For the Developer

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.

I am a terminal n00b, but I’m liking it. I grew up on a M$ box and didn’t take the ‘leap’ to a linux / unix based operating system until about a year and a half ago when we got new computers at work. Since that time I have been trying to learn more about the terminal and am very impressed by it. I’ve been using OS X at work and Ubuntu at home and haven’t booted into windows (except for playing games) for almost a year.

Something that I found out in the recent months and finding very useful is the reverse-i-search. By pressing ctrl + r in the terminal (works at least in ubuntu and OS X, probably all real terminals) you are given a console line like the following:

(reverse-i-search)`':

As you type the terminal will search through your terminal history and locate any commands that contain what you search.

Sitemaps just make sense. You create a Sitemap file, or a set of files and a Sitemap Index, that has all the your site links crafted purely for search engine consumption. It’s like candy for the search giants since they get spoon-fed your site structure by you. Not only can it tell them where your content is, but it can tell them how often it changes, when it was last changed, and what priority it is to your site. Pure confection!

But the problem, for me at least, was finding the urls to ping so that you are not waiting for the giants to get a sweet tooth and come looking for you. The page on informing giants talks about a magical searchengine_URL that can be replace by your supporting giant. The problem: the site never tells what searchengine_URLs exist for your giant companions.

Something that really bugged me (and still does) about the ubuntu since I installed it is that eclipse is not even close to being the latest version in the package manager. That just seems really strange to me to have such and awesome and widely used IDE not supported in Ubuntu. Anyhow I am not writing this post to just complain about Ubuntu’s quirks, I am writing to detail the steps that I took to get it setup and working on my Ubuntu 8.04.1 64 bit box.

As part of their tour of North America, Railo stopped by Salt Lake City with their CEO Gert Franz and CTO Michael Streit to present their CFML engine to the combined audiences of SLCFUG and NUCFUG groups. Along with the meeting we were able to have dinner with the Railo duo. The content of this post is being pulled from memory and conversations with others so I don’t vouch for 100% accuracy.

For those of you who use and love subversion (svn) as much as I do you will be happy to know that David Child from Added Bytes (formally know as I Love Jack Daniels until certain legal misgivings) has released a Subversion specific cheetsheat, his first new one is almost a year.

Subversion Cheatsheet

Wow, i hadn’t realized how close in version numbers the two things are…

I was thinking today of how many crazy things that I try to do, how many of them don’t work, and how many of them I don’t share when they do. So today I attempt to share a successful install of ColdFusion 8 (developer version) on my Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit box.

Just looking at the Google IO T-Shirt for this year’s attendees and it appears they spelled GOOGLEIO wrong. I was curious as I was sitting in a session and typed in the binary that is on the shirt and it came out GOOGLEKO.

Here is my translation of the shirt to binary:

0100011101001111010011110100011101001100010001010100101101001111

Here is what that is translated:

GOOGLEKO

Just something interesting, we’ll see if it is true.

UPDATE: Thanks TechCrunch for verifying the shirt for me!