Steven Erat's Blog | TalkingTree.com

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Tue Sep 15 9:04 PM

@iotashan @rukumar Shan meet Rupesh. Rupesh meet Shan. You guys should talk CF9 ORM. ;-) Rupesh, Shan works with me & has an ORM issue

Tue Sep 15 8:51 PM

No CF Admin DSN setting for isolation level, but u can add SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL <level> as u're validation query as workaround

Tue Sep 15 5:36 PM

Tue Sep 15 4:13 PM

@berniedolan Yup, and I was on a downhill at 35mph, slowed to 15 then skidded to within inches as he made a blinkerless right turn

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This entry was posted on October 2, 2009 at 4:41 PM and has received 28763 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Follow me on Twitter!

Fri Oct 02 7:26 PM

Ghosts of ColdFusion Past http://yfrog.com/3omigoj

Fri Oct 02 4:40 PM

@john_mason_ Thanks. Indeed, the server was under high load.

Fri Oct 02 4:21 PM

Ditto that! RT @awest: Working at home really blows. Not. http://bit.ly/UflXy

Fri Oct 02 3:44 PM

@charliegriefer Enjoy! Twitter is gonna have a melt down. #adobeMAX

Fri Oct 02 3:12 PM

Have you ever launched the ColdFusion Server Monitor and seen the buttons for Monitoring, Profiling, and Memory just not show up at the top?

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This entry was posted on October 2, 2009 at 4:36 PM and has received 29091 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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Fri Aug 28 8:52 PM

Why is it that ColdFusion must be started by a privileged user on every operating system but Mac? Hmph!

Fri Aug 28 8:43 PM

@shutupdanielle Could be worse, you could be in Bolton. 2 pizza shops, that's it. Nary a chicken wing in sight (really).

Fri Aug 28 8:36 PM

@mobarger Big city turn me loose, set me free, somewhere in the middle of Montana

Fri Aug 28 8:08 PM

@styggiti Outside temp last night was 52F here, but not sure which is better lower temps or lower humidity.

Fri Aug 28 5:43 PM

ColdFusion 9 (& ColdFusion 8.01) bug for CF Multiserver's bin/cf-init.sh file. Please vote: http://bit.ly/MsgCT

Fri Aug 28 4:56 PM

Yep, verified the 3 issues with the Solaris part of the cf-init.sh boot script installer for ColdFusion 9. Oh, bugtracker.....

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This entry was posted on August 28, 2009 at 4:56 PM and has received 29278 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

As you may have noticed, TalkingTree.com blog is rather barren these days. I find that while I work, while I relax at home (that is when I'm not working at home), or even when I'm mobile I'm nearly always using Twitter, and less so Facebook.

Unless you've been living under a rock you've heard of Twitter by now. If you're still not sure, Twitter is a bit like group chat where you post a short summary of what you're doing or what's on your mind, and other people that are interested can reply. While I'm not going to explain Twitter fully here -- you can find that on Twitter.com -- it can be very useful for sharing up to date information about a particular interest with lots of other people that share that interest. Most of my Tweeps fall into one of several interest groups... There's those interested in Photography, those interested in Web Technology, and those that happen to otherwise be friends or family. There are several applications you can use to watch Twitter updates. My favorite for use on a computer is TweetDeck, and on my iPhone I use Twitterific. One reason to love using an iPhone with Twitterrific is that I can be anywhere, shopping, getting a haircut, or at a conference and have the ability to take a cell phone picture for upload to Twitter with a brief description about what's going on.

Twitter and Facebook are such interesting places to socialize online while sharing information that I've neglected my blog for quite some time. To address that problem, I'll be posting summaries of recent Tweets to my blog here where you can catch up on some of the things I've been talking about. Although, this is a bit like sitting next to someone that's on the phone since my Tweets here are only half the conversation some time. To get the full benefit of Twitter you really have to follow both sides of the conversation.

To accomplish updating this blog with my Tweets, I whipped up a quick ColdFusion script to pull in my Twitter RSS feed and convert to HTML with all usernames and URLs converted to actual links. I'll next try to automate this so that my blog gets regularly updated with my Twitter summaries.

Of course, if you're already on Twitter, Follow Me, and on Facebook Add Me as a Friend.

How to read tweets

• If a tweet begins with an at sign, its a username, like @JoeSchmoe. Its at the beginning because I'm replying to something that Joe Schmoe tweeted earlier.
• If a @username appears later in the tweet but not at the beginning, then i'm refering to that user, like Hey, did you see that cool widget that @JoeSchmoe built?
• If a tweet begins with RT, that means Re-Tweet, and its kinda like holding up a megaphone. On Twitter you Follow or subscribe to certain people, and in turn other people follow you. The people that subscribe to your tweets may not be following the people that you subscribe to. So by retweeting someone that you subscribe to, you are amplifying that persons tweet by broadcasting to all the people that subscribe to you. Confused yet? If your subscribers are interested in the retweet, they may then follow that original person (a.k.a tweep or twit).
• If a tweet has a word beginning with a pound sign like #photog, that's called a hashtag. Hashtags are used as labels to identify a topic for your tweet. Later people can search by hashtags to see tweets from everyone that talked about that topic. In this case, #photog means the tweet is about photography or a photographer. This in contrast to #photo without the last 'g' and it is used for tweets about a particular photo.

Recent Tweets for Mon June 29, 2009

Mon Jun 29 10:09 PM

2 nights in a row my son doesn't want to sleep coz he's not feeling well. Long nights of frequent rocking, not much sleep for me.

Mon Jun 29 4:45 PM

@JoshuaCurtiss Pretty sure it was CF5 -> CF6 w/ the J2EE conversion. I was on the team at Macromedia that reviewd poss bkwds compat issues

Mon Jun 29 4:39 PM

@jlamoree Holy cow, a fradulent Lactating Lesbians infringement claim from Cream Ridge, NJ. That just, em, *sucks*!

Mon Jun 29 12:52 PM

@jonbcampos Apache XSL-FO http://bit.ly/Xrhar

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This entry was posted on June 29, 2009 at 5:23 PM and has received 28011 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Last week I applied for the Free Flex Builder 3 For Unemployed Developers so that I could build Flex applications on my new Mac Book Pro, and in two short days I received an email with my new Professional edition license key.

I had been using the trial version of Flex Builder 3, which had been installed from my Mac administrative account. Upon entering the new serial number I was greeted with a contradictory message in the Flex Builder 3 Activation dialog:



Current License: Professional Edition - Educational
Serial Number is Invalid



Flex Builder determined that it was a Professional Edition license key, but then indicated that the number was invalid, complete with a green check mark indicating it was valid. That doesn't make any sense at all.

I suspected that problem was somehow with permissions so I did a bit of Googling to find this recent post on the official Adobe Flex Team Blog which indicated at least that the Flex Builder license should be stored at:

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flex/license.properties


However, when I examined my file system I discovered that the Adobe directory did not contain a Flex subdirectory, and therefore no license.properties file.

To test permissions, I then launched Flex Builder with the sudo command to permit Flex Builder to run with root privileges. My assumption was that when I ran Flex Builder with my regular administrative account it was not able to write the license file to disk, and starting FB with sudo should allow it to do so. You can see that when run as sudo, Flex Builder wrote the license file to disk with the user and group of root / admin.

I was pleased to find out that this was in fact the problem, and Flex Builder now accepted my license and indicated that it was Professional Edition and valid.

This entry was posted on April 8, 2009 at 1:35 PM and has received 31800 views. There are currently 8 comments. Print this entry.

A week from today will be the 2nd annual Flex Camp Boston at Bentley University. At a very modest cost, this is a full day event packed with sessions at the intermediate to advanced level given by industry experts. Register for Flex Camp Boston.

For the last year I've been on the Flex SDK team as a Quality Assurance Engineer, and before that I had excellent run of more than 7 years testing and supporting ColdFusion. I know most of the speakers that will be presenting at Flex Camp and can attest to their passion for building the next wave of Rich Internet Applications, so I fully encourage you to attend if you haven't signed up yet to share in the excitement and mingle with your peers.

This will be an unexpected reunion of sorts for me as I suddenly find myself as a customer rather than employee. With the extra time as I seek new employment I'll immerse myself in training with Flex and AIR, and try to produce an application as an online reference to demonstrate as an example. The odd thing about QA'ing a software product is that you are exposed to narrow facets in which you dive very deeply, and don't often get the chance to practice the breadth of the product. My success in ColdFusion QA was largely dependent on the many preceding years where I provided "gold" level support for the product, something which required me to constantly explore and exercise every nook and cranny of the CF app server and language.

My first inclination for a Flex app is to build my own photography business website in Flex to avoid the cost of purchasing one of the reputable but expensive prebuilt websites from places like LiveBooks, BigFolio, or A Photo Folio.

Finally, I'd like to thank everyone from coworkers to customers to local cfug friends for taking a moment to contact me and express their thoughts and show their concern. People have been writing and chatting intensely while offering job tips and advice. As I mentioned on Facebook, I've never before felt the online community to be as tangible and real as I do now. Thank you all, and I hope to see those of you in the area at Flex Camp!

This entry was posted on December 5, 2008 at 11:32 AM and has received 28718 views. There are currently 4 comments. Print this entry.

Ever since I read about Zack Arias on The Strobist blog I've been a fan of his photographic style and I've enjoyed his generous lessons such as the 5-part White Seamless Tutorial. To the right is a photo I took after mastering the inverse square law of light in part 2 of Zack's tutorial. This was shot on white seamless believe it or not. Ok, this was one gridded main light at F22 and two bare bulb strobe heads behind him for rim light, but what the hell, that's my style.



When I learned that Zack has a DVD of his popular workshop for sale, I checked out the site and watched the promo video of the workshop. I'm always looking to learn new photography skills so I ordered the DVD set of One Light Workshop right away.

The DVD just arrived so I can't review it yet, but I have to say that Zack is one hell of a marketer! Included with the 2 Disc DVD set was a handy lighting field book to keep in the gear bag, and some One Light bumper stickers, and a One Light T-Shirt, and a music DVD produced by his wife. That's quite a package.

I'll be completing my photography work at CDIA by the end of this year and will launch a formal small photography business. The 10 hour Strobist DVD set was a treasure chest of speedlight skills which I devoured this past summer, and I expect to fully immerse myself in One Light Workshop (as well as the Joey Lawrence DVD tutorial) very soon.



"People are happier when they're lit" - Love that tag line Zack!

If you're in Boston tomorrow for the Photoshop CS4 for Photographers Tour, I'll see you there!

This entry was posted on November 13, 2008 at 1:26 PM and has received 29341 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Two problems with configuring ColdFusion 8.01 on Mac OS X for startup on system boot when using the the utility {cf_root}/bin/cf-init.sh. The first issue is that cf-init.sh cannot be used again to configure CF for startup on boot after the cf-init.sh script is used to unconfigure the service. The second issue is that for Multiserver configuration the script cf-init.sh cannot be used to unconfigure CF as a startup service and the items under /Library/StartupItems/ColdFusion8Multi must be removed manually. The ColdFusion Engineering team is actively seeking to correct these issues, but I'm posting for your convenience in case you run into this beforehand.

Issue 1 logged as ColdFusion bug 73548
On Mac, running cf-init.sh to install system startup script cannot be done a second time after running cf-init.sh uninstall.

The cf-init.sh function install_mac() permanently moves the file {cf_root}/bin/cf-standalone-startup to /Library/StartupItems/ under the new name ColdFusion8 as shown here:

Then the uninstall_mac() function in cf-init.sh permanently removes that file ColdFusion8 as shown here:



There are no longer any copies of {cf_root}/bin/cf-standalone-startup under any name on the system, so another attempt to configure ColdFusion to start on System Boot cannot be performed.

More details:

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This entry was posted on November 6, 2008 at 6:53 AM and has received 28247 views. There are currently 5 comments. Print this entry.

If you're giving Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop CS3 for the Holidays this year, or if you're lucky enough to receive them as a gift, read the EULA to double your gifting fun!

I've seen very little mention of the Adobe End User License Agreement, or EULA, for these products in the blogosphere, and I haven't spoken with anyone that already knew about this little gem either. Specifically, the EULA is the license that Adobe gives you as the purchaser or user of the software, and that license states the terms under which you are legally permitted to use them.

Both Lightroom and Photoshop CS3 EULA state, under section 2.4 Portable or Home Computer Use, that you're allowed to install the software on not just one, but two of your home computers! Yippee!!! There is a small caveat that technically you're not permitted to use the same product at the same time on the two computers, but unless you're a serious Type A Multi-tasker then I doubt you'll have to worry about that... The official Legalease from the EULA is as follows:

Adobe Lightroom EULA

2.4 Portable or Home Computer Use. The primary user of the Computer on which the Software is installed may install a second copy of the Software for his or her exclusive use on either a portable Computer or a Computer located at his or her home, provided the Software on the portable or home Computer is not used at the same time as the Software on the primary Computer.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 EULA

2.4 Portable or Home Computer Use. The primary user of the Computer on which the Software is installed may install a second copy of the Software for his or her exclusive use on either a portable Computer or a Computer located at his or her home, provided the Software on the portable or home Computer is not used at the same time as the Software on the primary Computer. You may be required to contact Adobe in order to make a second copy.

Further, when Lightroom was still in beta version back last January, the Lightroom Program Manager, Tom Hogarty, posted to a forum thread that you may choose a different operating system when installing the second copy, just in case, for example, that you have PC as your primary computer and a Mac Powerbook as your second, then you're good to go.

This entry was posted on December 20, 2007 at 7:05 AM and has received 28003 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

Integrating Photoshop Into the Creative Studio -- That's the snazzy title of the 8th course in CDIA's Professional Digital Photography program. Not too long ago, photographers that shot film could spend hours setting up perfect lighting in a shot using snoots, grids, reflectors, gobos, and other light modifiers to capture the perfect image with one shutter click. With the advent of digital photography its possible to achieve that perfect shot in far less time by shooting several versions of the set then combine the images in Photoshop using layer masks and blending. In the digital photographer's studio, the final image is often a composite that makes best use of time between setting up the lighting and post production editing.

The first exercise in this course is known as a split shot, a technique to control reflections in a set. Imagine an art director sets up a product shot in the studio composed of a couple books and some CDs, carefully placing each element in his or her preferred configuration. Then its the photographer's job to capture the image just as the art director composed it, even though the set may have elements of differing reflective surfaces or different contrasts. The CDs have prismatic reflections of the books behind them, and the books may have shadows or glossy reflections of the other books or CDs in front of them.

To achieve a well lit, final image begin by capturing the original set, then use light modifers such as cards or gobos to capture subsequent shots where one element of the set is lit properly. Weight down the tripod to completely avoid nudging the camera since later several captures will be layered and combined.

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This entry was posted on November 28, 2007 at 7:04 PM and has received 27407 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.