Showing posts with label Off Topic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Off Topic. Show all posts

Monday 7 April 2014

Balls I say!

G'day:
Sorry Rakshith, I know you deleted this message, but it's too amusing for me to not keep for posterity.

Thursday 3 April 2014

Just

G'day:
This is ubiquitous news just now, but I would just like to share how I found out about it:


Cheers for the heads-up Gavin.

Well done IT. This is a good day for social equality.

--
Adam










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 27 March 2014

We don't need bigots in this industry

G'day:
Bravo to the individuals at Mozilla who are requesting their new CEO steps down:



Cheers to Andy Myers for putting me on to this: 'Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”'.

There is no place in our industry for bigots.

F*** off.

--
Adam

Thursday 20 February 2014

Completely off topic: this is the state of spam

G'day
A slightly lighter moment. I just had this land in the "is this legit?" box in my blog's moderation queue:

Wednesday 5 February 2014

Waitangi Day again

G'day:
It's Waitangi Day again,(in NZ, anyhow... it's still the day before here in the UK) so here's some fluff about New Zealand.


This is a Kiwi:

Kiwi

So is this:

Self

And this:

Gavin
And so - apparently - is this:

Kai

Although I'm not so sure about that last one.

Wednesday 29 January 2014

SET ARITHABORT

G'day:
Hey, we've got a problem with a stored procedure we're running. When running it in SQL Server Management Studio it runs like lightning. When running it over a JDBC connection, it takes over a minute.

Our DB Manager has tracked this back to being down to a settings difference between the JDBC driver and SSMS... the latter has SET ARITHABORT=ON, and JDBC by default has it OFF.

Does anyone know how to pass these settings on the JDBC URL to set it ON? Or any other way of doing it?

Cheers for any suggestions.

--
Adam


Tuesday 15 October 2013

Friday 14 June 2013

A list of things I am not researching

G'day:

All of these things I am not investigating:

Why not? Because - f*** me - I don't know where to start! There's so much bloody interesting technology around and only about 18 hours in the day (eating, sleeping). Plus my blimin' life keeps getting in the road (case in point: I type this from the Wetherspoons @ LHR... the one at which I am beginning to recognise the staff, and they me...).

This article exists almost entirely to guilt-trip myself into doing something about all this. I've even got about a dozen blog articles underway on all this stuff. That weighs heavy too.

Argh!

Right. That feels better.

Have a good weekend.

--
Adam

Saturday 25 May 2013

Ruby via codeschool.com

G'day:
Cheers to Ray Camden for putting me on to this, but Code School are offering free online training all weekend, thanks to some outfit called New Relic sponsoring it. Yay for Code School & new Relic!

I was planning on doing some summery stuff like going into the forest and getting a decent dose of greenitude and vitamin D, but it's bloody freezing (10degC @ midday, about a week from the start of "summer"!) so I'm staying indoors and am gonna work my way through the Ruby courses they offer. If I find anything interesting - which I presume I will - I'll write it up.

However I had better also dose up on various forms of caffeine first, as I've already sat at this blimin' computer for 4h today, and my attention span is waning.

Wish me luck (not with the Ruby, but with not freezing to death en route to the station for a coffee ;-).

--
Adam

Sunday 19 May 2013

cf.baseball()

G'day:
Apropos of not much, here's a badly exposed photo of the cf.objective() bods who have come along to the Twins v Red Sox game:



What a very very shady bunch they are. Update: I've changed to a much better photo... one in which one can actually tell who the people are!

We're currently sitting at the bar at the game. Great fun, great new friends, great conference.

Time for another pint...

--
Adam

Thursday 11 April 2013

One of my colleagues is a published author

G'day:
Another community announcement. One that I mean to make a week or two ago, but it kept falling out of my brain.

Anyway, one of my mates from work - Marcos Placona - has had some of his work actually publishing in a real book: "Instant jQuery Drag-and-Drop Grids How-to". I reckon that's pretty impressive.

I haven't read it yet: it all happened whilst I was over here in NZ, and I was waiting for the hard-copy to be released (which it has been now, and I've just bought one... It'll be on my desk when I get back to London). My plan is to get him to sign it, and when he shuffles off this mortal coil, I'll be able to sell it for millions! As I said to him "this time next year, I'll be rich!" ;-)

Anyway, support your fellow community members and give it a read. Congrats, Marcos.

--
Adam

Wednesday 6 February 2013

Completely and utterly off-topic: Waitangi Day

Kia ora:
Today is Waitangi Day, which is NZ’s national day.  It’s usually marked by Maori sovereignty protests and flag burnings. Oh, and it’s a nice day off in the middle of summer for the non-political types.

Anyway, here are some significant New Zealanders, by way of a reading diversion.

Tuesday 20 November 2012

Friday 16 November 2012

Slashes are not more important than people


First things first

CFHour is asking people to donate money for the relief of victims of Hurricane Sandy.

To encourage people to donate, they are running a competition to win a copy of ColdFusion Builder.  Details are on their site, but I've repeated them below to get the message across as quickly as possible (guys, please let me know if I don't have this exactly right, I'll update it).

Donate some money to a charity that is targeting the relief of victims of Hurricane Sandy. Take a photo of the receipt and post it somewhere on the 'net that can be viewed (obscure any sensitive personal info!), then tweet the URL along with a hash-tag of #CFHourCares.


Friday 2 November 2012

Comments

G'day:
Hey, a bunch of people - including myself - have been caught out by a quirk of how the Disqus commenting system that I'm using on this blog works.  If you want to get notifications of responses to any comments you make, you must make the comment via the "Register with Disqus" option (the next step after "Or pick a name..."), rather than the other "Connect with..." options like Twitter, Facebook etc.  I think this is inadequate, and I am doing two things about this:

  1. Hitting Disqus up to see if there's a way around it (although I've read a bunch of their docs and googled rather a lot, and it seems not), and if not;
  2. migrating the comments onto a different system.
But in the interim, if you want to know if anyone has responded to your comments, you need to use the Disqus option.  Sorry.

Righto.

--
Adam

Thursday 20 September 2012

FFS RTFM

G'day:
So I'm back at work after a week off, and needed to drag myself out of bed a coupla hours earlier than I had become used to, and it's bloody cold today.  So my default setting today is "pissed-off" (so: same as usual, for all intents and purposes).

Tuesday 4 September 2012

SEO Gone Mad (oh, and link bait for the Paralympics)

G'day:
OK, this is the weirdest one yet.  I was wondering why the hell my blog was so popular today - it's been my biggest day ever so far with a mammoth 600 hits - and I started looking at where the traffic was coming from, because basically unless Ray Camden mentions me on his blog, I don't get much attention.  I promote myself via Twitter and ColdFusionBloggers, but I basically don't exist on the 'net except for that.

Here's the weird thing.  At the moment, if one searches on Bing for "paralympic medal update", this blog ranks first. "paralympics medals": still above the fold @ 6th. Search on Google for "paralympics medal table", and I'm 8th (ie: on the first page).  What?

Monday 3 September 2012

Paralympic Medal Table

G'day:
This is just a quick one.  You'll've noticed I've put a medal table for the Paralympics up over on the right there.  During the Olympics I had a coupla tables there, which I have now retired and posted the final state of the table along with the code, here.

During the Olympics, I was maintaining those tables by hand: I had to run a script, generate the mark-up, edit the blog widget and paste the mark-up in, and update the timestamp.  Tedious.

Now that I have access to a CF server, I've updated the Paralympic table to run automatically.