Simeon Says

As I put together my presentation for the COWPU last week, I kept a text file open and kept a list of all the URL’s I thought people might like to have, or that I might mention in my presentation. I wanted to post those here for everyone.

Ruby Installation
Win - http://rubyinstaller.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl
Mac - http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby_rails_lighttpd_mysql_tiger?status=301
Linux - If you are running linux you damn well better know how to do this

Rails Setup
Install Ruby
Install RubyGems
Install Rake `gem install –include-dependencies rake`
Install Rails `gem install –include-dependencies rails`
Create new site `rails sitename`

Projects
AS Project http://code.google.com/p/asproject/
CG Gen http://code.google.com/p/cairngorm-rails-generator/
WebOrb http://themidnightcoders.com/weborb/rubyonrails/index.htm
WebOrb Plugin ruby script/plugin install http://themidnightcoders.net:8089/svn/weborb
RubyAmf http://wiki.rubyamf.org/wiki/show/HomePage
Ruby Gems http://docs.rubygems.org/

More Information
Ruby - http://rubycentral.com/index.html
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
http://www.zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html

Rails - http://www.rubyonrails.org/
Article on Dynamic Languages - http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/04/16/16FEscripting_1.html
Ruby Online: http://tryruby.hobix.com/
New to Programming: http://hacketyhack.net/

I am gonna be on the road the latter half of the next 2 weeks. Tomorrow I am taking the family to Bend Oregon for the weekend. I had the opportunity to present for the (COWPU) this month, and decided to take the family on a little getaway. I am really excited to go to Bend because I have only passed through and never spent any time there. I will be presenting on “Flex with Ruby” tomorrow night. You can find the details of the meeting here.

Then I will be home for a couple days before I fly out to CF.Objective! I will be presenting on Fusebox at this conference. If you have not yet booked this conf its not too late. I promise you wont regret it.

And although its a CF conference if you want to know more about Ruby on Rails and Flex feel free to ping me at the Conference

Boy, I started off this month blogging strong. It didnt take long for me to fall into my normal routine though. Its been a good month although it buzzed by much too fast.

I wanted to take a second to make sure I shared with the world a little bit of good news. I found someone to fill the vacant position here at Business Transitions. I am very happy to announce that Doug Reynolds has decided to join our team. Doug and have known each other for a couple years through our local ColdFusion User Group and when the job opened up he was the first person I thought of.

I really look forward to working with Doug and I look forward to seeing what he thinks of his new job on his blog So head on over and make sure you get to know Doug. Drop him a congrats (or condolences) on his post to welcome him into the community at large.

I am gonna take some time to write about how bad my experience with AIT.com has been but for now I think its much more important to document the good things in life.

I finished successfully setting up ColdFusion MX 7 running on Centos 4.4 this morning. The server is running great. I actually had an incredible guide on this jouney as Steven Erat has done a breezo of installing CF on RHEL 4. For those who dont know, Centos is a recompilation of the linux source provided by a popular US linux distribution. So the setup on these to linux distributions is actually identical.

In Steven’s presentation he outlined all the pitfalls of the standard installation. Because I am running this on a dedicated server that is hosted remotely, I could not get the source from the DVD as his instructions mention. This is in response to fixing the “Graphing Service” error for systems not running an X interface. But because centos uses yum I was able to get the missing lib very easily.

yum install xorg-x11-deprecated-libs

After my install was complete I ran into a couple other small issues that took some time to sort out. The first of which as that starting ColdFusion took on average 350 seconds. This is not a sad server. I expected better. I was also not able to connect to cf when using wsconfig to set up apache. After a couple days of troubleshooting I did a search on the slow cf startup time problem and found this Adobe technote. To paraphrase the technote, the problem is that the name of the server was aliased to the public ip address of the machine. This was forcing local traffic through the firewall which blocked all but the essential ports. Once I made a small change in /etc/hosts to have the server name reference localhost, all my other issues went away. ColdFusion now starts up in under 10 seconds usually.

I just wanted to post my notes here in case somebody else runs into this in the future. Big thanks to Steven Erat for posting his guide for the installation.

I am having one hell of a morning. I need to get away from AIT.com dedicated hosting as quick as possible. I am looking at Cari.net . All there servers run in 64bit mode, which I read the technotes and CF doesnt really like that much. I know I can run a 32bit jvm and have a chance. I was just curious if anyone out there is actually doing that.

* Is anyone using cari.net? Good News? Bad News?

* Anyone running Centos x86_64 with ColdFusion 7?

Please let me know about any comments you may have on this.

I need some help. I have started going to the gym again and I need to have a new workout soundtrack. What music gets you fired up? Makes you wanna dance? Makes you wanna code?

Post your comments here so I can get fired up too

Ryan Stewart and I go on and on about this topic. But there is a heavy trend that I am seeing. Everyday I see more and more developers switching to macs. Now I understand that the number that switch still have no significance in terms of the percentage of windows computers out there, but that doesnt bother me. Because this trend is starting just like all the others, that is it starts with the geeks and the filters to their people. Its like broadband internet. I got it because it made a difference in my life. When I got it most of my family and friends didnt even have dial up yet. And then more of them got on the internet because it allowed them certain niceties. Maybe it was seeing pictures of friends. Maybe it was checking sport headlines. Maybe it was to email old friends. Who knows, but now they all have internet, and not just that, they all have broadband.

I see the same thing happening again with macs. I made the switch and people asked me why. I showed them why I did things my way, and they thought about it. Then they asked how they could do it too. I have more friends on macs than pc’s these days. And when I met most of these people, none of us were using mac’s. Everyday I have someone ( non tech people ) ask me about why I use a mac. And everyday I show them the things I like about the OS. I show them how my mac works everywhere I want to go and has no problems connecting up with legacy pc networks And I dont remember when the last week went by that I didnt get an email from a friend telling me they just bought their new mac. And none of them (except ryan) have been disappointed with the switch.

As I have started doing more Ruby and Rails code I have realized I have stepped into a community where I fit in very well. So well that at the 2006 Rails conf here in portland they estimated that of the 550 attendees 90% of them were using macs. As such they thought it would be fun to give certificates to those who chose to stand against the status quo and hand out “non conformist” awards. These Non Conformist awards were given to pc users at the conference.

I am not usually one who is proud to be part of the crowd. I like to stand out and be identified. But I dont think I have ever been happier to be part of the conformist group!

I am really excited that we are less than a month from CF.Objective 2007. I started attending conferences in 2004 and have been very lucky to attend several each year since then. Last year I added the inaugural cf.objective conference to my list and I could not have been more pleased with the outcome. I was so pleased with the conference that when I budgeted my time this year CF.Objective is the only ColdFusion specific conference I chose to attend. cf.objective aims to be an “enterprise” coldfusion conference and as such the topics for presentations have a higher bar to reach. This makes for a much more interesting grouping of presentations and the crowd at the conference is all top notch. While I appreciate the other conferences decision to target ColdFusion developers at all levels, I feel my time is best spent attending sessions that really push the limits of my skills.

As with last year I am presenting at CF.Objective. My topic this year will be Fusebox related, although we are still nailing down the exact details of what that talk will cover. As a member of Team Fusebox and a fusebox user for about 7 years, I think I can really bring something to this presentation. If you have any topics or suggestions please feel free to post those here in the comments. I would love to hear them.

And remember there is still time to buy your tickets for the conf. I can not stress enough the value of conferences as a training venue. There is no possible way to get more information jammed into you head over a 3 day period than by attending cf.objective. Not to mention the networking that can be done while you rub elbows with the ColdFusion elite developers. I hope to see you there!

I have the benifit of having used SVN for a while now. And with everything I like I preach it like the end of days is coming.

I often make suggestions about how folks should set up their repositories and I have blogged about this in the past.

Recently I found a couple good articles on this so I wanted to pass those along.

http://www.brajeshwar.com/2007/subversion-best-practices-quick-notes/

delicious link

I know I do. And so in honour of CSS Naked Day ‘07 I have removed the css information from my site.

I love what using CSS and XHTML designs bring in the flexibility of our web applications. I have been promoting CSS-P and good techniques for a long time. And I am proud to be able to disable the css of my site and still have something presentable for the world.

So go ahead, I challenge you. Lets all get naked together!