Tom Mollerus' Weblog

I couldn't help but laugh over some of this collection the MSNBC staff put together of comments on recent political ads, especially Obama's infomercial:

Happy Halloween to all! My dog Cleo has started the festivities early here in Needham; not only is she wearing her bat wings already (thanks to the kids), but she's managed to eat a Twix bar and Tootsie Pop, wrappers and all (again, thanks to the kids).

Brian Rinaldi has announced that Flex Camp Boston is back for 2008 and is now accepting registrations.

Last year's event was fantastic, and this year promised to be just as good. Speakers include Tim Buntel, Christophe Coenraets, Andrew Powell, Jeff Tapper, Brian O'Connor, and Mike Nimer, representing the top companies in the industry such as Adobe, Universal Mind, Digital Primates, IBM, and Brightcove. See the agenda for full details.

The early bird rate of $30 is only available before December 1st, but keep in mind that this event sold out in under a month last year, so I suggest you register as soon as you can.

When: Dec 12, 2008 from 8am - 5pm
Where: Bentley College in Waltham
Website: http://www.flexcampboston.com/
Registration URL: http://flexcampboston2008.eventbrite.com/

I want to thank everyone who joined us last night at our Open Mic night with the Boston CFUG. We had a great turnout and a very good response on the open presentation format. People liked it so much that we're going to do another at some point in the future. Also, congratulations to the winner of last night's raffle for Adobe software-- Isaac Dealey. Isaac is presenting his onTap framework to the CFUG during our December meeting.

For those of you who want to get more information on the projects that were presented last night, here are the links from the speakers:

• Charles Kaufmann's Coreforms: a set of Coldfusion custom tags that help you easily build data entry forms and tables to display data.
  Find it on RIAForge at http://coreforms.riaforge.org
• Tony Garcia's presentation on ColdBox: on his blog at http://www.objectivebias.com/blog/
• Tom Mollerus' (yes, that's me) ClickHeat project: generates a color-coded "heatmap" of click activity on a web page
  Find it on his site at http://www.mollerus.net/tom/projects/clickheat/

Have a project that you'd like to show off? Have a bit of problem code that you'd like to get help with? Want to introduce yourself to the local CF community? Then come join us this Wednesday night at the Boston CFUG's Open Mic night, where you can not only present your code to the local community, but you'll have a chance to win any Adobe software item of your choice up to $2,100!

Contact me or Brian Rinaldi if you'd like to participate. Those who present will get an extra entry in the raffle for the software. If you RSVP as well, that means you'll have three entries for the night. Not bad odds, huh?

Again, the meeting is on Wednesday, October 22nd, at 6:00pm at Adobe's offices in Newton. Check the Boston CFUG's site for more details and to RSVP for the event.

A co-worker threw in a "Mnah mnah!" at me after I started whistled the melody of the song ("dee-do, be-doo-be"), prompting a little trip down memory lane. It was first used in the mainstream U.S. market in The Muppet Show, and a quick search of YouTube found the video for us. Enjoy.

David Pogue just posted a great list of tech tips for the basic computer user. The only one I would have added would be the key-commands for a screen grab. Here are a few highlights:

Have you ever entered content into a wiki using the Wikitext markup language? Wikitext was created with the goal of being simpler to write than HTML. That may be so, but that still doesn't make it easy, especially the first time you try to use it, and especially if you're a non-technical user. So what should you do if you want your user base, all of whom are decidedly not technical, to actually start using the wiki you created for them instead of ignoring it because they don't want to bother learning a markup language themselves?

That's the question we had to ask ourselves at work as we configured a wiki for our sales team, who, while a nice bunch of folks, isn't going to learn the wikitext markup specification just to make us in the operations team feel happy. Luckily, we found a better way to let sales enter content content into our wiki.