Coder's Revolution - Technology

ColdFusion's Heartbeat

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:50:00 -0500

I jogged down the stairs, one arm over my head, as I pulled my coat on a sleeve at a time. Fishing the car keys out of my pocket with one hand, I leaned over my computer to tap in my E-mail password with the other. "Wow, 41 unread messages in the CF-Talk folder," I thought. "There must be a hot new topic on the list today." With a click I watched the new thread flow in. "Why i fear ColdFusion is on its last legs" "Oh Geez," I sighed, "Please not with this again!" There wasn't time to read all that right then. I'd have to catch up on this one later in the day when my absorption rate was higher. [More]

Two Tips For Making Sure Your Mail Gets Sent

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:31:00 -0500

A lot of you have web servers that double as mail servers to relay out mail from your ColdFusion applications. Even if you have a separate server that handles your mail relay, this post should still be helpful. The more and more that spam proliferates on the Internet, the more antsy ISPs get about blocking mail. There are a litany of reasons an ISP might reject mail from your server. GoDaddy has been one of the most annoying companies to deal with. There are two things I had to fix on my mail server before they would accept mail from my server. Reverse DNS and Helo host name. [More]

Google Wave Invites

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:15:00 -0500

I had 16 Google Wave Invites show up in my Wave inbox today. If you've been wanting to try out Google Wave, the bidding starts at $5.00. OK, just kidding-- shoot me a message and I'll invite you if I have any left. :) 11/30 UPDATE: I'm all out of invites now, but I was able to hit everyone that asked so far. Remember it often takes several days to get the E-mail from Google. Enjoy!

A Look Into ColdFusion's Future (Again) Sully? Link? Storm?

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:24:00 -0500

Well, now that ColdFusion 9 is officially out the door (it's still hard to believe), have you thought about what you want to ask Santa for CF10? We're going to double digits, baby-- so it'd better be good! Yeah, I know-- who do I think I am? Honestly, I still feel like a kid after Christmas with enough new toys to keep me busy for a while. Even so, I can't help but wonder what's in store. Once again, I have found clues in Adobe's own words via the latest version of the ColdFusion Evangelism Kit. [More]

So, I Wrote My First "Hello World" Android App...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:04:00 -0500

My friend John dreams 3 or 4 get-rich schemes every week. Most of them involve technology, and he generally tries to talk me into helping him with them. He can never be dissuaded from the belief that each of his brainstorms are nothing short of an entrepreneurial pot of gold. These revelations, of course, come despite the fact that he has virtually no programming experience and even less start-up capital. Most of his recent ideas have all been centered around the new Google Android phones and the ability to write apps for them. After listening to him babble about Android app development for several weeks straight, I decided to download the Android SDK and play around with it. [More]

Adam Lehman On The Future Of CF: Do You Want A Revolution?

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:36:00 -0500

My busy schedule has kept me away from the blogoshpere the past couple months. I had heard of Adobe's layoffs but I was kind of depressed for a bit last night when I read that they had affected Jason Delmore, former Product Manager of CF. What a blow to the community that was-- and I just had the pleasure of meeting Jason at Adobe Max this year. I'm feeling better now though. As I continued reading, I went on to see that Adam Lehman, who followed in Ben F's footsteps as ColdFusion Evangelist, has stepped up into the role of CF Product Manger. I absolutely loved what he said on his blog. What hit home to me was when he likened the advance of CF to a Revolution. [More]

Do You Know Your OO Acronyms?

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 07:15:00 -0500

Lately I've noticed how impossible it is to talk about Object Oriented Programming without peppering your conversations with scholarly-sounding acronyms. I don't know if we programmers just like to sound smart or if we see it as part of a special club of sorts. As my good friend Anonymous once said, "If it is Computer Oriented and if it doesn't have an Acronym, then it doesn't exist" That being said, here is a list I comprised of acronyms that are related to OO or have come up recently in blogs about OO. See how many you can identify, and comment with any additional ones you think of. [More]

Why can't we all just get along?

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 05:53:00 -0500

Can anyone tell me why there is no widely adopted protocol for instant Messaging software? Every web browser and web server use HTTP. Want to transfer files with your favorite FTP client? No problem, they all use the same protocol. What about sending and receiving E-mails? There's always POP3 and SMTP. Telnet and SSH are the same story. Sure, there's some different flavors, but most all clients are interchangeable. Why then, must I sign up for AIM, Yahoo, Skype, ICQ, and MSN just to keep in touch with everybody? Trillian sure helps, but I still have to have all those accounts. Why? Why can't we all just get along?

OO Design Patterns and IBO

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:29:00 -0500

If you missed it, Jeff Chastain put up a very interesting post over at Alagad's Blog. Also good was the "spirited" discussion that followed between Barney and Peter Bell. I don't know how I feel about all of it, but the entire thing is very fascinating. [More]

Radio doesn't Shack like it used to

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:57:00 -0500

I was working on a friend's multi-meter today and found myself needing to run to RadioShack. I'd rather not elaborate why I needed to fix my friend's multi-meter. It involves a test lead in the Ohms plug, 120 Volts AC, 2 blown fuses, 1 smoked capacitor and me. Suffice it to say I set out to fetch a new ceramic capacitor with radial leads, measuring 82 pico farads that wasn't shorted out. [More]

My first hour on the World Wide Web

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:09:00 -0500

Today over lunch I was recounting my first hour on the World Wide Web. I was in middle school (I'm 28 now) and we had visited a friend's house. He told me if I was good he would give me one free hour on The Web. [More]

My analysis of the SQL injection zombies

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 01:46:00 -0500

So as the SQL injection attacks have rained down on my server for the past few days, my logs have been steadily filling up with data about the requests. Frankly, the data probably can't be trusted, it's all totally un-scientific, and doesn't really lead me any closer to the people responsible for the attacks. Regardless, I think it's pretty interesting. I've compiled some graphs and stats here. [More]

Watch those relative URLs with SES

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 03:21:00 -0500

I love infinite loops. They're sort of the black hole of programming. No one really knows what you code does when it reaches the last iteration of an infinite loop, but I speculate it has something to do with String Theory and unbounded time and space increasing proportionately to the rate of dense matter being compressed by gravitational forces so strong even light can't escape. Well, that's what I came up with off the top of my head anyway. Speaking of infinite loops, I found one happening on my server today. [More]

Trusted Source? DNS Cache Poisoning

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:09:00 -0500

So, I assume you've heard the latest buzz about DNS Cache Poisoning and the subsequently released patches. It's rather interesting, and a bit unnerving that the "patch" for now simply makes the exploit harder to pull off-- not impossible. I guess that's basically because the patch simply makes name server requests more randomized. Anything more would require an overhaul to the DNS protocol itself. [More]

Tower of Babel: Where did all the languages come from?

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 01:34:00 -0500

In the beginning was assembly, and it was with the programmer and it was good. Through it all programs that have been made were written, without it no programs were written. The compiler shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. Then came a design pattern sent by Alan Kay, its name was OOP. The other day, someone asked me a really dumb question. "Why are there so many programming languages? Why don't you just all use one?" Ok, that was two questions, and they aren't really dumb, but I felt kinda' dumb trying to answer them. [More]