Hola, been awhile since I posted on my blog.  Been a bit busy ;)

At any rate, got a quick question on the advantages of Ruby On Rails... vs. say using Coldfusion?   Any takers on enlightening on why I would move over to RoR if I already know and use CF?

A small team in my Company are trying to get AIR approved as a Company standard for Rich Desktop Applications.  We already have Flex 2 & 3 approved, but would like to go one step further and start developing AIR apps for internal uses.  One thing we are needing is a list of Best Practices for Deployment and Security.  Was curious if anyone could share some information on best practices you have came across during your experiences? 

Just post them here so everyone can see them and leverage it!

Thanks in advance!
Josh

As a developer I mostly sit on my butt and do absolutely nothing but type, move my arms and occassionally get up to use the bathroom. I drink excessive amounts of coffee, energy drinks, candy, the works... typical developer right? Well i cant speak for us all, but I can definitely speak for myself. At one time I was actually extremely active in gymastics during college, played basketball, ran alot, worked out in the gym. Typical college stuff that I grew accustomed to when I was unemployed and the most important thing in my life was having fun and making sure my homework was done.

Now that I am pushing 31, life has changed quite a bit. I work, eat and sleep. Sometimes I just work and sleep forgetting to do the eating part (probably due to the execessive amounts of caffeine). I decided that this is a one way ticket to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.. and turned over a new leaf about 2 weeks ago. I started swimming and doing strength training, but I really wanted to start running. Funny thing happened was I was checking out the Degrafa website and saw the chart examples Joe Johnston did mimicing Nike+ charts. I was curious and went to Nike+ and realized they made shoes that could communicate to your iPod Touch or Nano. Being the tech savy dork I am, I went out

Read more...

I ran into a very odd issue this week with Coldfusion 7. I have an application that I have had up and running for a couple years and I made some database changes, CFquery (DAO) changes. Since I use Illudium-PU 37 Generator for most of my Bean, DAO, Gateway, & services I automatically get the benefit of being reminded about cfqueryparam (Thanks Brian). Unfortunately this time around I didnt regen the files, I simply went in and made a couple modifications since I only added like two columns to the table.

Well all went well for like a week, than all of a sudden I started getting this crazy error. I kept getting a message saying "Invalid Parameter Binding(s)" and it wasnt even the new columns I just added, it was something else entirely.

I did some digging in my cfdump of the cfcatch error message, I discovered that for some odd reason Coldfusion was converting a bit into a integer even though both my bean, ActionScript Value Object and the cfqueryparam were all set to a boolean value / cf_sql_bit. So when flex sent over the data to CF all was well, but when it sent the data to the DAO.cfc to do a save/update into the database the cfqueryparam was sometimes doing it right and sometimes doing it wrong, it was really -- really hard to duplicate the error message, but here is what it the message was returning in the cfcatch...

Read more...

Some say Embrace Change, Change is good right? Why is it that so many people in companies fight it with their last dying breath?  Those that fight are doing it for very simple reasons that make perfect sense to me anyways, because we all do it.  You see people are constantly learning, obsorbing information from experiences around them, interactions with people, groups, things, etc... Now when a change occurs in their life or in this case in their job, when this happens for the first time we are fine with it, things change around us constantly and we adapt.  But what happens when a change occurs and it just doesnt go very smoothly?  Well in a company, this is bad plain and simple. 

When change occurs in a company, especially big strategy changes and this change is managed poorly people learn from this.  They decide right off the bat to be critical and as soon as the change starts making their working lives miserable they fight it and if the change has already occured, the next time change happens in the working place they become extremely adverse to any change, overly critical and darn right resistant.  That's right resistant -- and who could blame them?  If change is managed poorly in any company (big/med/small) it affects more than the people driving the change, it tarnishes the employees trust in the idea that change is good and should be embraced when change is managed poorly.  So how do you avoid this issue or even deal with an environment/company that has a sour taste in it's mouth from a poorly managed/implemented change?  You apply Change Management principles, yes there is such a thing.

I managed to plow through a very long book,  "Diffusion of Innovations" by Everett M. Rogers (no relation).  In this book Rogers talks about getting an idea, technology or any new thing really diffused or accepted by a particular group of people.  This group could be an organization, a social group, a customer, a client, your mom and dad... it could be anyone!

Read more...