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OT - Google Maps: Interesting Feature

Posted On September 25, 2008 7:18 PM By Phil in Other

Don't know if this is new or not, or maybe new to us here in New Jersey, but as I was trying to find directions to 360|Flex Camp - New Jersey using Google Maps, I noticed a "Also Available: Public Transit" link. After clicking on it, I got a combination of bus/rail/light-rail routes to take as well as the option on changing arrival time/day. Pretty neat stuff. I do think I will be doing a little NJ Transit hopscotch tomorrow, especially since the whether could turn a 2 hour drive into double or more. Anyways, it's a pretty nice feature to have to show some alternative ways to get to a destination instead of driving.

Email Hijacked?

Posted On July 17, 2008 7:21 PM By Phil in Other

I have an email address I use just for this blog and not too long ago, I opened up Thunderbird to download my mail and had a ton of "Undeliverable Message" emails waiting for me. I am assuming that my email address is being spoofed and these are spammer hacks at email addresses on other systems that don't exist. So two questions: has this happened to anyone else and if so, what did you do? I'm hoping I don't have to abandon this email address, but who knows. Thanks in advance!

CFUnited: Refactoring to Object Oreinted Programming

Posted On June 25, 2008 11:00 AM By Phil in CFUnited

My final session at CFUnited was Dan Wilson's talk on Refactoring to Object Oriented Programming. While this session doesn't have as extensive notes as the other ones, it was very worthwhile to go to. Dan first talked about how to approach refactoring an application. His message was don't try and do everything at once because of a number of factors: cost, time, management buy in, etc. Instead, take a look at how you can change certain things in various areas of an application. To that end, he walked through a number of design patters and showed before and after code using the Kalendar application that he helped work on. If he could post those before and after, I think that would help folks trying to transition from procedural to OO-like as great examples of how and where to apply these principles.

CFUnited: Continuous Integration with SVN, ANT, CFUnit & Selenium

Posted On June 25, 2008 10:53 AM By Phil in CFUnited

Next up on Saturday was Qasim Rasheed's presentation on integrating SVN, ANT, CFUnit & Selenium. Some of the beginning stuff was covered in other sessions, but one thing I did notice is that everyone does their things slightly differently even if they are using the same products. Also, Qasim indicated if he had more time, he'd probably have looked at MXUnit as opposed to CFUnit, but reiterated what others said and that any of the xUnit frameworks should be used. His overview of Selenium was very good and I'll add that to my ever growing list of things to try out after the conference and bring into the workplace for use. Here are my notes and conclusions from this session:

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CFUnited: Prototyping for Smarties

Posted On June 25, 2008 10:44 AM By Phil in CFUnited

In the afternoon on Saturday, I attended the Prototyping for Smarties session by Hal Helms and Clark Valberg. Tangent:Prior to their first session, I believe, I was having a discussion with a bunch of people who were trying to figure out what the "Smarties" candy was. I described it as looking like pills, aspirin, others said different kind of pills, but nevertheless, you can find out exactly what they are by going here.End Tangent. Anyways, as has come to be expected, Hal and Clark's presentation didn't disappoint and Ben Nadel played the hyper-worrying/frazzled developer (like nervous guy, Doug, on Scrubs) to a T (almost too good, you might say, :). What also was good, was having attended a number of Hal's sessions over the years, as well as his Fusebox training back in 2001 or 2002 (can't remember), is that he has reevaluated some of his positions on certain topics, like prototyping and the depth needed to move forward on a project (he now advocates the medium fidelity model). Lots of good points came out of the topic and combining it with the Changing the Game presentation, one can definitely begin to see how to approach clients in a different manner. Here are my notes from the presentation:

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CFUnited: All about CFThread

Posted On June 25, 2008 10:26 AM By Phil in CFUnited

Another session I attended Saturday was Rupesh Kumar's presentation on CFThread. I'll admit, since I don't have CF8 at work, I haven't really played with CFThread all that much and really don't know much more than what folks have mentioned in the blogsphere. Anyways, as is the theme that seemed to come out of this conference, it is definitely a tool worth looking into, especially considering all the emailing our applications do (and the logging they should be doing) that we could separate out and have them run under their own process. Here are my notes on the presentation:

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CFUnited: Event Driven Programming

Posted On June 25, 2008 10:20 AM By Phil in CFUnited

I'm going to try and finish up all my posts/reviews from CFUnited today and tomorrow. Essentially, I have the Saturday sessions to wrap up and then probably a final wrap-up from my experiences at the conference as a whole. Anyways, I got up early on Saturday to attend Sean Corfield's Event Driven Programming session. Essentially, Sean delved into a topic that is somewhat foreign to CFML developers, but is heavily used in the RIA space (Flex primarily but also in AJAX). CFML, by its nature (even if you use OO concepts) is procedural in nature. While Sean did show is new framework, Edmund, much of his talk centered on the types of thinking needed to institute and design for an event driven architecture. I have mentioned this a few times both here and to others, I didn't really understand the event aspect of Flex until I developed a few ASP.NET applications. For some reason, and it may have been the code-behind inherit in ASP.NET and VisualStudio, but I finally "got it" after doing those projects. It did help me to understand how I needed to think about "events" within a page and its response. I look forward to seeing more of Sean's Edmund framework. Here are my notes from the presentation:

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CFUnited: Integrated ColdFusion Development Environment

Posted On June 21, 2008 10:49 AM By Phil in CFUnited

The last session I attended on Friday was Phill Nacelli's presentation on the an integrated ColdFusion development environment. There wasn't much different in here that what has been shown with the ACME guide and the articles in the recently released Fusion Authority, but, like I said before, some of what I attended at CFUnited was to bring back ideas to work as we rethink our entire infrastructure. Phill used Apache instead of SVNServe so that was nice to see how all of that was setup. Here are my notes from the presentation and it has been recorded (hopefully so was Saturday's):

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CFUnited: ColdBox Framework 101

Posted On June 21, 2008 10:36 AM By Phil in CFUnited

Friday afternoon started off by me attending Luis Majano's Coldbox Framework 101 presentation. I must admit, I have never really looked at the framework before and wanted to see how it differs from the other frameworks. Luis gave a good overview of his framework and covered topics to be released in the next version (2.6 I believe). Anyways, here are my notes for this presentation:

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CFUnited: Design Principles for Developers

Posted On June 21, 2008 10:28 AM By Phil in CFUnited

I attended Dave Powell's Design Principles for Developers presentation on Friday morning (a nice way to start off a birthday). Design is something I really need to get into, especially if I ever decide to take on secondary work (well, I want to, but it's a matter of finding time). I struggle with layouts and understanding the relationships, but Dave did a good job of slowly introducing those subjects to us developers and has given me some things to think about when I mark up Fireworks comps or prototypes. He showed good and bad designs, although I'm not sure on some of the good designs, but the web community (Webby Awards) seemed to think so. Here are my notes from his presentation:

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