CF9 Rocks but CFMAP would be better with Openlayers

I've just been watching the CFMeetup about CF9, I am super impressed with what the have done.

One thing which bugs me with the current beta, is the CFMAP tag which is directly tied to Google Maps.

I've been using Openlayers for a while now and I am honestly rather suprised that Adobe has chosen to support only google maps.

This is problematic as there are a lot of restrictions on what you can do with Google Maps, ie using it with password protected sites and the like.

Openlayers supports a wide range of different mapping providers and I really think it would be better to add support via openlayers, mainly because you get to program to an API which is cross provider.

It sucks if you start a project with google maps and then you hit licensing restrictions ( which i think a lotta people ignore anyway) and have to move away from google maps.

If your doing anything beyond simplely showing a maps, your going to be writing some custom javascript and it you use the google maps api, you can't easily switch because your tied to the google api.

If you use openlayers, you can switch mapping providers ****really**** easily.

Check out this demo with lots of different commercial providers and the other examples. Note the exmaples

I filed an enhancement request on the new CF9 bug db

Cisco VPN Client Crash with Comodo - Solution

One of my clients just changed over to a Cisco VPN (5.0.05.290), but after it was installed,
my dear old XP box would hard crash at the Comodo add network dialog on submit. Nasty...

I found a solution which is to install the VPN client without the firewall which contains ZoneAlarm stuff?

Basically extract the installer and run it with

msiexec.exe /i vpnclient_setup.msi DONTINSTALLFIREWALL=1

Introducing Explore Australia

After several years of work, I am happy to announce that Explore Australia is now live on the web.

Explore Australia is an interactive travel guide which covers over 700 different tourist towns and regions.

The site was built using Coldfusion 8, Model Glue, MapGuide Open Source, Oracle XE, jQuery & Openlayers and runs on Ubuntu via Amazon Web Services.

This project wouldn't of been possible with out the hard work of all the wonderful developers who contribute their time into these open source projects. I've learnt a lot and managed to contribute bits back myself.

Enjoy!

The Man who Fell to Earth - Scott Jansen

There's a now Facebook Group, I have an original Scott Jansen painting

KISS: Avoid Stored Procedures and save money!

I'm not a fan of stored procedures (SPs) for anything except complex data processing generally.

Having just read Writing and Calling Stored Procedures, I felt like explaining my point of view on this stuff. It's sunday after all.

Firstly, I'm developer who considers sql to be mandatory for the developer, rather than having dba's doing all the sql stuff.

That's just an approach which creates an unnecessary bottleneck in the development cycle. I have often seen bad results when developers don't understand the database and it's concepts, or maybe the DBA's didn't understand (or have time to) the application either.

DBA's are there to help with the complex stuff. Use them wisely (and cost effectively!)

This example of using SP's to ends up adding yet another layer to your app and is more complex & longer that the code it intends to replace. Suddenly it's also more work to say add a column to the insert as you have yet another chunk of code to update.

Using stored procedures means you can't easily work with multiple versions of code against the same database (as your logic in SP's is only once per db, not back in the app layer). You lose the ability to easily version your data access layer and hence things tend to stagnate.

If you database is 10 GB, do you really want to have to be running a different instance for each build with changes to the db layer. Doesn't that sounds like a rather expensive approach? It's a recession after all.

Tuning SQL for Coldfusion app with stored procedures, is also more complex in many ways! Personally I love how easy it is to tweak the sql in normal bound CFQUERIES. Copy from debug, tweak in something like TOAD and then update the CF code, easy!

What I love the most about Coldfusion is how clean looking (aside from the verbose cfqueryparam) the database support is when compared to other programming langauges.

Alas the ugly embedded sql in strings syntax of some other languages, almost necessitates SP's

Plus you can't port the app to another (perhaps free database) without rewriting the entire sql layer! Expensive huh?

SQL Server people seem to love (and needs) SP's more than with say Oracle. With Oracle you get the same result and performance just by using simple bound sql. I think the horrible muck that was classic ASP database access really started this trend.

A lot of the common uses of SP's I have seen is what I consider Premature Optimisation

Most of the performance myths about SP's date back to the old days of 100Mhz servers. Servers are cheaper than developers right? Not that I'm advocating something which is going to make your app run slower either (generally speaking).

My Advice, avoid SP's (until there's a clear issue which they can resolve) and enjoy the nice flexibility of bound sql and faster development cycles.

Stimulating Discussions on QandA

Last nights Q&A on the ABC was brilliant, even more so when combined with Twitter! The video is already available on the site, transcripts to come!

On twitter, the top trends for a while was people commenting on the show by including a hash tag "#qanda" in the tweets.

The range of guests was interesting, Julie Bishop, deputy opposition leader; Craig Emerson, Minister for Small Business; David Marr, journalist; and Cindy Pan, doctor and author; and of course PJ O'Rourke.

The discussion was wide ranging and once again, a right wing female liberal politician came off looking second best. Julie Bishop, like Rachel Fry, national president of the Young Liberals, was intelligently shot down by both David Marr and also PJ O'Rourke.

A few of my selected highlights were

1. David Marr shooting down Julie Bishops attack on the Rudds Handouts @ 19:30, nicely broken by the Hamster comment from PJ.
2. David Marr saying that opposition was good for Julie, because it gave her time to think
3. PJ's passionate comments about refugees actually being good for a country rather than a burden

So I'm a leftie, I really do enjoy watching the right wingers squirm on such shows because it's one of those unusual moments these days where a politican can be properly challenged.

At one point some tweeted about PJ O'Rourke being the kinda of right winger than they thought (or was scared that) Malcolm Turnbull might be.

What was refreshing last night was watching some of the panellists thinking and talking, rather than falling back on blind belief. Personally I hate blind belief, we all have brains, we should all use them.

Even with religion, I personally view it more as an approach rather than a belief. When approached in that fashion, religion can be a very strong and powerful force for good. The moment you take your brain out of the equation and fall back on blind belief, things start to go wrong.

A little aside, but I am rambling, during the American Election, I remember watching CNN and the live twittering and when Obama was talking about health care, I tweeted something and someone commented back along the lines of, "so if they pay for our health care, should they pay for our food too?"

It reminded me of how lucky we are in Australia, far from perfect, but getting there!

So after you watch QandA, there's a good article over on the Huffington Post as well, Why I'm Not Now and Have Never Been the Democrats' "Rush Limbaugh"

iiNet free radio station list (m3u)

I shouldn't be so hard to find, the iiNet Freezone is a classic case
of what happens when you give a graphic designer a copy of flash
with explaining what the web is all about, nice easy to access content in HTML!!!!.

So without further ado, here's the iinet link to the page, complete with error message, that contains a playlist for all their free radio stations

iiNet free radio playlist

nuff said!

New Facebook is lame, what about using that widescreen

Ok, the world et all reckon Facebook screwed up badly with their new design.

I concur...

People love knobs and buttons to tweak play and configure things (badly but hey), most of the comments I have read about the new approach relate it to twitter, but in many ways it's gone almost as brittle as MySpamSpace.

Remember Myspace, lets not even go there.

I have said it before that FB's biggest failure IMHO is groups, currently FB groups are a bit like buying a Che Guevara t-shirt and thinking your a revolutionary..

<TANGENT>
Most people have the sucky new widescreens, some unlucky people have these 22" 1400x900 screens which say more about the lame influence of the Movie Industry than anything about usabilty.

Newspaper and books have traditionally an aspect ratio which is higher and than wider. That's because it's far more useful. As we are all climate change aware these days, I pose the question about all that white space on your average screen and how many black bubbles of CO2 are being wasted? Give us all more vertical resolution pleeeeaaasse
</TANGENT>

So back to FB. I would like to see the news feed break into an OPTIONAL Zac's Widescreen layout where I can see the summary (old style) newsfeed LHS, (with block this stupid app updates options please), with mouse over expanded views into the specific content RHS.

Why should we have to click and reload move just to see someone's profile, when the above approach achieves the same? Sure there is all this silly hitcount stats rubbish, but why not move to model which acknowledges information overload and allow us to quickly scan into something and then decide we want to read?

The newsfeed in FB was quite an innovation, no idea if it was FB who first pioneered this but they definitely got it out there.

So let's draw my two themes together, FB Groups could be the next big thing, all they need to do is adopt the same approach used for profiles for groups.

Where the F%&*%K is my newsfeed for groups? Discussions and comments are hidden, deep down and beneath one to two pages of boiler plate stuff that I honestly read once and then just blatantly IGNORE!!!!!

When I decide that I want to be a poster boy by joining a group which sounds cool or states a point, like "No Australian Internet Censorship", I don't really give a rats arse, ( I am refraining from swearing today) about 10 random people in the group.

As I am making a statement, similar to one sheep following another sheep who has found some nice tufts of green grass, all I care about is that there are 5 users or 2.5 million. Don't even get me started on the lame joke that viewing members of a FB group!!!

FB groups should be just like profiles, updates first, static info, a click away. Plus we need some innovative approaches to showing discussions, aka Gmail.

This could be so F%&^&%^king huge, it's unbelievable that FB have consistently failed to do anything in this area.

So in Zac's Widescreen FB, we have a two column home page, LHS has a configurable newsfeed with rollover insight into the newsfeed items. Groups becomes more like people and the conversation level will grow.

Twitter is something different and IMHO will never achieve the sheer joy of comments on FB about status updates.

Nuff said..... Time for my second Coffee of the day :)

Sideways: Travels With Kafka, Hunter S. And Kerouac

After the pleasure of attending this book's launch last week, I'm chomping at the bit to read it!

I'm actually going to wait for a few relaxed hours to really enjoy the book and potentially read the entire book in one sitting :) Otherwise despite my speed reading, I'll end up staying up very very late reading..

From Rainbow Serpent 2006

I love the title, having first met Patrick on the renegade Cairns floor at the end of Rainbow Serpent in 2006 (as seen above in full flight), I have no doubt he's conjured up what is going to be a highly entertaining read.

Having not read the book, I'd suggest jumping over to the Patrick's site and having a read about both the author and his drug fuelled adventures around the world.

You can buy it online at Boomerang Books or if your in Melbourne, I know that Readings had some copies last week!

I'll follow up with a review

Quick fix for the annoying windows services admin ui defaults

One of the great interface crimes with Windows is the Computer Management Console!

As a web developer, I end up starting and stopping services a lot. The default interface is rubbish, but did you know you can change it? Probably not, it's classic poor interface design.

I really hate the extended versus standard mode default and that I have to make al these redundant clicks... but there is a solution!

So here you go, How to Configure Services MMC Snap-in to Open in Standard View by Default

I can't believe I never thought of searching for this before.....

Basically the cliff notes summary is, you can always open via explorer a MMC file in "Author" mode via a right click, tweak it and then save it as the default view.

For example in my case is simply having Computer Management open to Services in Standard Mode.

3 annoying clicks you never have to repeat again!