Jared Rypka-Hauer, Lead ColdFusion Developer, Minneapolis, MN
Their cable service is great too, if not as good as the broadband. My issue with the cable service is mostly that I don't like the menus, and I don't like the organization of the channels. DirecTV has great organization, with like channels grouped together. Very nice. But still, it's good service.
The phone, on the other hand, is horrid. The phone service reminds me of cell phone service from 10 years ago. Dropped calls, broken connections, digital distortion that makes me sound like the Atomic Powered Robot when I'm talking to people. I haven't had this much trouble with phones since, well, I haven't had this much trouble with phones.
But before I go all "I HATE COMCAST" (which I know is fairly common these days anyway), I wanted to find out if I'm alone or if there are others that have as much trouble as I do with Comcast.
Am I?
Laterz...
I've been observing this unfolding bit of community politic the last couple of days and I have to say, it's been fascinating. Adobe's taking a harder-line stance than Macromedia did (and by all rights should be). Sys-Con is taking their typical in-your-face attitude that led them to put auto-play ads in their magazine web pages in the first place.
I started hating Sys-Con about 3 or 4 years ago... mostly because their eZine versions of their magazines were rude (who would choose to be rude to customers?!?) and I could never get them to correctly send me a print magazine. They stole content from their own subscribers' blogs (long story, but it's true), they offered press passes to Sys-Con conferences with the proviso that any written pieces were the sole property of Sys-Con to be published exclusively in Sys-Con events... even extending these invitations to writers from other magazines! Their behavior has been offensive at best an unethical and even illegal at worst, not to mention irregular and spastic. The exact legalities of their behavior aren't the issue here, though... the fact that they've been making enemies in the ColdFusion community is. The fact that they've been sloppy and careless, and haven't had much to offer the community for years is.
Did I mention that I've tried to subscribe and the subscription process never worked? I couldn't subscribe. So I asked for a subscription and was told I could get comped one, which never showed up either. BUT, I did receive a free subscription to Java Developers Journal, which I never asked for, on an intermittent basis from 2004 to 2006. Then I asked someone at Sys-Con to switch my subscription, since I was getting a free magazine anyway, from JDJ to CFDJ. What happened? I started getting nothing at all, even after I was assured that the change had been made and everything was fine.
Talk about confusing.
So it's no wonder people won't miss them. Granted, I'm sure many will... but the fact that, once Adobe scaled back their support because the magazine was of ever smaller value to them, they dropped Adobe's server-side technology and moved directly to Microsoft's client side technology has to be seen as exactly what it is: a slap in the face. A direct and aggressive slam... vindictive and, as Ben Forta put it, "sour grapes".
And now they're blaming Adobe for this? I've talked to Jeremy Geelan in the past, and I've heard rumors that he could be many things, vindictive among them, but this is the first time I've seen actual, visible evidence of it. This isn't just a parting of the ways, this is a declaration of war on the part of a third-rate, small-potatoes operation that never could get their ducks in a row and do a good job at their only job: publishing information and distributing that information to the intended audience.
So on the one hand we have the ColdFusion community and Adobe, and on the other hand we have a third-rate publishing house with irrational and unstable leadership... it's sad, but it's not disappointing.
CFDJ is dead. Finally.
I positively hate it.
Part of it is my fault. In fact, it's probably entirely my fault. I should have investigated the ability of the thing to synch with OSX before I bought it. That is definitely my fault. I should have really done a LOT more investigation before I bought it. But it was new. It was cool. I thought (silly me) that it would make me hip, fashionable, and more productive.
Yep. I'm a dolt.
As for the Sidekick, it's ugly. The phone has horrible audio.
The Bluetooth is so crippled that... well the only profile enabled is the headset. 'Nuff said.
The interface is ungainly and the "track ball" is stupid. It's too sensitive and there's no sensitivity control as you'd expect to find for any other spherical or photo-optic input.
If you add someone to the phone book from the call log you have to go to the phone book and edit them to mark a phone number as a mobile phone, a work phone, a home phone, etc. It's so backwards that using it makes me irritated, not happy.
I want my iPhone. Alas, I just (well, 2 months ago) blew $350 on something I hate. I am indeed an idiot.
Can you believe it doesn't have a calculator??? A full QWERTY keyboard, lots of horsepower, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, browser (which is another piece of crap), and the world most worthless camera... I can't believe they even released it with this camera. I have had $50 cheapie digital cameras that worked better than this.
No video capabilities.
It's one of the most unhappy purchases I've ever made.
And it's all my own damned fault.
/whine
Laterz...
FCKEditor support for Safari! It's almost here!
This is an excellent thing, and very good news for those of us whose favorite browser isn't based on Gecko or IE. It also means good things for supporting FCKEditor in AIR applications. Now THAT is good news.
A couple quick notes on things:
- The WebKit Nightlies are basically Mac .app files that use the Safari 3 .app's innards but the WebKit framework that comes in the download. What you get in the download is simply a gold-rimmed Safari icon that you double-click and run. It doesn't replace the WebKit framework on your system, doesn't require any installation, and doesn't look any different than Safari 3, other than the icon having a gold rim. Testing couldn't be easier.
- Safari 2 has some issues with WebKit nightlies, so for the best experience, I recommend installing the Safari 3 beta, then running the WebKit nightly build.
- If you want you can download the FCKEditor nightly and use it in your applications. It will provide support for Safari 3 in addition to the other browsers, but may have bugs.
- I've been playing with it for the last little while and Safari 3 with the WebKit nightly is very stable and capable, and works fine with the FCKEditor nightly demoed at the above link.
- If you don't use a Mac, you're silly and need to get with the program... sheesh.
OK so the last bullet point is simply my opinion... but since you can run ANY OS AVAILABLE FOR A PC on a Mac, and you can run most of them under OSX (with better performance under Parallels than running directly on the hardware), there's really no excuse for not running the most powerful, capable, and performant hardware around. ;) No flames, no arguments, please... that is simply MY OPINION... just, only, simply, purely my opinion.
Laterz!
You see, Labs has a "Featured Technologies" pod on the home page... very nice 2"x3" sections with graphical product logos above a blurb. Very nice, attractive and something to be proud of. Only CF doesn't share that pod with the likes of After Effects, Premier Pro, or even Apollo (which is cool, but not as cool as CF!) ColdFusion, it seems, is relegated to the next tier of pods... "Latest Releases" shares space in plain text between Adobe Visual Communicator preview, Adobe FLVCheck Tool, and, of all things, Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended Plug-In for Google 3D Warehouse. O. M. G.
So let me get this straight: The ColdFusion team spends 5 years developing some of this technology, millions of dollars, countless man-hours, and presents the results to a user base of 400,000 people, and it rates high enough to share a pod not with After Effects or Premier, but with 2 plugins, an AJAX framework, the prerelease version of software to create a newscast-style video, and a tool for checking generated FLVs from non-Adobe software against the FLV spec.
Now I'm sure that everyone who uses a particular product sees the thing closest to their heart as the Most Important Ever (tm), but lets get real. Spry is cool, but it's not a revenue-generating product. The Adobe Bridge CS3 Media Gallery plugin is cool (it creates media galleries for you!!), but frankly cfpresentation blows the whole idea to Hell. A prerelease version of software for producing news casts is also very cool, but how many people will actually NEED that? And don't even get me started about the Google 3D Warehouse plugin... I mean, what on Earth is CF doing right next to THAT?
The thing is, ColdFusion IS a premier Adobe technology... with 400,000 users worldwide, when a single sale of CF 7 licenses comes to more than $1,000,000.00, when it's features draw from a great deal of the Adobe product line, and when you have a very excited, loyal, and lucrative user base, you don't just go sticking the beta release of the Coolest Version Ever(tm) in a pod next to Google-fricking-warehouse plugins! What is so hard to figure out here?
I have been accused in the past of taking a position of "Adobe can do no wrong" and I'm about to totaly disprove that: Adobe done wrong. They've done wrong by their employees, their users, and the one product they have that's got a community of fans... not just users... making sure it will be successful, stay successful, and grow, grow, grow. I'm saddened and apalled, because we've all been fending off the ignorant who say "Didn't ColdFusion die in version 4?", or "Adobe's going to kill CF just like they did JRun 4.5 right after THEIR beta" and we've had recurring assurances from Adobe that CF is safe, and a key component to their Enterprise platform, it's stunts like this that leave lingering questions... in short, it just plain freakin looks bad.
It makes us all in the CF community look like idiots. It makes us look like we work with a second-rate product that's not part of Adobe's top lineup. It promotes doubts, FUD, and certainly doesn't make it any easier for us to sell ColdFusion to our, nay THEIR, clients. It might even make it harder to sell, especially for those in companies that are considering .NET, CF, pure Java, etc., and have doubts about CF's future. So here's my advice to Adobe:
Get ColdFusion 8 in that featured technology pod. WE sell way more copies of ColdFusion than you do, because it's a community-driven product. So give us a break... step up, not just with the cash for the development team, but with the shiny bits that will make OUR clients take notice. We've been telling people for ages that ColdFusion is anything but dead... please, Adobe, make it LOOK that way.
/rant
Laterz!
I'm a moron because I think at one point I knew what I'm about to say and I'd forgotten it... but it still took me the better part of a day to figure out what was going on. Once I figured it out I was a big disgusted with myself for not spotting it sooner.
In one of my pages I have a sequence of queries that run to insert or update records which, in turn, drives the insertion or updating of records in other foreign-key tables... and, in order to make sure everything worked, I wrapped it all nicely in a cftransaction tag so if anything blew it up it would rollback the whole sequence. HOWEVER (and I can only believe other people have been bitten by this), an interesting thing happened.
In my list page, I have checkboxes to select items for deletion, like you see in webmail or any other list page where they want to make sure they're using POST operations to delete records. It posts to the add/edit page which does the deletions and then cflocation sends the user back to the list page. The upshot here is that since cflocation fired before the closing cftransaction tag, the transaction was silently rolled back and the user was returned to the same list they tried to delete from.
So I wrapped the delete operations in one set of cftransaction tags and the insert/edit queries in another set of cftransaction tags and ZIP... it all plays nice now.
Now if I can only keep myself from making similar stupid mistakes I might actually finish this project early.
Laterz!
Apparently Microsoft (soft as in hard on hackers) has known about this exploit, which will do all kinds of nasty to your computer, for a while. Like... since December 06. So this critical security hole has gone unpatched for 4 months while they... umm... well... let's see... they...
I guess they were too busy counting the money they've made from selling Vista... that's about all I can come up with.
It's just too precious. You don't even have to click, or install, or anything. It's an exploit of the animated mouse pointer mechanism in IE. Even in Opera or FireFox, you can't get infected... you only get this particular nasty by visiting (yes, just visiting) a site with the "malicious code" while surfing with IE ***6 or 7***.
So... their latest, greatest, biggest baddest and best operating system. Their most secure ever! The OS that won't let you leave your keyboard without making sure it's made sure that you're sure that you know that it's sure (for sure) that it's OK and that you really want to, will corrupt it's own memory via the ever-popular browser-based animated mouse pointer.
Hoe Lee Ker'ap...
Laterz!
It really got me thinking, and for the first time in a long time I wrote a nice, long, meaty blog post! Cool, eh? I thought so too...
Acrobat's an awesome platform and constantly getting better... so please don't think that pun was intended.
Laterz...
Sorry... I'm a big fan of Adobe, especially since they've been pouring on the community support and really pushing integration between the various product lines post-acquisition. I'm very impressed. But this... this is just plain stupid. A forced download of a download manager? That's bad enough, but it's not even an online download manager... it has to be installed and launched as an application! That's just... ugh!
So I did a bit of googling and found a link from VersionTracker.com that has a link to the actual distribution file's location on Adobe's updates server, but the link was broken and I had to mess around with the paths to get it to work. Anyway, I downloaded it and here's the kicker. It took 7 minutes to get to 69% of the download with the download manager, and I got the file in about 7 seconds by just using that URL in Safari. YES, 7 minutes to not finish versus 7 seconds to finish. C'mon guys... this is just silly. WIth numbers like that, the download manager is actually costing you more than it's saving you. If conserving bandwidth is that important just put a throttle on it and have done.
I hate downloading Acrobat Reader for just this reason. Adobe has always seen fit to make it a pain in the butt. Can we make this easy and get on with life please?
So here's the link to the US English Acrobat 7.0.7 installer.
Laterz!
These aren't the kinds of clients I want... it actually brings up all sorts of red flags. But, that's another topic altogether. This post has to do with bashing the CF community while comparing it to that of PHP.
First of all PHP is a lot like HTML, CSS, and Javascript... widely available, easily abused, and pervasive. The proliferation of shoddy PHP is only enhanced by the fact that it's free. There's well-written stuff out there, no doubt. But when a software engineering platform is free and easily available you're guaranteed to see a lot of crappy code masquerading as "free software."
Not to say that there's not a lot of shoddy CF code out there... but since, as everyone loves to point out, ColdFusion is "expensive," there's less of it than there is in the PHP world. The proliferation of "free" spaghetti code is something the PHP world is welcome to, thanks. People seem all too eager to forget that free_stuff != more_gooder, especially when you're talking about "spaghetti code" which is more expensive in the long-run.
Second point... CFMX is a J2EE application deployed on either an underlying integrated Jrun server or Websphere, Sun One, and any of a host of other J2EE servers. Some of these servers run into the thousands of dollars for a server, so the target client is not even close to the same target as PHP.
"J2EE" stands for "Java 2 - Enterprise Edition" which means that the motivation behind it is business-class projects for the Enterprise. This means that, as a J2EE application, CFMX is intended for an Enerprise audience. For $1000 you get a package that can, provided things are written correctly, handle more traffic than you've ever dreamed. When you find a situation where people "just wanna slap some code together" and call it an "application," you start finding people who whine about how horrible CFMX is.
CFMX is *built* to support systems that integrate with web services (AXIS or otherwise), hit a dozen DB platforms, use COM and Corba objects, access the underlying Java architecture, make calls to HTTP URLs, download and send email, use FTP, integrate with RIA platforms like FLEX, integrate with XML, generate output to PDF and FlashPaper, send content to a browser, and, in general, talk to about anything that can be accessed over the wire.
You can use CF to power mom-and-pop websites, or you can run things like Macromedia.com that support millions of hits per hour during peak times and it will handle the traffic gracefully. CFMX as a RAD platform enables us to provide software that could take years to develop in months. Just the fact that shared CFMX hosting is available when the server was never intended to provide that solution at all is a testament to its flexibility and power.
It's a stunning deal when you realize that for some software the SDK alone - which doesn't do anything but give you some documentation and source code - can cost thousands of dollars. There's a company out there (I've forgotten the name) that sells a converter for the Microsoft MSG file format for $15,000 a license. That means that the license for the components that read a file format costs $15,000. It does nothing else. You have to code the file handlers for dealing with disk files, the GUI, and all the other parts of the application.
The upshot is this: There is no legitimate "CFMX vs. PHP" debate because there is no one-size-fits-all web development platform. Each platform fits best in a situation for real reasons, and if you're forgetting to hold your proposed solution up to the light of those reasons, chances are you're making the wrong decision. In any case, comparing CFMX to PHP is singularly unproductive at best and a monstrous distortion of reality at worst.
The sooner people quit comparing them, the better. They are not the same. They're not meant to serve the same market. The motivations, goals, and technologies behind them are not even remotely similar. The types of projects they suit are different. They shouldn't be compared... unless you think comparing an F-22 and the stealth bomber is a valid comparison. They both fly real fast, sure... but that means nothing when you look at the complete picture.
Looking beyond that, the "free stuff" that IS available to CFERs is meant to enable more powerful and better designed applications. There's millions of lines of free code out there in the form of frameworks, tools, and other packages intended to aid and abet the skilled and professional development of ColdFusion applications. Examples: As for complete applications, here's just a few (and there's more!):
The free stuff in the CF world is different than the free stuff in the PHP world, because, one more time, the motivations behind CFMX are drastically different than the motivations behind the PHP world.
You don't get well engineered software for free!
Anyway... I'll close this rant now. I only hope that someone reading this gets it and stops trying to bend reality into a blur of invalid comparisons.
Laterz!
This started as a comment on Sean Corfield's blog (linked at right) regarding some dude's post on .NET and MS's apparent inability to ship it. I know little to nothing about .NET except that I despise the whole idea of using MS Money to post all my financial data on Microsoft's servers.
It's a repugnant concept from an arrogant company. Granted, they've done some cool things, but generally the criticisms are the same today as they were 15 years ago... inelegant, cumbersome, bloated systems that don't deliver on their promises.
I've been telling people for years that Microsoft's success is based solely on the market penetration IBM achieved with the Selectric Typewriter... HEY, it's true. When Harry the IBM guy came around to maintain IBM's equipment in the millions of offices where it was used, he offered people the Next Greatest Thing... an IBM PC. I had one... it weighed about 50 pounds.
The point is this: IBM did good work to build and market their office machines. But, they paid per-line to have someone write an OS, and paid royalties on every copy sold. Bingo... suddenly someone's making a nickel on every Selectric that's replaced with a PC. Millions of Nickels.
And, frankly, IBM got ripped... then again, who knew that PCs would become the future. They may have known they were getting ripped but considered it advantageous to get something out there and working, crap though it may be, to get people using systems and then tack server and support sales on top of it all.
I really wonder... if it hadn't been Microsoft who made it big, who hadn't been able to force Intel to stick with the x86 platform, who hadn't been able to catapault from DOS to Win ad nausem thru today, who hadn't been able to cripple innovation and forward progress and shackle anyone who wanted to contribute... where would we be?
(Did XENIX stand for a *NIX derivative, or was it a code word for XENOPHOBIC 9?)
I suspect we'd be on Mars, have flying cars, and be able to have a toaster-sized kitchen appliance materialize a gourmet meal for us just before we step into a room-sized virtual reality entertainment system.
But that's just me.
It used to be said that the average lifespan of a major corporation was 70 years from birth through growth and primetime to waning to death. Even though they linger, they still die. The article I read on this referred specifically to IBM... now, I know... IBM ain't dead. But is it the same IBM that Micrsoft leveraged to generate it's empire?
If I recall correctly (which I often don't) that timespan can be offset by shifting focus and keeping up with the times... I suppose the point was the juxtaposition of management styles, ala being flexible instead of arrogant. Demanding compliance from customers is a good way to run your enterprise into the ground. The point is that if you don't change management *attitudes* to accommodate shifts in your client-culture, you're going to lose their support.
Sperry, Honeywell, RAND, Cray... they didn't keep up and now they're dead, or at least locked away in a place where the family no longer has to worry about them bumping into guests in the hallway.
So the days of check counting machines and typewriters are gone. IBM whole line of PCs is pasee (I think they're ugly and substandard, but that's just me again), however IBM's niche has shifted, changed, and rearranged so many times that they've managed to avoid dying while becoming many different things. It's strength now is in it's diversity, flexibility, and their uber-cool TV commercials. ;)
I wonder, though... when a paradigm changes, doesn't the rest of the model have to be refactored? (I love OO... it's all about communication!) If you're in 1988 and your 70-year estimate is based on the technology and business attidues prevailing at the time... don't you have to factor the current contextual parameters into the picture when you're analyzing it now? If the average lifespan of a product these days is 6 months wheras in 1988 the average lifespan was 5 years, then the average lifespan of a major corporation at it's peak today is going to be somewhere around 27.5 years.
The upshot? I have a working formula based on comparing various data regarding business attitudes, corporate management strategies over time, and a few other relevant but proprietary details that I would be willing to whine, sue, and leverage all my powers to prevent you from accessing OR reverse engineering and yet expect you to believe in with wholehearted admiration*. Oh, and you have to respect me for creating this, or I'll sue you too. And, failing all that, if you try to use someone else's tool for a similar calculation I'll sue you and force you to use mine. Incidentally, I can train some folks to use this system, but it'll cost a mint and there'll be a non-disclosure agreement of course.
And no, it's not important that I have just denigrated every aspect of your intelligence and shown utter contempt for your needs. You *must* comply, cheerfully, or I'll see to it that you're screwed-but-good.
K? {insert cheery smile here}
In any case... according to my sohpisticated, mysterious, and very expensive algorithm for analyzing these trends... and I'm going to give myself a bit of a margin of error here (but I can do that because I decided I can do that)...
Microsoft has about 3 years before it dies a horrid flaming death along the lines of Honeywell and Sperry-Rand.
And yanno what? I want to be there to fill the void.
Laterz!
(note: facts may have been changed, altered, "creatively filtered, or in some ways completely misrepresented in the formulation of this dissertation. We hereby expect that these "upgrades to the human knowledge base" be taken in stride and accepted as fact.)