With the help of Simeon Bateman, this week I was able to get ColdFusion MX 7.2 to hook-up with Apache 2.2.3 under PCLinuxOS. Really it's not that difficult (if you find the right resources). Below are some instructions for anyone else trying to coerce ColdFusion 7.0.2 to play nice with Apache 2.2.3. And for my personal reference of course.

Ben Forta just announced a really cool addition to CF in version 8. That is, per application settings via the Application.cfc. The way that I understand it, you can override or add mappings and custom tag paths (and I'm sure other stuff) in the Application.cfc. I would think that this should fix all those problems that people have on shared hosting where people set a mapping for "Reactor" or "Transfer" or "com". It will definitely help me at work.

Well, it seems that I may have found that sancuary from MS that I was looking for. I tried another few Linux distros after my last post. I finally ended up trying PCLinuxOS. It started up fast, and had a wizard for configuring ndiswrapper to use the windows driver for my wifi card. And the best part is, it works. I am posting this from my couch, in Firefox, on PCLinuxOS using my wifi. I'm working right now to get a dev environment set up.

Warning - This post is a bit of a rant. I have to say, in the past, I've been somewhat of an apologist for Microsoft. Being a developer, I understand how hard it is to maintain a very large code base and roll out changes while staying bug free. Lately though, I just can't justify their mediocre software. (The first draft of this said "crappy software". But, I'm trying to remain objective.) The more I push the edges of their tools, the more I see the cracks.

For some reason I clicked the print button on my blog the other day. It opened up a PDF in the tab I was in. Well, I just didn't like that (sorry Ray). I recently built a print feature for an AJAX heavy project at work. Since this project uses Spry, the detail you see doesn't exist until javascript renders it in the browser. So, I came up with a solution of opening another window and then pushing the rendered contents into it. The new window even has a print.css.

I had been meaning to write a custom tag for timing ColdFusion code execution for some time when <cftimer> finally showed up. Well, I was excited about this small addition to the CF tag library. That is, until I put it in my code and then saw nothing. That's when I read a little more and discovered that you have to turn the tag on in the debugging setting in the ColdFusion Administrator. And you have to have debugging on while you are using it. "Sheesh!", I exclaimed.

This is a little late... But, Adobe snuck out a preview of Spry 1.5 on March 15th. You can go get it here. If you haven't heard, Spry is an AJAX and DHTML JavaScript library. I've been using it on a project at work. It's pretty slick. It reminds me of Flex the way you bind DataSets to "controls" and use curly brackets to reference variables. The 1.5 preview seems to have fixed a couple of small issues that I had with it. It also promoted JSON DataSets to first-class citizenship.

I think that alot of people saw Google's main April Fools joke. But did you catch this Gmail one? I only saw it because I happened to be there while my wife was logging in. I normally use Gmail Manager, so I would have completely missed this one. Hope you all had a nice April Fools' Day!

I was looking at the Twitter Badges that you can add to your site. I noticed that there was a JS implementation. I thought that would be cool because I could style it to match the rest of the site. So, I created a new empty BlogCFC pod and pasted in the code that Twitter offered. Well, I have to say I was very un-impressed. It basically is only set up to display the current message and the time it was added. Except there's even a typo. So, it wasn't even showing the date.

It's my first blog post and I couldn't resist. And being that it is (my first blog post), I'll introduce myself. My name is Chris Phillips. I'm a Web Application Developer. I work with ColdFusion, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and SQL every day. I really enjoy my work. A Little Personal History: I tried a few other jobs before I fell into Web Development. Most of them were just a poor fit for my particular personality quirks.