Simeon Says

And amazingly enough, just today a new release of my favorite development plugin has been released.

I have actually been using this one for about 4 days, and am a huge fan of the new parsing engine. This release includes such additions as sql syntax highliting, cfc wizard, and additional browser benifits. A huge shout out to Chris Bradford and spike for their efforts in making this release happen.

I have been playing with Flex this whole week. I have the server running on my PowerBook, and I have been having so much fun.

I started out just editing files by hand. This was not a good path. So I got the trial copy of MyEclipse. MyEclipse has editors for html, css, js, xml/xsd/xsl/dtd, Database Explorer and many others. I feel that at a $29.99 per year, this is a bargain. And with CFEclipse already taking care of all my coldfusion needs, I am now set.

Anyway, back to the story. So now I at least have syntax highlighting for my mxml files. This is a bit help in sorting out my docs. But I want more. I think that code insight/tag hints can be a really great learning tool. You know the tag you are looking for is H-something but you are not sure which? So I set up the mxml.xsd file in myeclipse which allowed me to have all that. Now in addition to customizable color syntax highlighting I also have tag completion and attribute insight.

To set this up in MyEclipse, open your “Preferences”. Navigate through the tree view to MyEclpse>Editors>XML>XML Catalog. On this page Select the “New” button below the first entry box to start a User Specified Entry. In the URI file browse to the location of your mxml.xsd file. In the “Key” field put “http://www.macromedia.com/2003/mxml” (w/o quotes). The key type will auto matically switch to public id. Press “OK” and you should be ready to go.

The only other thing you may want to do is associate your .mxml files with the MyEcipse XML editor. This can be done in Preferences under Workbench>File Associations.

I am sure that Flex Builder is a great application but since I use OSX and Linux as my OS of choice, this is a great alternative. And since I am already in Eclpise for my CF work, I am set.

I’ve said it before, I love living in the Pacific Northwest. I love all the scenic features we have available to us. But I also love how the community ebraces technology. We have a huge number of big technology companies here, and we happen to be the home of the Open Source Development Labs. Last year Linus Torvalds moved here to head up the OSDL, and now our governor is backing a plan to aid the open source movement.

Welcome to the Silicon Forest. Please enjoy the rain!

This story is also being covered by slashdot, which is where my title for the post comes from

I have started playing with Flex as a tool to possibly use in the future. I have recieved my Non-Commercial license and as such started building tools for my self.

So my first forray into this vast world of mxml included calling a cfc which was in use in another app, and binding the data that it returned to a DataGrid. This was my FIRST attempt at flex, and it was wonderful. Took maybe 15 minutes, including me searching the docs for the pieces that I needed. I was so extatic. I ran from room to room with my laptop showing anyone who would look (no one cared).

So I thought to myself, what could make this cooler… Oh, A CHART! Yeah, thats what I need a chart. So I went about adding a chart to my file. Refreshed my browser loaded up the data…Datagrid got data…empty chart

So I created an array of values and I used those as my dataprovider…worked great! So obviously there was something I was missing right? RIGHT?

Found here in a post on Brandon Purcell’s site is a post about cf/flex gotchas. Guess what the first entry is? Its a note about how all calls to cf for remoting return variable names that are UPPERCASED automatically.

Yep thats right, I spent my spare brain cycles for two days, working over a problem of variable name casing. I feel so silly. But I am also so relieved to finally have my first app taken care of. Well I cant really call it an app, but my first attempt with Flex.

If you are new to Flex and planning on using cf as a back-end, I totally recommend you check out Brandon’s article.

I couldn’t help but post these pictures because I think they are sooooo funny.

I found these here and alot of people found them there from Boing Boing. But I wanted to make sure I had them for all eternity because they make me smile like nothing else.

I just wanted to post this here to see if we can attract any more people.

Greg from beercasting.com will be swinging through Portland tomorrow for another great event.

We will be getting together at the
Goose Hollow Inn about 7:30pm. So come on out and visit and make history.

We are trying to break the 18 people record, so we need to up the body count!

See you there.

As a blogger who’s rss feed is consumed by many different RSS readers, I know how this growing trend in new delivery is taking hold.

I personally use NewsMac to keep tabs on hot topics on my mac, but i am very excited to see this new product on the KDE/Linux desktop.

aKregator is a feed reader that supports RSS/RDF and Atom types of news feeds. As a standalone application the aKregator offers your standard features. However aKregator can also be embedded in Kontact (KDE Mail/PIM). I have really like the Mail app on my powerbook but I wish it had rss built in. i think it is a natural way to visit this information. It appears that they have done a very good job of this in aKregator.

Check out this article on OSdir.com for screenshots and more information.

I am sure that many folks out there do this already, but I thought I would share my revelation. Really this applies to any versioning system I imagine, but I am partial to Subversion.

When I was working on a pc, I used the remote site features of dreamweaver alot. If I had a quick update, I would make the change and push it up. Neat and clean. Now I use my mac, and although at work I have dreamweaver and can still do that, in my personal life I can not afford that luxury. Also my secondary development box is running fedora core and dreamweaver mx 2004 doesnt run under wine well. So even if i could afford it I wouldnt bother. My first work around for this ( i hate ftp) was to use rsync to push the files to the server. However my productions servers are mixed windows and linux, and I couldnt get cygwin (unix tools on windows) working on my dev server, so I wont try it on my production.

“OK, Great story. How does this apply to version control” you ask impatiently?

Well because I use subversion to manage all my development, my repository is always current. I have my repository accessable from my live servers, so to update my servers I can just run an update command. This takes my local copy, compares it to the head (newest) version in the repository, and only pulls out the differences. So updates take very nearly no time.

Added bonus to this, is that if for some reason the new code is not happy on the live server, I can just as easily revert to a previous version of the site.

As I said, many folks may do this already, but for those who dont use versioning, this could be just another push

Its been a while since I talked about my blog. Its been running on the DAO code I wrote for about a month and I have not run into any issues. So I suppose its time I release it into the wild as I said I would.

simBlog is written using Sean Corfield’s fusebox 4.1 implementation of Ray Camden’s blog.cfc. Still included in this release is blog.cfc including it methods and data validation routines and such. However I have rewritten most of the data persistence stuff, if I managed to botch something up, i take full responsibility. Ray releases his code for us to play with and I will do the same. I make no gaurentees for it, but i will incorporate any changes that others see fit to include.

The code is set up to run in the docroot of a site. Others have set it up running from a subfolder such as /blog but it requires copying a couple directories to the docroot.

Also i have only implemented the mySql portion of the dao, although it would probably only take 15 minutes or so to do the MsSql part, I just dont have a server to test that against.

So without further ado I present simBlog 0.1. Please feel to report any bugs, problems or questions to simeon at simb dot net.

Although my wife and I have only been married for 2.5 years, we are not newlyweds by any means.

Today marks the 7 year anniversary of us starting to date. I am very happy to have such a significant number under my belt. I am even more suprised that she has kept me around for so long.

So I thought it only appropriate to take a second to celebrate her to the world by saying out loud how much she means to me. This woman is the most amazing person I know. Not only is she brilliant and caring, but she is also one of the best “Home-makers” I know. Not only does she take care of me(oh lord the cooking, I was skinny once), every wednesday night she invites all of our friends over to our house and cooks them dinner too! I can not wait for us to have the opportunity to start our family and have kids because she will be an amazing mother.

I have found my soul mate in Carrie. I hope that everyone out there have the opportunity to have someone in thier life who is as incredible as my wife.

Happy Dating Anniversary Pie!