Adam Howitt's Blog

ColdFusion Certification Study Group Week 3

At : 10:02 AM | Link | Coldfusion | Comments (0) | Send | 481 Views |

This week the 5 chapters we covered included lists, arrays, structures, session state management and locking.  As usual, there were grumbles about my questions being tough but some people still got through them.

We have a new member to the group this week as German Flores joined us from the American Bar Association to study with us.  I'd like to say we could have more people along but we're at capacity in the boardroom now with 10 people studying.  Texas Tim and Jaime have been the stars so far with an average of 85% over the first three weeks.  I'm tracking back at 82% so I've got to study twice as hard for next week ;-)

Here are the questions for week 3.  Someone asked about the answers and I did think about posting them with explanations of why some are wrong.  I was thinking that it might be good not to provide them so people could research the answers to help them learn but I've changed my mind.  Later this week I'll update each certification post with the answers for the spirit of the question.  I say "spirit of the question" because we get into big discussions about whether something is possible vs. was that what the person asking the question intended.

Reason 1 billion to use Firefox 2

At : 4:13 PM | Link | Coldfusion | Comments (9) | Send | 1139 Views |

Nope, not the automatic conversion of RSS feeds to friendly pages offering subscription options.  Not the automatic spell checking of text inputs on a form.  I'm talking about excel style table controls.  Tim Yager, our Texas transplant at the office, just discovered that if you are viewing a table in Firefox 2 and hold down the Control key you can select cells from the table or drag a selection of cells.  Unlike the old behavior where a whole row from the table is selected as you drag down a column, the behavior becomes similar to Microsoft Excel where you can drag only a column or series of columns.

It took us a little experimentation to distinguish whether this was some nifty javascript in the CFDUMPs we were viewing or a browser feature.  Turns out it works on any tables but it's damn handy for CFDUMPs of query results.  Thanks Tim.

ColdFusion Certification Study Group Week 2

At : 3:38 PM | Link | Coldfusion | Comments (2) | Send | 365 Views |

Week 2 came in a hurry and we have some particularly tricky questions this week covering chapters 6 thru 10 of the Ben Forta study guide book.  Some of the answers were more contentious this week but we let it pass and we're all learning how to discuss the merits of a right and wrong answer.  Download the PDF document with the questions.

Digitally Entwined

At : 1:35 AM | Link | Photography | Comments (0) | Send | 818 Views |

I'm glad to say that the details are all coming together on the Chicago Flickr Meetup group's first gallery show: we have our youtube promo video ready (with excellent soundtrack by recent Today Show guest Yvonne Doll and her band The Locals), the site is launched and the press have all the details.  If you live near Chicago and want to come and see, the opening night is Friday 2nd March at 7pm.  Upcoming.org has an RSVP mechanism and for anyone who wants to be added to the evite, let me know in the comments.  Full details on the site.

ColdFusion Certification Study Group

At : 10:17 AM | Link | Coldfusion | Comments (5) | Send | 454 Views |

We have started a weekly ColdFusion Certification Study Group at the office to help everyone prepare for the test.  I have heard a lot of people bad mouth the industry value of CF certification but the marketability of the certification is the last thing on my mind. For me it's a great team building event, it helps us learn more about the newer features of the language we haven't used and lastly it's good fun.

Nine people expressed an interested in the brown bag lunch session which takes one hour each Monday for 10 weeks.  Everyone bought the ColdFusion MX7 Certified Study guide by Ben Forta. We are covering 5 chapters a week and five developers are responsible for developing five questions for a chapter. 

Early Monday morning I compile the questions into a Word document and then when we meet, we answer the 25 questions before reviewing the answers and discussing why some of the options are incorrect or some are more correct. 

I think the involvement of each team member in the process of writing questions means they are invested in the process. That said, I will be listing the questions each week from our study group if anyone would like to follow along.  This week's document covers week 1 - chapters 1 thru 5 and the questions were provided by me, Kelly Tetterton, Tim Yager, Jough Dempsey and Jaime Smith. 

After certification we'll have a good old trip to the pub to celebrate. 

Team Fusebox needs you

At : 3:24 PM | Link | Fusebox | Comments (3) | Send | 993 Views |

Last week at the Frameworks Conference I joined Team Fusebox to help share some of the load.  At the meeting, the member of Team Fusebox picked an area of responsibility so I jumped in to lead the marketing team.  My role is not just to do the marketing but to find volunteers interested in becoming part of a marketing team dedicated to finding the best ways to market Fusebox. 

I've worked extensively with Google Analytics to help our clients understand what is happening on their website and whether they are getting any value for the $3000 pay per click campaigns they host.  We signed up for a Google Analytics account now to help us make decisions by the numbers and try some new ideas but the key is that we have a baseline before the marketing team kicks into high gear.

One of my goals for the team is to dig in to understand what gave Model Glue and Rails such traction in such a short amount of time.  I understand that there are technical differences but I believe that a good deal of the success was gained through smart marketing.

I use Fusebox 2, 3 and 4 every day at Duo Consulting and we have some high profile sites running in various flavors of our Fusebox based CMS.  What we've found is that not only is it stable and capable but it delivers under significant load.  Training new developers the coding standard becomes much easier when everyone knows where to look to find the queries or the form submission pages.  Maintaining over 100 fusebox applications is easier as a result of this standard approach.

So what about you?  Do you use Fusebox?  Have you tried the other frameworks, and if so why?  What was it about Model Glue that caught your interest?  Where did you find out about it and what made it easy for you to get started?  If you are interested in joining the marketing team to look into these kind of questions and have an interest in helping drive Fusebox forward, please let me know and I'll get you added to the mailing list.  If you would rather email me to join, send something to adamhowitt@gmail.com with Fusebox in the subject line.  I'm looking for people not only who know what questions to ask and who to ask but also people who are creative thinkers who can generate ideas for promoting the site.

Lastly, if you didn't see Sandy Clark's post, we have a contest to win two free passes to CFObjective and one pass to CFUnited.  To win we are looking for a redesign of the Fusebox site.  Full details can be found over at the Fusebox Wiki. We're really excited that Jared Rypka-Hauer and Michael Smith of Teratech offered these prizes - this should get some really good entries flooding in.

ColdFusion Development

At : 9:42 AM | Link | JavaScript, AJAX, Coldfusion, SQL | Comments (8) | Send | 862 Views |

Despite the bottomless pit of information available in Google, I find myself falling back on a core set of sites for the answers to my questions.  Through the magic of Google Co-op I have created a ColdFusion Development Search Engine.  It is a hand made list of sites I trust for answers to my ColdFusion questions.  I've also included and tagged JavaScript, SQL, Fusebox and AJAX resources with the idea that anything related to CF that I use on a daily basis to do my job is fair game.

If you can't find what you are looking for, let me know which site provided your answer and I can add it to the list after reviewing it.   

UPDATE: The URL for the search is http://www.webdevref.com 

Nat Papovich vs Hal Helms

At : 2:04 PM | Link | Coldfusion | Comments (4) | Send | 366 Views |

Last night it all came to a head and the inevitable happened. Hal and Nat got down and settled their differences the way you do when all lines of communication have finally broken down. Unaccompanied minors probably should turn away at this point...

CFDJ Ad Frenzy

At : 5:05 PM | Link | Coldfusion | Comments (12) | Send | 469 Views |

I wasn't going to post this but after some discussion at the frameworks conference it seems I'm not the only one to notice this.

CFDJ has a virus.  Something has taken control of their design and usability department and is automatically pulling in ads to every page.  See that great RSS feed listing great content you want to read?  Click on that link and you will see it.  It manifests itself as the 10:1 ads to content ratio and can be seen below.