Dutch Rapley

What If?

What if you you were walking into a grocery store and you noticed a family? The reason you noticed them is that you had to walk around their kids to get into the store. You look again and you notice they have a stroller full of food. Not a massive amount of food, it’s not a big stroller. You notice the youngest child is no older than three and bundled up. You overhear a conversation about the weather. The temperature has dropped fifteen degrees in the last hour. It may or may not be raining and it’s windy.

What if you offer a to give them a ride and they politely decline with, “Someone is coming to pick us up.” What if you know that’s not true and you insist? 

What if they walked one and a half miles, in less than pleasant weather, one way to buy groceries?

What if they don’t have furniture in their living room? You wonder whether or not they have a refrigerator. You wonder if they have pots and pans.

What if you go back to the store and you buy groceries? What if none of those groceries make it to your home because you bought them for the family in need?  What if you realized what you originally went into the store to buy is no longer important?

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

When Steve Jobs Died, I Wept

Decisions

When I was going off to college, I thought it might be a wise decision to buy a car. I knew of a 1976 Chevy Nova 4 door that was for sale. It didn’t have AC, but had a nicely tuned 327. May dad and I took it out for a test drive. I really wanted this car. My dad said, “No.” I needed to buy a computer. I did.

The computer wasn’t that great. It was put together with parts from Computer Shopper and had a Cyrix processor. I could play Doom, Command & Conquer, and the original Warcraft on it. 

I never experienced a hardware failure, but I found myself tinkering with it on an ongoing basis. Netscape was fairly new and web sites piqued my interest. Yahoo! was just getting started. Because of this computer and access to the internet, I got interested in web development which later led to me a career in the field.

In retrospect, the decision to purchase a computer was the best one that could be made. I didn’t make the decision, my dad did. Sometimes we need a little help in making decisions.

Four Week Challenge

I’m posting this a little later than I wanted and I’ll keep it short. I’m taking part in a four week challenge. The challenge is to learn something knew or expand knowledge on a particular topic in four weeks.

For this challenge, I’m diving back into Rails. The idea is to spend some time with Rails each day. It doesn’t have to be a large chunk of time, but I have to spend enough time to advance my knowledge. At the end of four weeks, I hope to launch a new website. Whether or not I launch isn’t as important as establishing continuity for continuous improvement. It’s not the destination that’s important, but the journey that gets me there. Here’s to continuous improvement and the advancement of knowledge.

FW Geek Dinner, Revisited

HISTORY

When I moved to Fort Wayne, I hardly knew anyone. Being a telecommuter didn’t make it easy to meet people. I was fortunate enough to meet a couple of other telecommuters, Mike Krisher and Nathan Yergler, early on and we started meeting on a regular basis to “talk shop” over at Old Crown Coffee Roasters. After a few months, we all decided it would be a good idea to invite the community at large to join the discussion. Thus, the Fort Wayne Geek Dinner was born.

The FW Geek Dinner ran from about mid 2006 to early 2008. We always had between fifteen to thirty folks in attendance with attendees from as far away as Bryan, OH and Muncie, IN. In early 2008, I thought it would be a good time for the dinner to self organize, but that never took shape.

REBIRTH

Over the last year, I’ve had several folks approach me about bringing back the FW Geek Dinner. Those who attended the past said that they really enjoyed the format and the company of those who attended.

WHO’S INVITED?

The FW Geek Dinner isn’t just for programmers and server administrators. If you have any interest in anything technology related, you’re welcome to attend. You could be a maker, enjoy LEGO Mindstorms, work with illustration software, work with 3D modeling software, etc. 

WHEN IS THE NEXT DINNER?

The next dinner is currently being organized and will take place either late January or early February. Once we finalize the details, I’ll announce the plans. In the meantime, you can join our group to stay informed or to connect with other professionals in the area: http://groups.google.com/group/geekdinner-fw.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/

A found a new font. I’m using it for programming on Mac and Windows.

Needed ColdFusion Hibernate Improvements

Adobe made some nice improvements to Hibernate integration in the latest 9.0.1 update.

The nicest addition is the ability to work with multiple datasources in a single application.

I feel the implementation leaves much to be desired. Here’s where it falls short:

1. Additional datasources are differentiated with the “datasource” attribute in the CFC metadata
2. Across all datasources in an app, entity names have to be unique
3. There’s no flexibility with entityLoad() - see #2 above

I feel that a couple of minor improvements could be made:

1. Have a Application.cfc setting for this.ormsettings.datasources, this could provide some additional, useful functionality. You would no longer need to specify the datasource in the CFC’s attributes.
   
   this.ormsettings.datasources = [
   {datasource=”ds1”,
   cfclocation=[“com/myorg/orm”]},
   
   {datasource=”ds2”,
   cfclocation=[“com/myorg/moreorm”, ”com/bmic/evenmoreorm”]}
   ];

2) working with entityLoad() and entityNew()

Currently, if you’re working with entityNew(), you have a nice work around, and that’s because you can instantiate ORM objects with createObject(). Granted, you’re still at the mercy of dealing with unique entities.

I realize it wouldn’t be right to add an additional attribute to entityLoad() and entityNew() for the datasource, but the following could be options for implementation when dealing with multiple hibernate sessions:

entityNew(“path.to.SomeEntity”)
entityNew(“ds1:SomeEntity”)

entityLoad(“path.to.SomeEntity”, 100, true)
entityLoad(“ds1:SomeEntity”, 100 true)

entityLoadByPK() would require the same enhancement as entityLoad()

entitySave() wouldn’t need to be updated since the entity is aware of the datasource it belongs to.

CBS Sports FAIL

I don’t know how fumbled this one. Was it the developer or the QA engineer? Maybe both are to blame. I know the casual user doesn’t see the meta data when visiting your site. Meta data matters when you share a link via Facebook.

ColdFusion + Migrations

Wait. What? Database versioning with ColdFusion? Not exactly. If you’re building any type of web application on Linux or Unix (Mac OS X included), there’s no reason you can’t leverage a little bit of ruby goodness in the form of ActiveRecord::Migration.

Migrations in ActiveRecord do a wonderful job of versioning your database, especially if you work on a distributed team, or each developer has their own local environment, and you use git. Forget managing SQL statements that updates your table structure, that’s for the birds.

If you’re interested, you should definitely check out the standalone-migrations gem.

After all, it’s about using the best tool for the job.

Web Application Developer

Artisan or engineer?

So Long Slashdot

For years, I’d take a glance at Slashdot on a daily basis. For the past several weeks, I haven’t looked at it, even once. I can’t explain it. I’m just not interested anymore.