:neil_middleton

• Getting started with ActiveScaffold – A neat little alternative to the default Rails scaffolding that gives you a whole load more UI, and functionality out of the box
• Radar- Let’s you find ActiveRecord objects by year, month, fortnight, week and more.
• Adam Salter’s sitemap_generator - Need a Google sitemap for your Rails app?

Lots today..

Some Flash related stuff:

• Swf_fu – a neat little Rails helper for embedding SWF files in your applications, especially handy if you’re using CDN’s
• Ruby-ImageSpec – Another tiny, but handy utility which gets you the dimensions of a given image, or flash file, very handy if you’re using SWFs in a CMS, and want to avoid the Firefox 100% bug
• HTML5 – The momentum against using plugins in the browser appears to be growing. The XHTML 2 Working Group is shutting down at the end of this year to focus on HTML 5

And some people talking out of their arses:

• An argument against selling different versions of your product – which only works in the M$ case, the epitomy of evil. The 37signals argument just fails completely. More resources = more cost to them.
• Jacob Nielsen claiming masking passwords is bad – which is fine if you don’t mind having any security

A big day in internet land yesterday as Firefox 3.5 finally dropped. Here’s some more interesting stuff:

• Worldwide Firefox Downloads – How much bandwidth do you burn every second?
• BrowserCMS – The best Rails content management system in the world, probably.

Working from home today, which is always a bit weird…

• Cappuccino – A Javascript / Objective-J framework for writing web applications. Seems to be pretty cross platform too.
• Another AJAX platform at Ajax.org, and this one looks to be pretty good at charting
• Firefox 3.5 – that’s all you need to say really…

Monday morning. Joy…

• Upgrading OSX to Ruby 1.8.7 – if you haven’t already, 1.8.7 is a worthwhile and fairly easy upgrade.
• Textmate bundles have moved and it’s now on GitHub!

Well, whaddya know, I’m doing it again…

• A Quick Primer on Sharding for Ruby on Rails – A nice little guide on sharding and what it’s good for. If you want to get mega, read this.
• Scalr.net – A nice little tool for managing a web cluster on Amazon’s EC2. Also available on Google Code
  
• SQLiteManager – A nice little GUI for your SQLite databases

I might do this again, but don’t hold your hopes up:

• Paper Trail – A simple application auditing, versioning plugin for your rails models. Stupid simple to integrate
• Runway App – A nice little GTD focused application. I’ll give it a go for a few days and see how it flies. Free for Beta
• Capazon – Amazon’s EC2 through Capistrano. If this works, it’ll make me happy.

This morning, Adobe announced that the latest drops of both Flash Builder (the IDE formerly known as Flex Builder) and Flash Catalyst are available on Labs.

Both have been well covered in the media already, and Catalyst (or Thermo as it was known) is heading for it’s third year of being demo’ed at Max, without a release.

“Design in Mind” was one of the core themes for this release, and these tools, together with the updated Flex 4 SDK, deliver on that to make it easier than ever create high fidelity, rich Internet applications that target the Flash Platform.

Andrew Shorten’s also released a little tutorial that you can work through to familiarize yourself with the tooling. In this tutorial Andrew shows you how to build an employee address book application that lets users enter search criteria and view a list of results fetched from a database (via a ColdFusion service), from which they can select an employee to get their full contact information. The completed application could work either as a browser-based application (using Adobe Flash Player) or a desktop application (using Adobe AIR).

So, if you haven’t already, head over to the labs and check them out, they are certainly interesting tools.

This Monday sees the start of the annual Scotch on the Rocks conference at the Sway bar in London.  This year there’s a change in format as the conference is going on the road, visiting a city every other day through all of next week.  There’s a fairly good line up of speakers (alongside a decent showing from Adobe) and a fair few people making their way up there.

But that’s not why I’m writing this blog post.  Something I’ve noticed this year is the complete absence of any Adobe conferences containing ColdFusion content in and around Europe.  Aside from Scotch and the odd ColdFusion camp here and there, there’s nothing.

For the Americans this is a very different story.  For instance, there’s the Adobe MAX conference in October, CFObjective() a couple of weeks back, CFUnited plus a host of other smaller localised ones.  This goes to show a common problem with software companies based in the states – the belief that the world stops when you hit the US coast.  Admittedly, last year there was an Adobe MAX in Europe (and Japan), but this year, they’ve been binned, and Adobe are expecting everyone to go to the LA event instead.  However, for nearly everyone outside of the US this is an incredibly expensive proposition – nearly always costing into the thousands just to attend and have somewhere to sleep for the night.

So, for those of you who may not live on this continent, please note that without the valiant efforts of FuzzyOrange and the Scotch team, we would have absolutely nothing in the UK (or nearby) until towards the end of 2010 (assuming MAX comes back).

Therefore, if you live in northern europe, and can make any of the venues next week, please buy a ticket and attend Scotch – as it’s the only chance you’re going to get for a ColdFusion orientated conference this year.

The other day, on my 31st birthday of all days, I can only have what can be described as a “stupid  bint” drive into the back of my Mini Cooper.  Fast forward a few days, and I find myself stood in the foyer of my local Enterprise Rent a Car whilst the Mini’s in getting some repairs done (whilst I endure the Kia Cee’d)

Whilst standing in the queue of other loaners I found myself stood next to a “Community” board, which from what I could see consisted of letters sent in by “happy” customers.  Most of these letters were praising the service they had received and how great the company was.

Now, a couple of things crossed my mind at this point – firstly, who the hell writes these letters (aside from old people with time to burn), and secondly, why do they write them?

Read the rest of this entry »

« Older Entries