Boyzoid's Blog & Stuff

Over the last month or so, I sat down to try and write this article several times. Each time, I was so over come with emotion that I simply could not finish it. After the influx of email, Facebook and Twitter messages I have received recently, I decided I need to get this done.

When I was younger, my father once told me, "If you surround yourself with good people, you will never have anything to fear." I do not think I ever really understood what he meant by that until recently.

The last few months have been some of the most difficult and trying times I have ever experienced. I am not sure how I would have fared without the support of my family, friends and the Adobe developer community. After the death of my father, my family was astounded at the level of support offered to us by people they had never met. More than one of you brought tears to our eyes with your kind words on my father's online obituary. The donations made by so many have also helped alleviate some stresses as well.

The kind words and offers of assistance given the recent news from Alagad have been even more overwhelming. Words are not enough to describe the gratitude I, and my family, feel for everyone who has extended a hand.

I used to think that the saying 'you are judged by the company you keep' was unfair. After the last few months, and seeing how incredible the people I have surrounded myself with truly are, I have started to hope I will be judged by the company I keep, because you guys are an amazing bunch, and I am both honored and humbled to be in your company.

Even though I feel it does not seem adequate, Thank You, everyone. The Adobe developer community rules!

My good friend, Dan Wilson, pointed out to me a short while ago that there was some spam that had made it onto the Flex Blog aggregator, All You Flex Are Belong To Us.

It seems that one of the Feedburner RSS feeds that was being used for one of the blogs was taken over by someone else. I have updated the feed in question and have deleted the 'spam' entries.

Sorry about any issue this may have caused.

I hate to say this, but if you sent a message via the contact form at AllYourFlexAreBelongToUs over the last few months, I just now got the messages and fulfilled any requests to have feeds added. 

I chalk this up to a change in mail servers, a rogue rule in my email client and my own inattentiveness causing me to miss the messages.  If you sent a request to have your feed added and you do not see it show up on the feed list tonight, please let me know.

Sorry for any confusion or frustration.

Sometime around the New Year, Joe Rinehart's wife, Dale, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS).  For those who do not know Joe, he is the author of Model-Glue and a tremendous asset to the ColdFusion community.

Myself and several other members of the ColdFusion community decided that we wanted to pool our resources and try to help offset some of the large medical bills Joe and Dale will surely begin to receive.

If you would like to help us help Joe and Dale, please visit http://www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com/ and make a small donation.

Thanx in advance!

Recently, my wife's desktop was acting up and for about 2 days I was unable to play music while I was working.  I forgot how difficult it is for me to code in silence (or near silence).  This got me thinking, when I need to focus and just crank out code, there is a certain album I listen to, James Taylor LIve (CD1 and CD2). For some reason, that album always puts me in the zone and I can code like a madman.

So, when you need to be heads down, and crank out code like its no body's business, what do you listen to?

CF.Objective() starts in a few weeks on May 1. Coincidentally Iron Man is being released the following day. If you would be interested in seeing the movie with some of your favorite (or maybe not so favorite) ColdFusion geeks, leave a comment here, and be sure to subscribe.  I will post details of when and where we will be going to see the movie.

A while back I launched AllYourFlexAreBelongToUs.com, a Flex blog aggregator. So far, the sire is doing better than I could have hoped.  I am now ready to take the next step.  I want to offer "I am aggregated by...." buttons for my aggregatees ( I just now made that up) to add to their sites.  There is one big problem, my design skills are...how should I say this...pathetic.

If you have design skills that surpass a 4 year-old and are willing/able to help out, it would be much appreciated.  The only thing I ask is that the buttons stay true to the color scheme on the site.

What's in it for you?  Well, honestly, I don't have much to offer except my never ending gratitude and credit for designing the buttons.  But be rest assured your work will be viewed by millions thousands hundreds dozens of people.

If I happen to get more than one submission, I will probably put it to a public vote as to which one will be used.

Thanx in advance!

A while back, I started working on a custom Flex component that would allow for easy pagination of data in an array collection.  I am happy to announce that I have made quite a few updates, the most obvious being that the PagableArraycolelction now supports sorting and filtering.

For more information, get out the project site on RIA Forge. 

We were recently discussing setting up development environments in the #coldfusion channel on DalNet IRC.  This is a discussion that pops up form time to time, so I figured I would share how I set up my development environment.

I use Apache for my development web server, and for each project, I set up a new 'virtual host' so that each project can run form its own web root.  I really have no good explanation for doing this other than its the way I like running my projects.  I give each project a 'serverName' like blog.dev. This just helps me be aware of whether I am on dev or production, and makes it so I have to type less.

Then I set up a new entry in my HOSTS file for blog.dev and point it to 127.0.0.1.

To make editing httpd.conf and HOSTS easier to edit, I set up a project in Eclipse that points to my {apache root}/conf folder.  Inside of that project, I create a linked file to my HOSTS file.  Now from within Eclipse, I can edit my httpd.conf file and my HOSTS file.

I typically will structure my project so that I have a structure that looks similar to:

{projectRoot}
     flex-src (if its a Flex project)
    support (this is where I put project documents, associated files, artwork, etc)
     wwwroot this is the web root for my project, and where I point Apache to)

Obviously, as the project dictates, I will add other sub-directories. Also, when using SVN, {projectRoot} will typically be the 'trunk' of the repo.

So, how do you set up your development environment?

UPDATE: Someone asked in the comments for a way to restart Apache from inside Eclipse, well, thanx to Ant, that is very easy.  I attached an Ant file to this entry, you can get it from the 'Download' link below.  Drop this in your {apache root}/conf folder and when you want to restart Apache in Eclipse, right-click the file and choose 'Run As.. --> Ant Build' .  You may need to change the name of the service.  DISCLAIMER: This is offered as is and I make no warranties.  Offer void where prohibited.