Server

A week or so ago, Matt Woodward posted a blog entry detailing how to install Railo and Open BlueDragon on Tomcat. Since then I’ve been experimenting with installing not only Railo and Open BlueDragon into Tomcat, but Adobe ColdFusion 8 and MX 7 as well. I’m trying to determine if this configuration is better for… Read more: To .WAR or Not to .WAR?

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a project that uses the Mach II, ColdSpring and Transfer frameworks for ColdFusion.  This is my first “real” project using Transfer and, I have to say, I’m supremely impressed with the thought and work put into the framework by Mark Mandel.  It seems every time that… Read more: Using Decorator Objects in Transfer ORM

As a small business, any business-related activity that keeps me from doing billable work costs me money.  Obviously there is a certain amount of those hours that you have to deal with.  The trick, in my mind, is to find ways to limit those hours so that you can get back to the business of… Read more: Suggestions for Software to Run a Small Consulting Shop?

Yesterday I did something that I would have never thought I would do. I rode around in various airplanes just for the sake of riding in airplanes—I took a “mileage run”. Mileage runs are tickets purchased for the express purpose of gaining frequent flyer miles or segments. In my case, I needed segments. Six to… Read more: My First-Ever “Mileage Run” Completed

One of the things that I’ve missed greatly since moving to using a laptop as my primary machine just over 3 years ago is the ability to run multiple monitors. My old tower machine had a pretty hefty video card (for the time) in it that had both DVI and VGA connectors built in.  At… Read more: External Monitor Solution for Your Laptop

I am working on a project for a client that is running ColdFusion MX7 on their servers and ran into a situation today where a search feature that worked perfectly in my local development environment (which, admittedly is running CF 8) produced some very inconsistent results when run on the testing server. This particular search… Read more: Interesting Gotcha with Nested Loops in ColdFusion MX7

As some of you know, one of my other interests besides programming is amateur radio.  I am the “liaison” or team lead between our local group of volunteer examiners (VEs) and the American Radio Relay League’s (ARRL) group responsible for overseeing license testing for the FCC. Part of the responsibility of being team lead is… Read more: ARRL Creates an AIR app for Generating Amateur Radio Exams

I want to take a quick few minutes and thank Bob Flynn and the rest of the team for putting on such a wonderful conference. I would have written this last night but, honestly, my brain was mush after driving home. The entire thing was superbly organized, the facilities were absolutely top-notch, and the tracks… Read more: BFusion/BFlex Was an Excellent Event

For the last couple of years, my travel and work schedule have really taken a toll on one of my favorite hobbies.  I got my amateur (ham) radio license in 1994 while stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, AZ. Ham radio is kind of like the original geek hobby.  Before computers, before cell… Read more: It’s a Ham Radio Contest Weekend

These last few posts have been created with MarsEdit for the Mac.  As a general rule I don’t like using web-based editing tools as my primary method for writing posts.  Once I switched my blog over to WordPress a few months ago, I decided to look for an application that I could use to manage… Read more: Off-line Blog Posting Software

If you’ve been doing development very long, chances are you have had at least one “OH CRAP” or maybe even it’s big brother “OH S…” moments when you realized that you’d just deleted something you can’t get back, overwrote some bit of very complex code or done some similar bone-headed thing that wound up causing… Read more: My Local Web Development Environment Overhaul Pt. 6 – Version Control System

A few weeks ago I read a series of articles titled “Inbox Zero – Action Based Email” on the 43Folders web site. I had been looking for a better way to keep up with all the things that I needed to do and had happened upon the Todo application for iPhone as discussed in a… Read more: Living the “Inbox Zero” Way

I realize it’s been just over a month since the last post in this series and for that I offer my apologies.  Several things, both work-related and personal have kept me very busy over the last month–hence the couple of short posts in the interim.  However, I didn’t want to let this series die before… Read more: My Local Web Development Environment Overhaul Pt. 5 – IDE

I suppose I’m terribly late in having this revelation but it dawned on me last week that the future of a lot of a significant part of what we do in our our day to lives is going to depend on “the cloud”.  What do I mean by that you ask?  Let me ’splain something… Read more: A “Cloud-y” Revelation

This is a quick post as much to remind myself the next time I need it as anything about how to start and stop MySQL from a terminal window on OS X.  When you install MySQL it defaults to auto starting at login.  I like to have control over when the services that I use… Read more: Start/Stop MySQL from a Terminal Session on OS X

I try really hard to be an Apple fan-boy…I really do.  I love my Macbook Pro, really like my Mac Mini and adore OS X. I even like my AppleTV units pretty well (a little less with the new GUI, but that’s another story). BUT, I’m really starting to take a very negative view of… Read more: Apple Mighty Mouse Rant

This entry in my series detailing how I have my development environment set up will deal with databases.  This is going to be a somewhat shorter post than the others simply because there isn’t as much customization to be done in this area as some of the others. For any client that I have a… Read more: My Local Web Development Environment Overhaul Pt. 4 – Database Server

I’m going to interrupt my series of posts on my local development environment with a quick post on how to add your own tools to the ColdFusion administrative web application.  This is probably old news to some people, but I just had a chance to play with this a couple days ago while checking out… Read more: Adding Custom Items to ColdFusion Administrator Navigation

This installment in my series detailing how my local web development environment is set up is going to deal with my application server setup. After visiting with several folks at the cf.Objective() conference this year, I was convinced that I needed to configure my ColdFusion 8 installation in “multi-server” mode. There are a few advantages… Read more: My Local Web Development Environment Overhaul Pt. 3 – Application Server

As web developers, one of the most under-appreciated pieces of software in our arsenal is the web server software that answers the calls from the masses of visitors that want nothing more than to pour over every word and image that we put on our sites. Ok, “masses” and “pour over” may be a bit… Read more: My Local Web Development Environment Overhaul Pt. 2 – Web Server

As I mentioned in my last post, after attending the cf.Objective() conference earlier this year, I decided that I needed to completely tear down and rebuild my local development environment. My old setup worked well enough, but there were some gotchas in the setup. So, after talking to some of the presenters and other attendees… Read more: My Local Web Development Environment Overhaul Pt. 1 – Overview

…you forget how to get to the admin interface of your blog software to create a new post. I’ve been really horrible the last (nearly) 2 months in not blogging at all.  So much has happened in that time frame that I can’t explain it all.  cf.Objective() 2008 combined with the pre-conference Mach-II training is… Read more: You Know You Haven’t Blogged in a While When…

Those of you in the web development industry will immediately know what I’m talking about (and maybe some of the more observant web users too). Today is April 4 or 4/04 which in web parlance means “404 – File Not Found”.  Cheesy I know, but I thought it was funny when it dawned on me… Read more: Today is “File Not Found” Day

I absolutely love Time Machine with Time Capsule!  Time Machine by itself was cool enough when I was using it with an external drive on my desk. The only problem with that scenario is that everyone in our house had to have their own external drives for backup.  I have a MacBook Pro, we have… Read more: Not to Sound Like an Apple “fan-boy” BUT…

Ok, so maybe that’s stretching it a little bit.  BUT, one year ago today I took delivery of my new Apple Macbook Pro. I continue to be just as impressed with it now as I was the day I wrote the first blog post about it. Looking back, it doesn’t seem like it’s been a… Read more: Today is the Anniversary of My Enlightenment

I sometimes have to remind myself what a useful tool the debugger that’s built into ColdFusion 8 is. Today I was debugging a fairly involved process that I’ve been writing that uses several CFCs including on CFC that contains methods to apply all the business rules to the particular process.  I had a couple of… Read more: Interesting ColdFusion 8 Debugger Behavior

What a (long) weekend! This year, as last, my uncle and I bought tickets to the Southeastern Conference Men’s Basketball tournament held at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, GA.  Unlike last year, we didn’t get to actually see our favorite team (University of Kentucky) take the floor. Kentucky was to play the final game of… Read more: March Madness (really really mad)

It’s that time of year again.  College basketball is in the midst of conference tournaments before next week’s start of the NCAA tournament. I’m heading to Atlanta for the start of the Southeastern Conference men’s basketball tournament to cheer on my beloved Kentucky Wildcats. I’ll try to blog some photos of the next few days.

I’ve decided to change my blog software to WordPress from MachBlog.  I know, I know, it’s heresy to use a PHP blog system for a ColdFusion guy, but I just didn’t have time to write the code in MachBlog for all the things I wanted to do with my blog.  Anyway, here we are.  I’ll… Read more: New Platform and Design (again)

I’ve just spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out why my cfcUnit tests for this project I’m working on suddenly stopped working….stopped working as in DOA.  No errors, no failures, no screen output, NADA.  All the tests were running fine (and passing) yesterday when I left the office so I was… Read more: cfcUnit Weirdness

I’m so pumped!  I just got my registration complete for cf.Objective() in St. Paul, MN May 2-4.  I also registered for the 2-day pre-conference workshop.  I’ve been doing some basic work with Mach II over the last few months but want to get some in-depth knowledge of how to (correctly) build larger applications. There are… Read more: I’m Going to cf.Objective() — Are You?

Parking – $7Shuttle – $10Ticket on the 40 yard line 5 rows from the field – $50Drink at half time – $7 Watching KY beat Florida State in the Music City Bowl – PRICELESS!!!!!

A couple weeks ago I posted about moving our SVN repositories to a hosted solution at CVSDude.com. I primarily wanted to do that so that I wouldn’t have to be responsible for administering the SVN server (performing backups, configuring hook scripts etc).  I’ve got enough on my plate right now without trying to become an… Read more: I Think I’m Going to Like Mylyn

Just a quick note to say Merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous new year to all my readers (all 2 or 3 of you that I know of). We’ve been having family Christmas celebrations for a little over a week now due to our extended family being spread over two states. Tomorrow morning… Read more: Wishing All My Readers a Very Merry Christmas

I recently decided to outsource my souce code management to CVSDude. I had been running SVN on my VPS that I have at Slicehost and that had been running okay.  However, I’m only good enough at SVN administration to get the server up and running and create a few repositories and there were other things… Read more: Cool ColdFusion and Subversion Integration

…that I made the choice to convert to the Mac platform so as to avoid having to deal with Vista! My Mom had to get a new machine this week after the processor on her old one went out.  Of course it came with Vista and, after a couple of days of futzing about with… Read more: What I’m Thankful for…

Well, I’ve been “experiencing” Mac OS 10.5 Leopard for about 48 hours now.  After waiting so long and having this operating system so hyped up, I have to admit my reaction so far is somewhat mixed. My “experience” started off somewhat rocky.  I attempted to do an in-place upgrade in order to keep all my… Read more: Leopard 48 Hours In

Earlier this summer when someone told me that you could hook two Macs together with a firewire cable, boot one up while holding down the “T” button and access its drive from the other like any other external firewire drive, I never actually thought I’d use it. Today, while working on one of my daughters’… Read more: Never Thought I’d Use It…

Apple announced this morning that the new version of OS X (Leopard) will be released on October 26th at 6:00pm.  I for one can’t wait to get my hands on the new version (so much so that I’m pre-ordering the family pack today).  I’ve been a huge fan of OS X since I made the… Read more: Apple Announces Release Date for Leopard

After an excrutiatingly long wait, I can finally now call myself an Adobe Certified Instructor.  In July I took and passed the Adobe Certified Instructor stand-up exam for LiveCycle 8.0 ES. For a number of reasons, just this weekend I finally got the certificates in the mail to officially christen me as an ACI on… Read more: I’m Certified (or is that certifiable?)!

I installed the ColdFusion 8 developer edition a few weeks ago on my MacBook Pro.  I installed it as a multi-server installation pretty similar to the recommended way for installing CFMX 7.  One of the differences with the installer is that CF8 asks you if you want it to auto start at boot time.  Initially… Read more: Disabling CF8 Auto-Start on the Mac

You ever had one of those ‘light-bulb’ moments?  I love when those come along because it usually means that something ‘clicks’ that I’ve been noodling on.  Today was one of those days. The last 3 weeks, I have been working on converting a small content management application from ‘spaghetti code’ to a Mach II application.… Read more: Don’t You Love Those ‘Lightbulb’ Moments?

For you Mac gurus out there, this is going to sound like child’s play.  I finally took the time to figure out today how to change an icon for a particular folder (applications and files work the same way) to something other than the default.  I have a folder named ‘Projects’ under my Documents folder… Read more: Learn Something New Every Day!

I’ve been in Newton, MA (just outside Boston) all this week taking a couple of Flex 2 classes at the Adobe offices here.  Starting tomorrow (Thursday) we’re beginning the 2-day class called Flex 2: Data and Communications.  One of the prerequisites for the class is to have Flex Data Services (now called LiveCycle Data Services… Read more: Deploy LiveCycle Data Services 2.5 on JRun

As part of my birthday celebrations yesterday, we dropped our kids off at my sister’s house and went to see the new movie Transformers. My sister and her husband had seen it a couple of days earlier.  I’ll quote my brother-in-law’s reactioin to the move: “WOW!” Yep, I completely agree.  What a movie. What follows… Read more: Transformers…More Than Meets the Eye!

Yep…for me another year is in the books.  Today is my 36th birthday.  We are celebrating as we have so many times before with a combined birthday get-together with my family. My sister’s birthday is July 8 (no, we weren’t almost twins, she is 5 years younger than I) so growing up we always celebrated… Read more: Another Year Gone By

I have been thinking about setting up my Macbook Pro with a Bootcamp partition ever since VMWare Fusion Beta 3 announced that you could use your Windows XP (or Vista) partition as a virtual machine.  Last week I found out that a class I’m taking at the end of July requires you to install the… Read more: Bootcamp Run-Around

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was in the process of setting up a home theater PC.  I decided this time to use a program called Orb to be able to access all the media on the machine remotely. The best way that I can think of to describe Orb is WOW!… Read more: Orb MyCasting Rocks!

Just a quick note to mention that my blog is now running off my virtual private server at SliceHost.  My server is running Fedora Core 6, Apache 2.2 and MySQL 5.  It is using the 512MB / 20GB plan that SliceHost offers. There was some disucssion on the CFTalk list today about how bad of… Read more: Server Migration Complete

In preparation for moving all the hobby and client preview sites that I now host from a Windows 2003 server on my DSL connection to a Fedora 6 virtual server at Slicehost, I’ve migrated my blog from BlogCFC to MachBlog 1.0.  I’ve also been putting off adding posts until I got completely migrated, so that’s… Read more: Now on MachBlog (and a new design)