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After today I owe Ryan Price a huge debt of honor, and at least one beverage of his choice. Mr Price, a well known figure in the Orlando, FL internet-savvy community, just promoted my search for employment on his community site’s blog with many complimentary things to say. He also highlighted how through a limited amount of networking over the past year I’ve managed to gain a great deal number leads very quickly, which has just been an amazing experience - thanks to the feedback my family will be just fine. A sincere thanks to you, Ryan, you’re an honorable and compassionate person!

I am immediately available for any projects, please contact me if you have anything. With close to ten years of experience developing applications in ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails and PHP, I can bring a high level of technical expertise and professionalism to your projects.

The project management tool activeCollab, previously mentioned here, has just announced their pricing structure for the forthcoming v1.0 release. The key point you’ll notice is that they’re no longer going to have a free or open-source version available, instead they’re pushing their paid releases while they “keep [the old version] 0.7.1 around.” There will be two versions available, a “small biz” release for $199 that doesn’t have the calendar, trouble tickets, time tracking or static pages, and a $399 version that has these. At this news I’m even more satisfied in my choice to move all my work to using Redmine.

A weird one. Had an MS Word file that would crash Acrobat (both 6 and 8) every time we’d convert it to PDF due to some embedded fonts. After searching the net I tried out PDFCreator and it worked! Go figure.

Scott Stroz just posted a great article over on Doug Hughe’s site regarding the tendency some people have of rejecting feature additions to ColdFusion because the feature can be done using CFML’s Java underbelly. In my 3.5 years of developing with ColdFusion full-time I’ve seen countless times that experienced developers recommend that others “just use Java” to fill in missing functionality in ColdFusion, functionality typically available in competing technologies like Ruby, PHP or C#.

I started using CFMX6 and was immediately impressed by how easy basic things were. Want a query? Just use one simple command. Want to display your results? Just loop over the results or just start using the query variables on your page - it automatically shows the first record if you don’t tell it otherwise. Easy, just like it should be. In addition there was extra depth behind it - CFML’s object oriented system, frameworks, etc, allowed those who needed more to do so, while still staying in CFML.

As someone who came from a PHP background it was, however, rather apparent that even back then there were a few things missing - image handling, secure transfers and a database agnostic querying system were obvious ones to me. CFMX7 did not appear to me to further the cause - most of the additions seemed to be aimed at the “enterprisey” market, especially the event gateway feature, and most users weren’t going to spend $6000 on that.

The folks that recommended using Java for day-to-day things were IMHO short-sighted and were doing ColdFusion a disservice - what should have been a push from the community to get the feature added to the core system, to have another feature given the “ColdFusion easy-to-use” work-over, the developer was being pushed towards a much, much more difficult technology. People who learn ColdFusion don’t do so to use Java, they do it to use ColdFusion, just like you wouldn’t learn PHP to use the C++ language it is written in.

Thankfully ColdFusion 8 (the “MX” was disposed of) has brought it back to where it should have been - neck and neck with similar tools, ahead in some cases, and back to making simple websites simple again. No more will we have to “just learn Java” to resize an image, or securely transfer files from other servers, and we gain easier AJAX routines, easier page layouts, and many more tangible and more usable features that will benefit a greater portion of the market, all wrapped up in an easy-to-use package.

So, well done Adobe, ColdFusion 8 is great, and I’ve got a request in at work to upgrade to the newest version.

Sys-Con have finally put to rest what I’ve thought was an utterly horrible magazine, the ColdFusion Developer’s Journal. Between an utterly useless website that bombards you with 80% advertisements / 20% content, and a magazine with legally questionable practices (using blog articles without consent or payment), the ColdFusion industry is much better off without them.

Yes, the above is what one of the company’s sub-sites looks like. Yes, that is a pop-over advertisement for one of their magazines. Yes, that is an auto-play video advertisement. Yes, this is a really, really bad website, worthy of the next edition of Web Pages That Suck.

Amusingly, during the past year, when most of the really bad stuff came to light, a new magazine called the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update stepped up to the plate and utterly trounces anything SysCon has done in years. Good riddens to CFDJ, we’ve got FAQU now.

In the UNIXy (UNIX, BSD, Linux, OSX) world secure file transfers have been the norm for years, thanks in part to the standardization of SSH as the security protocol due to both its simplicity and power. Windows, on the other hand, has never featured security as a very important feature, evidenced by the ellaborate routes someone must take to handle SSL in IIS.

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A handy little one - a backup script for RimuHosting that will backup your Rails app and copy it to the provided backup storage account. To use it you first have to add Geoffrey Grosenbach’s backup.rake script to your lib/tasks directory, then sign up for RimuHosting’s backup service, then just save out this script as e.g. “backup.sh” and add it to your crontab. Easy when you know how.

export TIMESTAMP=`date +'%Y%m%d%H%M'`
rm -f backup.zip
rake db:backup RAILS_ENV=production
zip -r -9 -q backup.zip *
lftp -u 'myaccount,mypassword' backupspace.rimuhosting.com -e "set ftp:ssl-protect-data true; put backup.zip -o backup_$TIMESTAMP.zip; exit"