Monthly Archives: March 2005

ColdFusion Components

Posted on by
Reply

I’m a big fan of Cold Fusion Components. The problem is that I’m not exactly sure how to get the most out of them. For me, the CFC (ColdFusion Component) is kind of like a really “good” modern art piece. I know that there are all kinds of cool stuff going on, but I’m not exactly sure how to figure it out or what it means.

Because of that, I’m always on the lookout for good examples or ideas for CFCs. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of stuff out there. The Macromedia site has some good articles, but I read one today that I liked – http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-22_11-5144505.html.

It’s not really all that informative from an idea standpoint, but so far my adventures into CFC land have just been creating glorified user defined functions. I think that the maintainability and the separation of business logic from presentation is important, but I have yet to really capture the essence of CFCs in any of my code. I think Polymorphism is the first step to doing that, and the article presented some good examples.

Of course my housecat could definitely eat a Zebra. Shadow is awesome.

Props to Macromedia

Posted on by
Reply

One of my big complaints with Macromedia has been their lack of any kind of public relations push for ColdFusion. As I’ve gotten more familiar with the “scene” I’ve come to the conclusion that part of the reason they haven’t is because ColdFusion couldn’t compete with other alternatives. ASP.NET was more powerful, more widespread and essentially free for companies who used IIS. There is also a dearth of developers for .NET because it’s a Microsoft product. For smaller sites, PHP was a good free alternative. ColdFusion, in my mind, didn’t really do anything to distinguish itself from the pack.

Now, with MX 7 it seems like they’re finally starting in that direction. Ben Forta blogged about an eweek article that reviewed MX 7 and found it “enterprise” worthy. It’s a good review and highlights many of the things that MX 7 can do for enterprises. With it’s focus on OO programming (in the form of CFC’s), the great web services inclusion and the addition of a report builder, Macromedia looks like it’s playing with the big boys.

I also didn’t think Macromedia did enough to leverage its fantastic adoption of Flash into marketing ColdFusion. I’ve always felt that if they could show that Flash and ColdFusion go hand in hand, or that using ColdFusion could make Flash development better and smoother, that the technology would sell itself. Now, finally, with the ability to use the cfform tag to create Flash forms, they’re starting to do it. I see a Macromedia trifecta of rich web applications with ColdFusion, Flex and Flash.

Good job Macromedia.

Stocks for the Future

Posted on by
Reply

I finished my book, The Future for Investors, over the weekend but didn’t get a chance to blog my final thoughts on it. I’m still very impressed by the research that Siegel put in. Reading some of his thoughts about the internet bubble and his take on some of Warren Buffett’s investing ideas made the book pretty entertaining. There are some great quotes from people who thought that Dr. Siegel was crazy when he predicted in 2000 that the stock market was in for a shock.

Another reason I liked the book was because it really showed, in raw data, how good a careful, sustained investment strategy can be. I see my portfolio as something I’ll cash out to help pay for a house or to help pay for kids college, but I wanted to find a good way to invest for the long, LONG term – retirement. Siegel convinced me that investing in quality stocks that pay high dividends is the way to go.

There are some things I disagree with him on however. After reading the book, those who invested in Oil, Brand-name consumer staples and Pharmaceuticals would have done the best. He thinks those industries are poised for more gains and that Oil in particular is still a good bet. He and I may just differ on our time frames, but I think that 50 years from now, the oil companies won’t be the money makers they were 50 years ago. Instead, I’ve decided to focus on big Pharma (Pfizer), Software (Microsoft) and Telecommunications (SBC). I think that those industries will bring the kind of returns that Siegel talks about in his book and 50 years from now, they’ll be considered “tried and true” instead of the “bold and new”.

Arch Coal Downloaded

Posted on by
Reply

I finally got the stored proc and the historical price download from Yahoo working. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out but it takes a while to insert. I inserted every price from August 1988 to today, so it wasn’t an insignificant amount of data but I’m still planning to tweak it to see if I can speed it up.

I also need to clean up the database a bit and make sure the foreign keys are in all of the correct places. I’ve got a table for Stock Info, which contains the Stock ID, the ticker and an ID for the type of security it is (option, equity, future, ect). Then I have a table that stores the price information and it has a reference to the Stock ID that I need to turn into a foreign key.

Now that I’ve finally got data in, I can start playing with the new chart features in MX 7.

Ramblings

Posted on by
Reply

A couple of random thoughts. First, my umbrella was killed yesterday by wind, which has happened to me a couple of times (it’s always sad). But here’s the thing. They make windproof umbrellas! Seriously, why didn’t anyone tell me? I feel like I missed the bus to join the “umbrella club” because I didn’t need one until I came to Penn. So do you think I can sport the Oakley umbrella? No?

Second, for Lent I gave up “junk food” which was a pretty tough thing to actually define. But unfortunately, Haribo Fizzy Cola’s fit into the category no matter what definition you use
(and yes, the idea of a 5 lb box of Fizzy Cola sends me to my happy place). But after Lent was over, I went to the Haribo website to check it out.

Wow. It reminded me of a game I like to play called “For Kids or Stoners”. Seriously, check out the website. Is this for kids, or for someone who’s high? Really? Are you sure? Next week’s topic is Spongebob Squarepants.

Cold Fusion App In The House

Posted on by
Reply

I spent most of the evening putting together the first few parts of my app. I created my first application.cfc (which only sets the database variables). It doesn’t seem very different from the application.cfm file but I also haven’t had a chance to really dig into it.

I also created the base CFC for the app and tested the database connection. The DB connection works fine (which means I set up everything correctly, which is suprising) but my tag isn’t working correctly. Getting that working is the mission for tomorrow.

Cold Fusion at Home

Posted on by
1

One of my coworkers told me about a development version of Cold Fusion that I can run at home. It doesn’t seem to be crippled in any way except that it can only be accessed as localhost and on a couple of clients. It’s perfect for what I need, so I’ve put down my Microsoft Kool-Aid and installed in on my Win 2k3 box.

I’m actually pretty excited about it because I already know a good amount of Cold Fusion but I haven’t had time to play with the most current version yet. There’s a lot of cool stuff I can think of to put in the app I’m writing here at home.

The Green River Star

Posted on by
Reply

I just bit the bullet and subscribed to the Green River Star. I went to high school in Green River, Wyoming and I’ve wanted to subscribe to their weekly paper for a while. It used to be because I was homesick but now it’s just that I like to know what’s going on. I guess I just don’t like to feel disconnected from my roots. Even though I wasn’t born in Wyoming, it’s where I spent most of middle school and all of high school, so it’s essentially where I grew up.

cascade.mtn

Posted on by
Reply

That’s my domain – cascade.mtn.

I did figure out the slow logon problems were a DNS issue. The DNS server wasn’t registering correctly with the Active Directory service and was causing problems. I think this was cbecause I wasn’t actually registering using a domain, like yahoo.com or digitalbackcountry.com – I was just trying to use ‘cascade’. So I ended up creating a fake domain called cascade with a .mtn suffix (for mountain).

When I was in middle/high school I had all kinds of cool ideas for domain names. My best idea was to have an “Olympus” domain with individual computers named after Greek gods (and Zeus as the DC). But for this particular domain I took a little influence from my wife and named all of the computers after mountains in the Cascade Range.

I’m heading to Jersey today but this weekend I want to start on the asp.net/SQL Server part of the project. I patched the SQL Server to Service Pack 3 yesterday and created most of the tables I want to use. Now I just need to program up some ASP database interaction so I can populate my tables with data from Yahoo. It’s going to be very similar to the method we use in OTIS, just customized to my stock holdings and interests.

SQL Server Nerdness

Posted on by
2

Ciara left for Boston today which means I’m a sad bachelor for a couple of days. It also means that Shadow and I are going to spend more time tweaking the Windows 2003 server I installed this week. Right now the domain logon and accessing file shares is really, really slow. In doing some research I think it has to do with DNS. I’m getting in way over my head, but it’s kind of fun. I plan on checking that out tonight.

I also installed the SQL server this week and that seems to be working. I haven’t had time to sit down and do anything with it yet but once I get the domain issues sorted out, I’ve got a couple of ideas for it. This weekend I’m hoping to learn enough ASP.NET to download data from Yahoo! and insert it into my database. I will keep you posted on how it goes.