Archive for July 2006
Updated: 29 Jul 2006 08:10 am by
Filed: Geek Stuff
Despite having devoted a bit of time over the past couple of years to my own theme for use here on we3geeks — and actually ending up with something that was both usable and decent looking — I have never been completely pleased with the appearance of my blog. As a result, even as I was tweaking and tuning my Tango-based theme here, I have also been casting a wandering eye for something I liked better…
This is it: I came across this new WP theme called ShadedGrey earlier this week in reading the WordPress Planet. Although there are a couple of very minor things that I will be tuning and tweaking in the presentation part of the theme, I really like it. I hope you do, too…
In addition, the Planet also announced the availability of WordPress 2.0.4 this week, which includes primarily bug-fixes and security patches. As has always been the case for me (your mileage, of course, may vary) the upgrade from 2.0.2 went smoothly. Kudos to the fellow geeks that keep the installation and upgrade instructions so current and thorough on the WP Codex.
Updated: 03 Jul 2006 07:54 am by
Filed: Geek Stuff • Linux
After getting back from CFUnited-2006, and having received clarification from New Atlanta that using their free version of the BlueDragon server for development was in line with their revised license agreement, I ran through my installation process that I have previously documented for an earlier version of Ubuntu. The good news is that that process still works verbatim on Ubuntu 6.06 — at least down through the steps required to get BD to start as part of the system initialization. I have not yet played with getting connectivity to my local MySQL installation, but will probably do so in the next day or so.
Updated: 02 Jul 2006 09:17 am by
Filed: Life in General
We are home safe and sound, as I write this, even if still trying to recover physically from almost two weeks away from home (I spent the week ahead of CFUnited 2006 at a different work-related conference in Los Angeles, and was home less than 12 hours before leaving for DC). I feel blessed that we made it home safely yesterday, even if our ultimate itinerary looked nothing like what we had planned both for DC itself and for travelling home, and that I have three days before I have to venture back into the office. Deb and Ian are still sound asleep, I have the windows wide open, it is beautiful outside this morning, and I have my first cup of my own coffee in exactly two weeks.
Our travels home had an ominous foretaste, as it turned out, as we went to dinner Friday evening. The Metro train to Bethesda experienced the generic “mechanical difficulties” en route and we had to switch trains before making it to dinner.
I had arranged early Friday morning with the hotel for a shuttle ride to the airport for our earlyish (7:00 am) departure home, although having the shuttle company indicate that they would be there for a 4:00 am pickup seemed a little extreme. We made it to the lobby by about 10 minutes ahead of 4, after getting up with the alarm set for 3:00 am. 4:00 am, however, came and went with no sign of the shuttle, and at 10 after, the hotel called the shuttle company to find out where the shuttle was — no definitive answer other than that it must be running a few minutes late. At 4:20, we had the hotel call for a cab.
We finally get to the airport at about 5:15 am, still in plenty of time to get checked in and run the security screening gauntlet at Reagan. On check-in, we learn that our 7:00 am flight is now a 7:45 am flight, and that we have less than 20 minutes in Atlanta — Delta is recommending that we re-book the legs of our flight after the DC-Atlanta portion, and we head for the dreaded black Delta Direct phones. Because there are three of us, the best they claim they can do for us is to get us to Altanta on the original flight, and then a next-day flight from Atlanta to Salt Lake City and ultimately to Idaho Falls. Much muttering ensues…
After getting through the security screening, and waiting near the gate, I approached a Delta counter person named Ayalesh A to ask about lodging for the night in Atlanta, given the change in plans foisted upon us by Delta. After explaining what had happened, she worked miracles and got all three of us plus Jeff onto the non-stop DC-SLC flight Saturday evening, and onto the last SLC-IF flight. She pulled our already-checked bags back from the bowels of Reagan, and explained what we needed to do to reclaim them and check back in. It took her 30 minutes to work all of this magic, and how she did it we will never know. End result: we were now going to at least be home the same day, even if 8 hours later than originally planned, and on a non-stop DC-SLC flight. It is only through people like her that I run into occasionally that I have any confidence that anyone working with the airlines in the US has any idea how to make travel actually work and that there is some concern for the customers. This is the second terrible experience in 8 days with those nasty black Delta Direct customer service telephones, both of which have been overcome by an individual person at a counter in a big city airport faced with solving problems of people whose travel plans have been thrown into a blender by as-yet-unexplained problems with the airlines.
So it is now 6:00 am, and we have almost 12 hours to kill in the airport. The one up-side we can see is that we may get to watch the two World Cup quarterfinal games scheduled for Saturday. After much napping, a session of kicking a soccer ball with Ian in the airport concourse (joined for a few minutes by a little boy and his dad!), and watching two soccer games with crowds of friendly people from all over the world whom we had never met and will likely never see again that share a love of the greatest game in the world (and the two teams we wanted both winning exciting, reasonably well-played games!), we finally board the flight home. Smooth sailing for the rest of the journey and we arrive home and fall into bed somewhere around 11:30 pm.
A very long day, considering the 2 hour time change between DC and home, but that bed and the silence of nighttime in Idaho Falls was both wonderful and welcome! I have a to-do list as long as my arm (things like lawn work, dealing with photos from the trip, catching up on some of the World Cup games we missed, tracking down software tools mentioned at the conference, catching up on laundry and sleep) for these next three days before heading back to work on Wednesday, but I get to do it at home with my family!
Updated: 02 Jul 2006 08:39 am by
Filed: Food • Geek Stuff • Life in General
The last day of the conference, and I could tell that I was getting full. Thoughts:
- An excellent session on SQL Server 2005 Express Edition by Jeremy Kadlec. Despite the fact that I dislike almost all of what Microsoft stands for and their tools, I am forced at present to use some of them. This looks like it might represent a valuable tool for us on our development boxes, at least, for our SQL Server-based tools. Jeremy, as usual, did a great job.
- Another excellent session by Charlie Arehart on tips and tricks related to using and writing Web services in CFML.
- An interesting general session by Vince Bonfanti of NewAtlanta on their BlueDragon server product: a mixture of history, marketing, and a look ahead at what’s coming in version 7 later this year. The ability to do multithreaded Web app development in CFML looks very interesting (particularly when coupled with the reported differences in performance and stability between their product and Adobe’s ColdFusion).
- A miserable session on optimizing and troubleshooting CFMX server performance — this is the one session that I sat in on that was terribly disappointing and that I came out of feeling like I hadn’t really learned anything. To be fair to the presenter, this is an incredibly challenging topic to present anything on and to do it within an hour seems problematic anyway. It was compounded, however, by the presenter’s lack of meaningful examples and his lack of organization. Very disappointing.
- Oddly, the session above was followed by another session on configuring and troubleshooting CFMX by Dave Watts. This session, in contrast to the previous one, was well organized, full of useful information (or at least leads to check on), and entertaining based on Dave’s style.
- An only-moderately interesting closing session, with a Q&A session with some of the notables at the conference. Not much real out of this, and then they did all the normal raffle stuff where they give out lots of books and software that most of us already have or can’t really use.
And that wrapped up the conference. All in all, three days definitely well-spent with several very key things we need to look into in the coming year. Topping the list, in my opinion, are the following (not nessarily in any order of precedence):
- CFEclipse and Subclipse as a viable development platform for us to come close to standardizing on within our team
- Selenium as a framework to support testing our applications, and testing in general
- CFAJAX and/or Spry as a framework to incorporate AJAX into our CF apps (the one interesting thing that did come out of the closing Q&A was the unanimous vote from the panelists that Spry was very exciting, if immature and still evolving, in terms of how it fits with CF)
- BlueDragon as a replacement for CFMX
- CF-specific sessions at MAX this year
- Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 Express Edition for our development boxes
Stuff I didn’t like about the conference (or more correctly, I suppose, things I would like to see changed):
- I wish they would look into alternating locations between the East and West coast, and moving it so that we don’t have to try to travel home on the weekend before the July 4th holiday
- Get a real MC to chair the conference; Michael Smith is obviously very bright, but he is not an MC — and please don’t hand this responsibility to Simon Horwith.
- Find a conference center with solid wireless access capable of handling this conference, its audience, and its network needs.
- Lose the inch-thick door chock with all of the slides in printed format; you’re handing us a CD with all of the same content anyway. I have to wonder how many other copies of this they threw out (or that the hotel staff threw out because people left them in their hotel rooms on checking out because they didn’t want to lug them home).
- Have a meaningful closing session.
- Consider a single day, reduced rate registration fee for students, where they can pick any one day to attend at a very low price. Make it less than $100. Make it feasible for younger people to get a taste of a conference like this and get them hooked. This is the future of this group of technologies, and this conference has a great deal to offer, but even the Saturday track (new this year, with the “best of” sessions) is too expensive.
- If you are going to have a panel Q&A session, include the important vendors — they have a very different perspective on the kinds of questions that were posed than the users that were included. How can you have something like this without including a rep from Adobe and from NewAtlanta?
And that’s a wrap on the conference. Will we attend next year? Undoubtedly, but probably not with three of us — more like two — unless some changes are made for next year. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great conference and a great value for the nuggets and leads that we picked up. Jeff and I talked on the way home about why this one seemed different than last year’s for us, and he mentioned that we ourselves are in a very different place this year than last year (much of which is directly attributable to last year’s conference). We are running CFMX 7.x and using Subversion, for instance, and those two things moved us closer to where we should be by a great deal — the difference between what we are doing and the rest of the world is much smaller now than a year ago.
Dinner: we wrapped up with a wonderful, very relaxed dinner at Bacchus of Lebanon in Bethesda. This was the first experience with Lebanese food for Jeff, Ian, and Deb. A great way to end the week. Interestingly, the Metro train we rode to dinner on broke down on the way there, and we had to switch trains. This would prove to be an ominous lead-in to our travels home…