For the Developer

This command is going to save me so much time:

find . -path "*/.git" -execdir git pull origin master ';'

It’s amazing what you find when you read the documentation. Since I always forget the address for Google’s CDN hosting of jQuery I have to search for it each time. This time when I found the address I was looking around a bit and found out this interesting tidbit that I didn’t know before about Google’s CDN for their AJAX libraries.

Specifying a version of “1.8.2″ will select the obvious version. This is because a fully specified version was used. Specifying a version of “1.8″ would select version 1.8.4 since this is the highest versioned release in the 1.8 branch. For much the same reason, a request for “1″ will end up loading version 1.9.1.

Google AJAX Libraries API Developer’s Guide

This is how you can configure Railo Express to use Jetty virtual hosts and local host file entries to point to a single Railo Express installation. This was extremely useful while developing applications that power multiple domains.

Today I wanted to setup local host entries on my MacBook. Searching around I found several articles about editing the /private/etc/hosts file to add local domains entries pointing back to my computer. I don’t know if it is something that changed with Leopard or Snow Leopard but it just wasn’t working for me. Even restarting the computer was a no go.

One of the things that I was really excited for in ColdFusion 9 was the support for the ternary operator. As Ben said:

To me, the ternary operator is what the IIF() method call always wanted to be.

Unfortuately I was testing some CFML code, written and working on Railo, on a ColdFusion 9 server and had this error pop up:

Unable to find an operator implementation for coldfusion.compiler.ASToperator

Turns out the the ternary operator works great… unless you are using it in a default value for an argument. Fail.

Here is how I setup a VirtualBox Virtual Machine (VM) running Ubuntu 9.10 Server edition for ColdFusion development on my MacBook Pro.

There was a bug in Jetty that was causing MXUnit ant tests to not work because it was double encoding the cookies. The bug was fixed in Jetty but Railo had not released a new Express version with the fix.

Many of the domains and sub-domains on my Media Temple Grid Service contain installations of WordPress. Since I don’t want to be bothered by a normal upgrades here is how I install WordPress in a way that allows for simple upgrades.

This is not a completely automated solution, there is more that you could do to improve the process, but it should save a lot of the time normally spent updating WordPress.

While working on an AIR project hosted on Google Code I wanted to setup automatic updates. I wanted the entire project to be self contained and not require any supporting websites. After a little coding I can now use Mate and dispatch an event to check for updates.

As I amass more photos I get squeamish. Photos are some of the most valuable data on my computer besides the code I write. My code generally isn’t a big worry because it is being versioned and usually exists in several working copies so the risk of loss is smaller. With photos I have at best have a dvd backup of the originals along with a time machine backup. But if my apartment and computer goes up in smoke? It’s all gone.

With the wonderful advances in the cloud I decided to see what it could do for me. After doing a little searching I found a post or two about it and I decided to try it out myself.