I'm in a new position today, as Senior Web Developer at the leading secure single sign-on provider, PingIdentity. They've set me up with a sweet 30" Macintosh HD screen, plus a nice, light MacBook Pro. The fridge is even stocked with Cokes. I think I may just sleep here.
While browsing the web tonight my wife came across what is the first enjoyable advertisement I've ever seen on the web (those fun Orbitz games don't count-- while I like to play with the baseball or putt-putt golf widgets, I didn't like the ads themselves). And the great thing about it is that it's more than just an interactive game and more than a running commercial-- it's an entertaining combination of both, almost like an example of that semi-mythical idea of "interactive TV" that pundits have written about for the last decade.
On HGTV's web site, a Flash ad showed up for Sears showing a static picture of some guy dressed up as a dandelion. Beneath him there's a button requesting that you "Roll over the weed". If you do, that's when the commercial gets hilarious.
Continue reading "You know, I don't mind this web ad-- I love it" »
If you're in the Boston area and didn't make it to the ColdFusion User's Group meeting tonight on unit testing with MXUnit, you missed a good time. Marc Esher and Bill Shelton gave us an intro to unit testing, and a few of us went out afterwards to Dunn-Gaherin's to toss a few back with our visiting ColdFusion evangelist, Adam Lehman. Adam kindly said a few words about Adobe's current efforts with CF, and also raffled off a copy of ColdFusion Server.
Be sure to make it to the next meeting, when yours truly will be presenting on version-tracking your code with Subversion. I'll be raffling off a free copy of Subversion. ;)
P.S. So that no one misses the joke, then shows up expecting a chance at free software and gets angry at me: I'm kidding. Subversion is already a free download.
I made yet another update to EmailParse.CFC last week while I was working in the code for other reasons: I've added spam lookup on the sender's IP address courtesy of SpamHaus.org.
Continue reading "Spam/RBL lookup added to EmailParse.CFC" »
I've posted an update and a fix to my EmailParse.CFC today:
You can read more about my email-parsing code for ColdFusion in the EmailParse.CFC Project area.
In my previous post, I wrote about the trouble I had trying to install the CF 8.0.1 Updater for Linux. Thanks to a few good tips from Brian and Todd, I now know how to install the Updater without a problem-- but I think that I might as well post the solution since Adobe doesn't seem to realize that it may not be obvious to everyone.
Because the Updater has a .zip extension, I took it for a zip file. Without any other direction from Adobe, that seems like a reasonable course of action to me. But when you try to unzip the updater, you get errors. The solution is pretty simple: just download the updater file, change its extension from .sh to .bin, make it executable, and then call it directly:
# wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/coldfusion/updates/801/coldfusion-801-lin_updater.zip
# mv coldfusion-801-lin_updater.zip coldfusion-801-lin_updater.bin
# chmod 755 coldfusion-801-lin_updater.bin
# ./coldfusion-801-lin_updater.bin
That will start the Updater quite nicely. Oh, and one other thing-- when the Updater finished and I went to view my site, I got a 500 error from the webserver. A simple stop-and-start of the coldfusion_8 service did the trick:
# service coldfusion_8 stop
Stopping ColdFusion 8, please wait
Stopping coldfusion server..stopped
ColdFusion 8 has been stopped
# service coldfusion_8 start
Starting ColdFusion 8...
The ColdFusion 8 server is starting up and will be available shortly.
======================================================================
ColdFusion 8 has been started.
ColdFusion 8 will write logs to /opt/coldfusion8/logs/cfserver.log
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