Simeon Says

I just had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Ben Forta and Tim
Buntel during the keynote address for CFUNITED!  I had the
pleasure of confirming Macromedia’s support of our efforts and their
intentions of lending support to the project in the future.

Along with that announcement i am pleased to announce the avaiailability of the new CFEclipse
web site!  The site may not have much there yet but in the near
future it will be the home of all information regarding CFEclipse.

And as if that was not enough, we are also pleased to announce our
intention of releasing the next stable build of CFE.  I am hoping
this will come later this week, but we are at the mercy of our
developers time on that.

With that in mind its important to emphasize that CFE is a community
project.  Build for CF developers by CF developers.  And the
project always needs more help.  Not just java developers, but we
have lots of tasks for users of all skills.  From documentation to
howto’s, from captivate tutorials to speading the word.  For more
information on contributing to the project, please check out the note
on the home page of the new CFEclipse website.

And lastly, this project only exists because of the support of the
community.  So it is very important to say thanks for using
CFE!  To start my announcement I asked how many people had heard
of CFE.  I would say more than 3/4 of the audience raised their
hands.  I followed that up with asking how many people use CFE as
thier primary development environment.  I would say almost half
the audience had thier hands up.  In fact many of them before I
fisnished the question!

So Thanks you very very VERY much to our users and Community.

i arrived very well after a long day of flying.  The Using the
metro was totally the way to go.  From Regan Airport it was like
$3 to get here and only took like half an hour.  Way easier than
trying to drive.

Anyway, upon arrival i hooked up with Damon Gentry (fellow Portlander)
and we had dinner at PF Changs.  Damon told me he had seen Ben
Forta earlier in the night but while i was around, I didnt see
anybody.  Well not "not anybody" on my way out to Damon’s car we
bumped into liz.  We all know liz is the real brains behind this
whole conference anyway, so I made sure to be real nice

I feel silly saying I have to go to bed now, because its only 8:30 on
the west coast. but since I have to get up on the east coast I figure I
better try anyway.

Talk to you all tomorrow.

I am currently sitting at the  Portland Airport waiting to
board my plane which will take me to DC.  I still cant get over
how cool it is that the Portland Airport has free wifi!

Anyway, I am looking forward to having so much fun this week. 
CFUN 04 was the first conference I had ever attended and i am so fired
up to be back this year.  I hope to run into lots of cool people
and learn a ton.

Talk to you all there!

In an annoucment today
Google CEO confirmed they are planning to create a payment
system.  They seem to stress this system would not be in direct
competition with paypal because it will not focus person to person
payments, and will not hold the monies between transactions.

On the other side of this I recently found out that paypal is now offering an All-in-one payment solution. 
This new solution allows you to use not only paypal users for payment,
but to actually accept credit cards and process them via paypal.

For my hosting clients I currently use Paypal’s Subscription service to
do the monthly payments.  On a few occasions I have had to help
clients set up paypal accounts because they did not already have
one.  This service would allow me to process real credit cards for
those customers, without requireing me to set up a merchant account and
all the other steps that are required for such things with services
like payflow and authorize.net.

In truth I am not sure that this is something I will go after because
part of the benifit of paypal is that they are responsible for all the
personal and banking information of thier clients.  Although I
have built many ecommerce sites for clients, for my small consulting
business I dont think I care to take on those additional risks.

Anybody else have thoughts on such things?  Anybody hate using
paypal?  I think its great to not have to give out my credit
information to everyone.  I even buy my domain names with
godaddy.com using my paypal account.

Ok, I have to say it….  I have never actually used a
webservice.  OK, there it is.  I said it.  Please
forgive me.

To justify myself, my employer has 1 site on cf6 and just recently has
one hosted on cf7, and I maintain a bunch of sites on a cf5
server.  So I have not had much occasion to need to talk between
the sites.  However that all changed today and I got right into it.

However I found out quite quckly that there can be more to this than
meets the eye.  After writing up a cute little component and
checking that I could hit it form the url and pass in the method, as
well as enusing that it sent out proper wsdl when asked, I called my
webservice with cfinvoke.

coldfusion.jsp.CompilationFailedException: Errors reported by Java
compiler: /opt/coldfusionmx7/runtime/bin/jikesw: error while loading
shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: cannot open shared object
file: No such file or directory .

I am not sure if such dependencies exist on windows but with cf 6 and 7
on linux you must have the compat-libstdc++ package installed.  On
fedora core 1 that was as easy as `yum install compat-libstdc++` and it
was taken care of.

But just in case I am not the last person on earth to cross this problem, I thought I would post about it.

I took the weekend off.  I dont think I picked up my laptop
almost at all.  It was a very odd feeling.  My wife and I
volunteered at the Tigard Festival of Balloons this past weekend. 
Starting on Thursday and ending Sundday we got up at 4am so we be to
the park by 5:30 to launch the balloons.  Every morning the alarm
would go off and we would swear we would never do this again.  And
then we would get to the event and get to work and feel the amazing
sense of accomplishment that goes with watching a wicker basket with
people float away under the huge envelope filled with Hot air.  By
8am everyday we were done and couldnt wait for the next day to get to
do it again.

As if all that was not enough, Saturday was my 28th birthday.  And on
saturday, not only did I get to help launch the balloon, I also
flew.  I had my first hot air balloon ride, and it was
amazing.  It was so fun to look at the area I live in from that
view.  It puts a whole new perspective on things.

And as if that was not enough to make my birthday complete, my
wonderful wife got me an Ipod.  I know that her decision to do
this was largly in part of the comments to my earlier post, and so I
thank you all for your input.  And I thank my wifey for my shiny
new 60gb Ipod Photo.

To wrap up a wonderful day my dad come up and we went to the ballon
festival’s evening events.  Its called the glow and if you look at
the pictures my wife took, you wont have to guess why.  The next
day was fathers day and my dad got up with us to go and launch the
balloons.  He had a great time and it was nice to hang out with
him.

Not a technical post, but just for the faithful tech readers who made
it this far into my personal post, Spike and I had dinner last night
and did some planning for the CFEclipse project.  Look for some
new stuff coming your way very soon on that front.

SEO is not really something I focus on, but I consider myself a jack of
all trades so I try to keep up on the news.  I consider SEO a
black art that should only be talked about on stormy nights while
people dance around the fire.

All of that aside, the good people at google have filed Patent
Application 20050071741.  And the benifit of such and event for us
is that they must describe the process by which they rank our
sites.  This information includes tidbits such as  the lenght
of time that the domain has been registered is a consideration, as well
they have put extra emphasis on not ranking spammers.

Although In truth, there is nothing really shocking.  If you have
good content that gets updated regularly, and others link to you
because they recognize you have quality content, then you are pretty
safe to begin with

Following in Ben Forta’s
footsteps my site has a new favicon.  I was showing a co worker
Bens new favicon and later that day they sent over this one for me.

I didnt want to be rude so I elected to put it up on the site.  Now you guys can remember me always

Thats right this thursday only see Rob Rohan present on
Neuromancer.  Neuromancer is a set of libraries Rob wrote to make
javascrip remoting (ajax type stuff) easier.

So come on out.  Meeting starts at 6pm.  Networking and Pizza at 5:30pm.

Check out the PDX CFUG site for directions.

SEE YOU THERE!

PS. Only 3 more meetings until we
give raffle off our copy of cfmx7!  Every meeting you attend
between now and then gets you another entry!  Bring someone new
and get 5 additional entries! 

I decided today that its time I accept fate and pick up an
ipod.  I have a shuffle (that my wife is excited to take on) but I
am really having a problem picking what Ipod I want.  Apple has
done an amazing job pricing the upgrades very well,  to the point
that I had the 60 GB photo Ipod in my hand today when I started looking
at mini’s.

So as best as i can tell, I am the last person on the planet to pick up
a hd Ipod, and i want to hear some feedback from you all.

My thought process goes like this, and I need someone to help me
rationalize the purchase.  I like my shuffle but i dont like not
being able to pick the songs that are being played.  So this
brings me to want a mp3 player with a screen, so I can select the songs
and such things.  Currently I only have a couple gigs of
mp3’s  on my computer, but I have a few hundred cd’s in the
garage.  So in truth I could get away with having a mini. 
But one of the pulls of the Ipods with hard drives is using it as a
portable drive.  So with that being the case, it makes sense that
i should get a bigger one than the 4gb available on the mini. So then I
look at the 6gb mini, because its only $50 more.  But if I go to
the 6gb, why would I not want to go for over 3 times the space for just
$50 more.  And under that rational I found my self holding the
60gb Ipod Photo because its only $50 more than the 30gb photo which is
only $50 more than that silly b&w 20gb.  How the hell did I
get to considering spending $449 on a stupid mp3 player? I can’t
believe I would even consider it, but I am very close.

So anyway, I need some help.  Does anybody have the Photo? 
Do you like it?  Does anybody who bought the smaller Ipod ever
wish they bough a bigger one?  How about the other way, bought the
big one and wish you had kept the cash and gotten a smaller one?

Internet I need you!