Simeon Says

Ok, I got up at 3am so I can catch my 5:30 flight. I will be in DC around 4pm. I have never flown US Airways before and I have to say I was very disappointed with the long lines at the checkin.

But other than that, one stop in pheonix will put me in DC. I am very excited to get there. There are many people who I count as good friends who I only get to see at conferences. This year there are even a couple coming from over the pond. Unfortunatly there a couple people i will be missing. Jared and Doug specifically. But i wont let that get me down I will just have to drink a beer or 2 for them.

Anyway, if you are going to be at CFUNITED feel free to drop me a line. If you are from portland I would love to have a chat with you about our Adobe User Group. And if you feel the need, I am doing the “CFEclipse, a guided tour” on thursday afternoon. this talk is an intro to CFE from the how do I get it and why do I want it. If you are already a user, this is not really for you. I have been known to through people out of my session (go learn something darn it!). We will cover at the end a little of what is coming down the pipe. If you are already a CFE user and want to see whats coming hit up Mark Drew (he is one of the folks coming from the other side of the pond) as he is the lead developer on the project and the mostly likely candidate to have the new stuff running.

At any rate, I will be blogging throughout the conf, so check in here for updates.

Ok, thanks to Erki for pointing out the script for the install of the samples database. I used that to set up a database i could use with the contact manager application.

I promptly started getting errors because the names of the fields are a bit different for the CF version of the contact manager application. But looking in the ContactDAO.cfc supplied in the download from labs.adobe.com I was able to sort that out.

So if you are a using flex on a platform that doesnt support access databases, and you would like to use the Contact Manager sample application to test the data syncronization of Flex Data Services and ColdFusion, you can use the sql below to set up a mysql database.


CREATE TABLE `Contact` (
`contactId` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`firstName` varchar(40) NOT NULL default ',
`lastName` varchar(40) NOT NULL default ',
`address` varchar(40) default ',
`city` varchar(40) default ',
`state` varchar(5) default ',
`zip` varchar(10) default ',
`phone` varchar(40) default ',
PRIMARY KEY (`contactId`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

This is something I have been thinking about for a while, and the truth is that I have some random thoughts about this, so it’s going to be hard for me to make a cohesive post.

As I start this post its 8am here in Portland. I have been up since 5:30AM. Its Saturday morning! Only 1 reason… World Cup Soccer! I just finished watching the England vs. Paraguay match. It wasn’t an amazing match, it was not particularly high scoring ( not like the Germany vs. Costa Rica game, but when is there ever a game like that ) but its the first soccer game I have gotten to watch in High Definition on my TV. Although I only have my local broadcast channels in HD, all of the games of this 2006 World Cup are being broadcast in HD. I think that is amazing. But that is not why I think soccer will change the world. (see I already got sidetracked).

Here in Portland, OR we have a NBA basketball team. I don’t respect them enough to name them in this post. I don’t by tickets to the games, the only time I go is when I can get seats in someone’s box. I am forever and constantly disgusted by the attitude and performance of our players, on the court and in their personal lives. They play the game for ridiculous sums of money, and I honestly believe that for most of them it’s the only reason they play. Long ago they lost the drive and love of the game. When the game is over they all hurry to the locker rooms, and then get in their expensive cars and retreat to their mansions. It’s a very rare occasion when you see them interact with the crowd (unless starting a fight), autographs are almost impossible because they would rather sell merchandise that they have signed. The basketball players in Portland are worthless.

Here in Portland we also have a soccer team. The Portland Timbers. I pay to go to most home games. I love soccer. I love it more than any other sport. So it’s not surprising at all that I buy tickets to the Timbers but i wont for our basketball team. This last weekend we had our first home game against the Seattle Sounders ( our rivals) and I had plans to go. The morning of the game we were headed to my young nephews T-Ball game. While getting ready to go I realized it had been a while since I had a chance to spend some time with the older brother of my young nephew. I asked my wife if she thought it would be ok if we tried to kid-nap him. I made plans to pick him up after the t-ball game and bring him to our house to spend the night. I wanted to take him to the soccer game. My nephew is a traditional sports player, Football, Basketball and Baseball, just like his dad, his uncles (except me) and his grandfathers. He played soccer when he was younger but as he grew up it became more appropriate for him to start practicing football (American not Futball). Anyway, it was at this game that the real epiphany about soccer happened for me. It was a great game, we shouted for out team. We shouted at the refs. We boo’ed the other team. It was great. And for the first time his life I saw my nephew act truly passionate about something. He had so much fun. And I think I know why it meant so much. We didn’t just watch the players in this game and cheer for them; we had our hearts in that game as much as the players did. And the players knew it. Every time they scored a goal they ran the perimeter of the field and did high-fives with the fans they could reach. If you are not a soccer fan I think its important for you to know that a soccer field is as long as a football field including the end zones, and wider by 150%. And they ran that distance celebrating their triumph with their fans. We scored 3 goals that game.

When the game was over and the Seattle sounders made their way off the field, the timbers gathered up in the middle of the field. After a quick talk with each other, they then procedded to walk another lap around the stadium. This time as they walked the clapped. The Portland Timbers took a lap around the field to cheer their fans for supporting them so well through the game. They did not flee the field and hurry away from the venue. They stayed and made sure that everyone at the game knew that they appreciated them for coming out and supporting them. I thought this was amazing. But the part that made it really meaningful for me, is that my nephew noticed. After coming out and enjoying this game with me, he got to experience what its like to be appreciated as a fan by a player. It was great and I feel blessed to have gotten to share that with him.

This morning after the Germany vs. Paraguay game was over I saw another neat thing. When this game was over the players from the two teams went around and shook hands and shared hugs with the members of the other teams. It was this act that prompted me to write this post. Seeing that and remembering the experience my nephew and I got to share last weekend, made me want to post here about how much I love this game.

I am tivo-ing all the games. My family rarely watches TV live. We always skip commercials. I have found however that during the soccer games, i tend to watch commercials. I love the messages they send. For instance (this is a commercial so keep your grain of salt handy) the Gold Coast has been in civil war for like 20 years. This world cup is the first one they have qualified for. The head of their government called a truce between the 2 sides of the war, because a country divided makes for poor fans. In another of the commercials they show us scenes of people (adults and children) all over the world in small groups juggling and passing the soccer ball.

The only real message that I have pulled from all these commercials is this. Even though we are all different, different countries, different religions, and different colors of skin. We all have a common tie. We all grew up playing soccer. For some of the older generations in the US this may not have been the case, but I believe this has changed in the current day. Soccer is a competitive sport. But I see more sportsmanship and camaraderie between opponents in this game, than I do between team mates in most other US sports.

And although there is certainly the possibility that as Soccer becomes more popular in the US, it will become just as corrupt, and the players as controversial as the other American sports, I choose to hope for another outcome. I hope that the ideals taught through soccer will help to make the coming generations more tolerant of the differences in people. I hold out hope that although we may compete in many of the things we do, in the end we are people and that we can appreciate each other for that.

Someone posted a question over on http://flexcf.com today asking for help with the Contact Manager app. It made me realize I had not played with this application yet. I went through all the steps to set it up until I had to set up the dsn for the database. The database included in the download is an access db. And on my mac that does me very little good.

I thought I had seen someone post a mysql version of the database but after googling and using the search on mxna, I came up dry.

Anybody got a mysql version of that database?

Its Official word from adobe has been released on Adobe Max 2006!

From the Adobe Site:
When: October 23-26, 2006
Where: The Venetian, Las Vegas, Nevada

So looks like we will be contregating West Coast-ish 2 years in a row! Lucky us.

Make your plans… I will see you there!

I have been following the mail lists and seeing alot of folks comment that the eclipse auto install site for CFEclipse (http://cfeclipse.org/update/) has been down. The CFEclipse Crew had to migrate servers not to long ago, and this problem seems to have cropped up then. Although we are still not entirely sure what the source of the problem is, I have been able to get it working again.

At this point I have only restored the settings for the current stable 1.2.0 release. I dont think many folks are using the older releases any more. Hopefully we will soon have the BER nighly builds added to that configuration.

At any rate, for those of you that have been waiting please feel free to install CFE and continue with your happy coding days

Just a note because my assumtions were wrong. I had the occasion to need to put a site together fast. I ran out of time at work so I tried to set up my site on my mac for testing. Everything worked great until I got to the part where I was testing the payment processing screens. I have set up payflow on several occasions so I didnt even think about it being on my mac. But when I tried to test the payment gateway I got back and error with an empty string.

I decided to check the release notes, and it doesnt note that this has been tested on “Windows NT, Windows2000 and Linux platforms” so I guess I should have known. However it also says “Note: this tag does not run under ColdFusion v4.0 or earlier or on ColdFusion MX v6.0 ” which we all know to be untrue at this point ( I have had it running on 6.x and 7.x servers).

Anyway, just a note to make sure you dont plan to deploy on a OS X box for production using PayFlowPro. And if you develop on a mac, make sure you have a testing environment that is supported.

Well its a great day! We are one step closer to the 1.0 release of ColdSpring.

The ColdSpring team have released ColdSpring RC1 of this great framework and i encourage everyone to update their local copies. There are quite a few new things in here (not if you have been using the BER CVS release) including factory-method/factory-bean support and improved support for remote proxy factories.

Lots of fun! Hats off to the ColdSpring Team!

I cant say that I have improved my site much, but I have upgraded alot of stuff. The first thing most will notice is the new layout. I like it and i found the design on Open Source Web Design site. Beyond that I have upgraded my blog to BlogCFC 5. And the CMS that the rest of my site uses is now running on Fusebox 5 beta 2 code. The CMS is also tied to gether using the most recent release of ColdSpring from CVS.

I have some neat things I should be adding to the mix soon, but this will have to do for now And if you are bored, be sure to check out my mug on my home page.