A Day Late

I attended the Macromedia MAX conference this past week in Salt Lake City. I intended to write a few entries about the conference while I was there but never got around to it. Overall it was a good conference. I decided we really need to migrate our system to ColdFusion MX 6.1. Now that I think about it all the sessions I attended dealt with things that can only be done with MX.

Most of the sessions I went to dealt with CFC’s (coldfusion components) which were added to MX. Basically it enables object oriented programming in ColdFusion, although it’s pseudo OOP. For web purposes I think it’ll work great. ColdFusion itself is actually a procedural language. Now with the addition of CFC’s you get the benefits of OOP and procedural all in one. There are a few limitations such as single inheritance (a CFC can only extend one other CFC), although you can chain the inheritance (ie. a.cfc extends b.cfc which extends c.cfc etc…) but like I said for the web I think you can get by in most cases.

A few of the benefits I see to using CFC’s:

• Business logic can be easily seperated from from presentation logic. Currently (in 5.0) the .cfm files can become fairly large with queries, custom functions and other code embedded throughout the presentation logic. With CFC’s you can keep all your queries, custom functions, etc seperate from the cfm files. Very nice.
• EASILY deploy web services. Using CFC’s it’s possible to deploy a web service in less than 5 minutes (we actually did it in a hands on lab). Not only is it easy to create a web service it’s possible to lock the security down to individual functions within the cfc file.
• .cfc files are self documenting. By pointing a web browser to the .cfc file on the server an html file is returned with a complete description of the file and it’s available functions.
• Promote code reuse
• Makes it much easier to model real world problems (create a cfc for each entity)

I could go on and on, but I won’t. I took a few pictures during the conference. I’ll post a link to’em when I get them uploaded. Unfortunately I didn’t take my camera to the party Thursday night at the Olympic Speed Skating Oval. The food was ok (it was the type of food that’s prepared for 2500 people) but the activities and atmosphere were pretty cool. I hear next year it’ll be on the east coast, hopefully I’ll be able to go.

My server mysteriously rebooted a few days ago. I’ve checked the logs and I can’t figure out what caused it. It’s possible someone pressed the power button and put the system in a shutdown mode, I did have some nieces and nephews over that night. Still…the system wasn’t that accessible, the power button had tape blocking it which didn’t appear to be disturbed. Plus if the power button was pressed why did the system start back up. I dunno…I’m confused. A few days before the power went off for about 45 minutes and the UPS kept the server and DSL running fine. Then the next day my uptime gets put all the way back to 0 from this, oh well.

I got a flu shot today. I think this is the 6th straight year I’ve got one but this is the first time I’ve ended up with a stiff arm. It might have something to do with the fact that I spent the rest of the day sitting at a computer, keeping my arm relatively motionless. In the past I’ve always made an effort to move my arm around, today I just forgot about it. Is it worth it to get a flu shot? I dunno, the way I see it my insurance company pays for it, I can get it on campus so it takes all of 5 minutes so why not?

On another note I registered for the Macromedia MAX 2003 conference, which is in Salt Lake this year, from the 19-21 (November). We use ColdFusion a lot, so hopefully I’ll learn some good things. I can attend at least one conference each year so I thought I’d see if this one is any good. If any of you attend other conferences you’d recommend, that’d be valuable for a Web and Database Admin, let me know.

I started reading the new John Grisham book, “Bleachers“, yesterday. So far so good, but I like everything he’s written so that shouldn’t come as a surprise. That reminds me, I think the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s “Timeline” comes out soon. It’s an excellent book, but I’m still a little nervous about the movie. Crichton has a few other good books that turned out to be terrible movies (ie. Congo).

That’s all for now.

Everytime I open up my dell laptop from sleeping I can’t help but notice the bottom left corner of the screen. The fact there’s a simple button on my computer that claims to be able to “turn me off” is a little strange. Clearly whoever designed the button failed realize it’s not that easy. I’ve looked around a little, but I still haven’t found a button that claims to be able to “turn me on.” That’s just my luck, only turn offs.

I finally got around to buying Panther this week. The upgrade went smooth as can be, although I did notice my Emacs for Aqua isn’t working anymore, I’ll have to look at that. I really haven’t noticed a whole lot of differences, but the stuff I have noticed is good. I love the Expose. Open window management was always something that bugged me about OS X. I usually have quite a few windows open and switching between them was cumbersome sometimes. The F9 key works nicely. I wonder if it’d be possible to create a hotkey on the status bar to activate expose instead?

One thing I wish Apple would implement is a virtual desktop switching tool. That’s one thing I love about my Red Hat machine, the virtual desktops. There’s an open source tool available at sourceforge, but it doesn’t seem to work with Panther properly. Anyway, I think it’d be a nice addition and I’m a little surprised Apple hasn’t already implemented it.

Anyway, so far I’m happy with the upgrade.