Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts

Saturday 14 February 2015

Snooze

G'day:
This is just a heads-up. I intend to put this blog on hiatus for the next few weeks. I'm on holiday at the moment, and I'm also trying to break the back of this CFML book I'm writing (slowly... only two chapters drafted so far). I'm also finding a lot of my time needs to be sunk into the Lucee mailing list at the moment (for better or for worse).

If a blog topic springs to mind and I feel I need to write it up immediately I will do so, but I'm not going "ooh lummy... I haven't written anything on the blog recently..." and letting it bother me.

Oh yeah, and there's also too much cricket to watch and beer to drink out here in NZ. Today is South Africa v Zimbabwe and India v Pakistan, which I'm watching with me Mum & Dad.

Righto.

--
Adam

Saturday 24 January 2015

Follow-up to "Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but..."

G'day:
A few days back I got a bit stroppy with a plagiarist: "Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but...".

I note that James has deleted the page(s) in question.

Instead of simply citing the work properly (ie: put the creative commons attribution on it).

How weird is that? It seems to me it was not an exercise in helping the community, it was an exercise in bigging himself up. Via knocking-off someone else's work.

Dubious.

Still: all's well that ends well, I guess.

--
Adam

"Regular expressions in CFML" link summary

G'day:
This is not a very interesting article. I just need a list of links to other articles for my book.
I have just reminded myself I still need to write that last section! Oops.

So, yeah, nothing new here. Sorry.

--
Adam

Tuesday 2 December 2014

For Andy Allan

G'day:
I have no idea why I'm doing this, but here you go Andy: a blog article.

--
Adam

Thursday 30 October 2014

Oh yeah... I'm back doing ColdFusion for the time being

G'day:
Not that it's particularly important, but for one reason or another, I'm been seconded back into our ColdFusion Team from the PHP Team. And will probably remain here for a month or so.

--
Adam

Thursday 18 September 2014

Rendering a GitHub file in this blog

G'day:
A few days back I released that CFScript documentation effort, which at the time was just done inline as a blog article. I had not decided how best to home it so it could be found. I thought about putting it on GitHub, but in my experience Google is lousy at finding stuff on GitHub. As unimportant as the adamcameron.me domain is in the bigger scheme of things, I seem to rank quite well when it comes to CFML topics (ed: that CFScript page bloody doesn't, mate), so I figured putting it here would be a good first step.

Friday 12 September 2014

RSS URLs

G'day:
A couple of the RSS URLs for this thing have changed. The correct ones are in the box to the right, and as follows:


I think the default one has stayed the same, but the "last ten" ones have changed, due to domain name change.

--
Adam

Sally Field

G'day:
After y/day's article "So long, and thanks for all the CF", a lot of people have been saying a lot of very flattering things. I've decided I'd sound even more like a wanker than usual if I thanked everyone individually, so I'll just say "hey, thanks for the kind words" once, now. That was it just there.

I'm also fascinated no-one has (yet) said "good riddance" or some such. I figured I'd get a bit of that. Perhaps ppl are keeping their thoughts to themselves.

A couple of updates.

I tried to switch off the @cfmlNotifier feed, but for some reason it's still broadcasting?! This is really odd because generally speaking I need to restart it every day anyhow. Weird. On that: someone's picked up the reins on that project, has grabbed my code and is trying to work out what drugs I was on when I wrote it as we speak. They hope to have it up and running shortly (they mentioned 24h, but no pressure ;-).

In one of my blog comments someone indicated I seemed to be not only leaving the community, but also slamming doors behind me: what with the renaming of the blog, the new subdomain (just "blog" rather than "blog"), unsubscribing from mailing lists etc. I can assure you I leave the community with no sense of malice at all. The simple fact is I have been focusing on CFML because I have been paid to... now I'm not being paid to: I'm not going to focus on it. My after-hours hobby is computer programming, not necessarily computer programming in CFML. I take what I do seriously, and I believe any dev who is to be taken seriously ought to be doing dev in their spare time as well as 9-5. Accordingly when I take my job as a CFML developer seriously, I look under rocks, open the cans (of worms), and stir the pot. But I simply won't be doing that with CFML any more, because I won't be using CFML any more. After I get up to speed with PHP, I'll probably do it to PHP instead. As you might have already noticed ("PHP: how does PHP deal with same-named form values? [shudder]", "PHP's error "handling". Oh dear"), I've already been calling it into question.

The "rebrand" is just - as Dom said in his response to that comment - just tech-neutralising it all, and being more representative of the content, going forward. I'm not really going to be writing about CFML any more (there's one more article in the pipeline), so it would be stupid for this thing to stick with its association to CFML. It's not like I'm unpersoning all the articles, and changing the historic "CFML" references to "PHP" or anything!

Also bear in mind I have already rebranded once. This used to be "Adam Cameron's ColdFusion Blog", but the more I started working with Railo, the less it seemed sensible to describe it as a ColdFusion blog, so changed it to "CFML".

Thursday 11 September 2014

So long, and thanks for all the CF

G'day:
The rumours I've been seeding recently have turned out to be true. Today I got confirmation that I am leaving the CFML community and joining the PHP one.

Tuesday 15 July 2014

2

G'day:
I'm frickin' lousy with dates (as in "calendar", not as in "romance". Although the same applies, from memory ;-). Well: remembering dates is never a problem, but remembering what the current date is is something I'm not so good at. I forgot to touch base with my big sister on her birthday over the weekend... and there's another anniversary on the same day.

I've been doing this bloody blog for two years now. Which is approximately 23 months longer than I expected it to last.


Last year I gave you some stats ("1"). I'll try to do the same now.

  • I've now published 750 (this'll be the 751st) articles. I still have about a dozen in progress. The same ones as last year, funnily enough. The topics just don't have legs, I think.
  • And the word tally is now up around 600000 words. So in the second year I didn't write quite as much as the first year (350000), but spread over more articles (428 in the last 12 months vs 322 in the first year).
  • I've had another 3000 comments since the previous year's 2000. That's pretty cool. Thanks for the contributions everyone. Often the comments are more interesting than the articles, I find.
  • Google Analytics claims I've had 86000 visitors over the last year (up from 25k in the first year). So this thing is getting more popular. The average per day is 230-odd. It was around 120/day in year one. It's still not a huge amount of traffic, but I guess my potential audience is pretty small too.
  • The busiest day in the last 12 months was 5 March 2014, with 593 visitors. That was towards the end of the isValid() saga, with this article: "ColdFusion 11: Thank-you Carl, Mary-Jo, many other community members and indeed Rupesh", and a click-chasing one entitled "CFML is dying. Let's drop it off at Dignitas". Looking at the analytics, that was the bulk of it, plus I was writing a lot about new features in ColdFusion 11 around about then, which boosted things. That was also my biggest week ever, by quite a margin.
  • The most popular article last year was the one about me migrating from "ColdFusion Builder to Sublime Text 2". That's had 2200 visitors. The next most popular were as follows:
  • The most +1'ed article was "I am one step closer to being unshackled from ColdFusion". It's interesting that that was the one that people liked the most. It had 13 +1s. Most articles get none or maybe one, so that's quite a lot.
  • Last year I worked out which article had the most comments. I have no idea how I did that, and I can't be bothered working it out again. So erm... that'll remain a mystery.
I've blogged a lot about ColdFusion 11 during the year... what with it being in public beta and then being released. I've also compared its functionality to Railo's equivalents. I've shifted my primary dev platform at home to Railo now. I've done a lot of JavaScript over the last 12 months (I've spared you most of the detail), but haven't progressed in other languages as much as I'd like to. That's my mission for the next year.

I battered Adobe a lot about how they (don't) handle their bugs. I will continue to do this. They're long overdue for an updater to ColdFusion 10, for one thing; plus we should have had at least a coupla small updates to ColdFusion 11 by now.

The biggest shift in my coding practices in the last year has been down to reading Clean Code, and adopting a lot of its suggestions. My code is better for it. I've got my colleagues Chris and Brian to thank for this... both the encouragement to read the book, but also keeping at me about it. Sometimes to great irritation on my part. If you have not read that book: do so. Especially if you're either of the two members of our team who still haven't read it. Ahem.

Another thing I've been fascinated with this year gone is TestBox. I love it. I am looking forward to shifting off ColdFusion 9 at work so we can start converting our MXUnit styled tests to BDD ones. Brad and Luis are dudes.

I've bitched a lot about Stack Overflow, but contrary to what I threatened ("Not that it will really matter in the bigger scheme of things..."), I still answer questions there every day (if I can find questions I can answer, that is).

Railo continues to rock. As do Gert, Micha, Igal from Railo. They really have done brilliant work keeping CFML alive and interesting.

A bunch of people have motivated me to write this year... it's too difficult to pull out a list of the main miscreants, but Sean would be the top. And the list of my various muses (or adversaries!) is - as always - on the right hand side of the screen, over there.

Gavin deserves special mention, as he very kindly tried to raise money to get me across to CF.Objective() ("Shamelessful plug"), but we had to kill that plan just as it was getting started ("Do not sponsor me to go to CF.Objective()"). But happily Gert stumped up with a ticket at the last minute ("Well that was unexpected"), so I made it anyhow. I really am taken aback by you guys. Seriously.

And of course Mike from CFCamp paid for my entire conference last year too ("CFCamp 2013"). That was amazing. And I mean both Mike's generousity, and the conference itself. Go to it this year if you can: CFCamp.

Ray's done most of the work for ColdFusion UI the Right Way, but I've helped out a bit. I'm glad we got going with that project.

Thanks for your participation in this blog, everyone. If you weren't reading it or commenting on it, I'd've chucked it in. But you keep coming back. Cheers.

Oh and let's not forget: <cfclient> sucks arse. And I can tell that without using it, Dave Ferguson ;-)

--
Adam

Monday 7 July 2014

Doh!

G'day:
Actually it was pretty easy to reinstate the comments (the process has improved and is more reliable since the last time I had to do it), and rejig the template. I think everything is OK now?

Lemme know if not.

Righto.

--
Adam

Doh!

G'day:
So... yesterday I was monkeying with my blog templates, and I inadvertently wiped all my customisations. And did I do a back-up? Of course I didn't.

So, yeah, it's not working or looking quite right @ the moment. I have also switch off commenting as I don't want them to go to the default Blogspot commenting system.

Normal service will be returned... at some point before too long, but I am not working on it immediately as there are bigger fish to fry just now.

Sorry 'bout that.

--
Adam

Saturday 5 July 2014

Code for annotation highlighter

G'day:
As mentioned a coupla days ago ("Attempting a new approach to annotating code"), I've decided my approach to annotating my code examples - by colour-highlighting the lines of code I want to discuss, and then cross-referencing that back into the notes - doesn't work so well when there's lots of stuff to discuss. So I decided to come up with a different approach.

Thursday 3 July 2014

Attempting a new approach to annotating code

G'day:
My code examples recently have been getting very bloody cluttered with highlighting, so I'm just using this article to experiment with a new approach. I need to test the CSS and JS in a live article, so need to publish something to test it. There is nothing interesting in this article. Don't read it. It's just a scratch pad for me to test my new solution.

Friday 27 June 2014

Ducks

G'day:
This is very much a cop out: it's a tiny "article" which achieves only to excuse myself from writing something useful.

I'm not finding CFML to be particularly interesting at the moment, so I am completely inspirationless when it comes to what to write. I'm pleased with my code at work (although it's been slow at times), but there's been very little noteworthy that's relevant outside the context of our team.

I'm also slightly let down at the cancellation of the C# cross training ("Adam Cameron's C# CFML blog"). This is being remedied shortly, but it's still a bit... disappointing though.

Added to that I've decided I spend way too much time researching CFML shit I don't actually care about, specifically for this blog; so I've kinda decided to peg back on that a bit for a while. Instead - selfishly(?) - focusing on getting through some more JavaScript courses on CodeSchool, instead of inventing something to write here. I've also got a bag load of Ruby courses to look at, and now Sean reminded me that not only have I not yet gone through "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages", but now the sequel has arrived at a screen near you: "Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks: Languages That Are Shaping the Future". 14 bloody languages to look at? Bloody hell, there's still probably 14 more libraries I want to look at in JavaScript too!

Trivially, I also have a life outside of all this, and there's a few things there I need to focus on, and "get my ducks in a row" (I really have no idea why one wants one's ducks in a row, but - hey - why not?)

So, anyway, sorry for the lack of material. I need to focus on other shit, which means less time for this carry on.

Righto.

--
Adam

Tuesday 17 June 2014

I'm not Ben Nadel (or Ray Camden)

G'day:
Just a quick note. Ben Nadel has a feature on his blog to "Ask Ben" via which the community can contact him directly for help. I think Ray might also have this on his blog too.

However I'm neither of those people, and I won't help people if they come directly to me via email with their coding problems.

Friday 13 June 2014

Do me a quick favour?

G'day:

Update:

Thanks, I've got the information I need now. Cheers to everyone who helped.

Could someone pls check whether any of these links yield actual bug records, or simply say:

The information requested is not found
My expectation is that all of them say "not found". Do any work properly for you?

Wednesday 7 May 2014

For the record: Cameron vs <cfclient>

G'day:
This is just cos I need some typing space.

Isaac Sunkes posted on another article:
If you try to google anything CF11 or CFCLIENT or similar looking for some useful information to help you learn new features, search results are sometimes just Mr G'day's post complaining about them.
How is that useful?
Isaac... let's google. I've googled for "cfclient". This is with an incognito window, as Chrome remembers what I tend to look at, and obviously I have been busying myself with <cfclient> recently.

Tuesday 1 April 2014

For the non-Firefox users amongst my readers

G'day:
Inspired by OKCupid's move today, I am displaying a popover on this blog when a Firefox user first visits:



The text states this:

Hi:
Sorry about the "WTF?" moment going on here. I am posting this notice in front of anyone accessing my blog from Firefox.

As I say in my communications policy for this blog, everything here is my opinion. Generally I stick to my opinions about stuff relating to CFML, but I reserve the right to express my opinion on any topic.

Something I have a strong opinion on is the topic of prejudice and bigotry. I won't conscion it. I do not simply mean racial bigotry, I mean bigotry of any stripe, including homophobia.

I was very disappointed to see that Mozilla have appointed a "card-carrying" bigot to the position of CEO. As we have all heard by now, Brendan Eich is so prejudiced against homosexual people he has financially invested in attempts to underwrite homophobia into United States law.

In my opinion, this is completely unacceptable. I can't have a say in whether he should be stood down from this position, but the longer he retains it, the dimmer is my view of Mozilla as a company.

As my own small protest I have deinistalled Firefox from my computer, and I am also now inviting you to do the same.

I'll only be displaying this banner to you once... I've popped a cookie on your browser so it should not display again. Sorry for the interruption.

Cheers.
Unlike OKCupid, I will display it only once.

Thursday 13 March 2014

Do not sponsor me to go to CF.Objective()

G'day:
A coupla days ago I posted a guilty blog post "Shamelessful plug", which mentioned that Gavin was running a charity drive ("Charity Corner - Diabetes and Fly a Foul Mouthed Fusioner Fund") to try to fund me to get to CF.Objective() this year.

I am calling quits on this.

I hope I don't make any of the existing donors (thank-you!) cross, but I'm going to give the money away. Or back to you. But hopefully you let me give it away.

I just spotted this Twitter message from my long-standing mate Jared:

He needs help (details here), and more than I need a ticket to a conference, so I've instructed Gavin to give him the money gathered so far.

If any of my donors are unhappy with this decision (and I understand it'd not what you put the money in for, so that's fine), contact me privately and I'll get your money back to you.

And if you were thinking of sponsoring me: thank-you, but please sponsor Jared instead. Cheers.

Thanks for the kind thoughts & gestures everyone, but... ballocks to that: let's help our industry mate out when he needs it.

--
Adam