Waxing Lyrical

I officially feel like a numpty. For reasons I won't go into I was absolutely exhausted the other day and made the stupid mistake of trying to repartition my macbook pro and put bootcamp on it. Needless to say i manage to cock up the whole thing and wipe my drive.

To my credit, I only said three bad words.

I hadn't been reconnecting my external hdd as often as I should have been but still I had a number of backups using leopards Time Machine feature - and as it turned out a full system restore was incredibly easy. I just put in my leopard cd, chose to restore a time machine backup and picked the latest date - an hour or two later bob's yer wossname and my system is restored. Add to that the fact that my business email runs through gmail's domain accounts now, I used the "recent:" login feature to get back the last 30 days of my mail ( I had a backup from only 10 days ago anyway) and I've lost almost nothing!

Ok so now I'm going to be regularly keeping my external drive plugged in for backups, but the experience has made me seriously consider getting a timecapsule - it's an external hdd with wireless that can be used for seamless automated time machine backups, which I can imagine might save my bacon some time in the future.

For now I've moved my itunes library and my virtual machines onto the same external hdd so that will make sure I have it plugged in at least a few times a week, and I'll try to get into the habit of always plugging it in when I'm at a desk. In short though, Time Machine is absolutely f'ing brilliant.

The other stupid thing I did was write some blog posts. I wrote a few of them, while away at Philip island on a weekend away without internet connectivity (first time in years - it was... unsettling) I noticed the text file of these bloggages on my desktop today and felt stupid again as I realized I never got around to posting them on the actual blog... I feel a partially connected air app coming on!

Back in my hotel room after the Air 1.0 launch. Was a great event, this year is going to be a wonderful time to be a developer, especially in the Adobe space. There was a good turnout but almost none of the cf / flex people i usually see around - shame on you all ;p

If anyone hasn't gotten into air yet give it a shot - it's well worth your time and I think in the next 6 months we're going to see some massive changes in our industry.

i have made it a point over the years to keep in touch with developers I meet and offer help wherever I can. I'm not great at posting to the mailing lists because I usually get so caught up in what I'm doing that I forget to read them :)

Lots of people ping me during the day (and sometimes night) for help with cf / flex/ javascript / css etc etc, and there are a bunch of people on my list who I have asked for help with the same when I'm having a brain fart or when I'm doing something i've never done before. Some of the people on my list have spent an awful lot of time helping me on occasions, and I always try to return the favour.

The point I'm making is this - network with other developers, stay in touch and reach out when you need help. But more importantly, be ready to help someone out if they ask you a question too - this doesn't mean drop everything you're doing and do their work for them, but if you've got 5 minutes then share it. A lot of people, including experienced developers, don't realize how powerful a tool your network of tech savvy friends can be. I'll be going into more detail about this in my talk at Scotch and (hopefully) WebDU, but I just wanted to throw a quick word out to any who might be listening.

Today I was doing battle with some really appalling actionscript 1 code. I love actionscript 3.... a lovely fellow named Campbell Anderson, who has answered more than a few of my irritating as1 questions lately, has quite patiently helped me through some very weird issues and saved me a lot of time and frustration. I'll be making sure he knows he's appreciated :)

This is one of the great strengths of the cf community, and i'm finding it more and more in flex and flash too. Be generous with your time, and you'll find that when that moment comes when you really are stuck in a hole for whatever reason, you have allies on hand to help you out.

After all, many minds make light work.

Yup I'll be speaking at Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh, Scotland in june. I'm very very excited, and hopefully won't be completely boring - I'm speaking alongside a raft of the top people in our industry so a little intimidating :D Maybe I'll just get drunk before my presentation...

If you're going to Scotch I'll look forward to seeing you there!

After 8 years or so I finally got around to taking the Coldfusion developers exam this morning. I am now an Adobe Certified Advanced Coldfusion Developer and an Adobe Certified Advanced Coldfusion Trainer! So probably in 6 months time I'll be listed as such on the adobe websites...

Flex exam in jan then my trainer certs will all be complete.

Anyone out there have any experience with chemistry and/or chemical biology? I have some questions I'd like to ask you if so, so drop me an email, I could use your help :)

Believe it or not it *is* actually on topic too...

After a 6 month hiatus or so where I've been flat out working with another group and haven't had time to look at Bender, I was speaking last night with Adam Lehman and a few others who have inspired me to dig out Bender and get back into it. I want to get it working as soon as possible so the code is releasable and allows the basic features of Transfer - Mark Mandel and I also chatted about potentially using the data services included with CF to do live syncing between Transfer and Bender although not yet sure whether that's a good idea :)

Anyways - Bender is back and I'll be finishing it off and looking for testers. If anyone has requests or suggestions fire away.

Toby

CFCamp in Melbourne was brilliant. It wasn't the greatest turnout but we had a good number of high caliber people there and the talks were excellent.

I particularly liked Peter Bell's talk about DSL's and Software Product Lines - I'll definitely be following up with Peter to learn more about this, as this is exactly where I've been heading.

After the camp a bunch of us went for drinks and I ended up having some very long (and slightly inebriated) discussions with Adam Lehman of Adobe and Peter Bell. Mark Mandel piked early ;) but I got to know Adam and Peter pretty well and had a fantastic evening. Thanks to all who turned up and especially those who spoke and organized the day - it's well worth it, and hopefully we will see more of this sort of thing in the near future.

Skype has been getting worse and worse lately, with outages and constant errors, disconnections and message failures. On top of that, the company's business practices seem to be getting less and less friendly too - fortunately an alternative is now available for those of use who rely heavily on conferencing for business: Gizmo!

http://www.gizmoproject.com/screen-shots.php

I've downloaded this - works beautifully and has some nice little features that skype lacks. Gizmo doesn't have video conferencing, but for me that's less of a concern than a reliable voice conferencing app.

It looks as though we'll be getting a CFCamp in Melbourne after all, through the efforts of Mark Mandel. The downside is he's conned me into speaking :D I'm giving a half hour talk on "Enterprise development for the rest of us" - basically what it really means to be an enterprise developer and how to ramp up your career and habits to get to that level. And seeing as I'll have a captive audience I might see if I can squeeze in a magic trick or two, so if my talk totally sucks there will at least be some entertainment.

Hope to see lots of people at cfcamp melbourne!

Yes Yes Bad Blogger, I know. smack. Anyways....

I'm having a problem where i'm using a date selector in flex and selecting a date (client running on australian machines), but when its saved to the server it seems to be going in as a US date based on the current server time. How do I fix this? I've tried mucking about with the locale setting in the compiler arguments, I've tried just using CF_SQL_DATE instead of _TIMESTAMP but to no avail. If there are any readers left on this blog I'd appreciate any ideas.

I hate working with dates and regions, it's definitely on my top 5 least enjoyable things in programming.