New Siding & Trip To Hocking Hills
The last several days have been very busy. The siding for my house finally came in Wednesday of last week. They were able to get the lower half of the house down on Thursday, but due to poor weather on Friday, they didn't get to finish up the siding until Saturday morning. (They started promptly at 7:30am on Saturday morning.) The outside of the house looks really good, but we noticed some of the puddy that was applied to the dry wall inside was knocked off (which chipped the paint.) They're supposed to come out to take a look at the damage and see what they can do to patch things.
Sunday we headed down to Hocking Hills for the day. The leaves are changing color quickly, and it was just a beautiful day for hiking. The weather was perfect—couldn't ask for a better day. Got lots of pictures which are posted over in my photoalbum.
ISP Change...
Well, hopefully you all are starting to show up on the new site. The DNS information is starting to propogate and I've got redirects set up for those of you who are still getting the old DNS information. Hopefully I won't run in to any mail problems. Lucky, I still have a few days to work out any kinks that may occur.
Migrating from CF v4.5/5 to CFMX v6.1
Ok, I've been migrating a lot of stuff from older version of ColdFusion (that were based on either C or C++) to ColdFusion MX v6.1 (which is based on Java.) I've run into several anomalies, which I thought I'd document here.
<cfdirectory>
The <cfdirectory> tag no longer returns the ./.. rows in the query. I had several applications that used <cfdirectory> and I was manually filtering out these entries by starting on the third row of the queryset. Obviously, this caused problems in the CFMX v6.1, since those records no longer exist.
Moving ISPs...
I'm planning on moving my domains over to a new ISP starting tomorrow. If you start seeing automatic re-directs, don't worry about it—it's all part of the plan.
Officially Dating One Year Now...
Well, Jenn and I have been dating exactly a year today. It's hard to believe it's been a year already, but then again so much has happened in the past 12 months that in some regards it seems a lot longer. Anyway...
Happy Anniversary Jenn!
Half-life 2 Source Code Stolen...
It seems the source code for Half-life 2 has been making its rounds around the Internet lately.
The theft of part of its source code has delayed until April 2004 the launch of "Half Life II," the hotly anticipated alien-hunting game of Vivendi Universal Games, a company official said.
"A third of the source code was stolen," VU Games president of international operations Christophe Ramboz told daily Les Echos in its Tuesday edition. "It's serious because it forces us to delay the launch of the game by at least four months, that is to April 2004. Just the time to rewrite parts of the game."
- Reuters
My feeling is they're using stolen source code as an excuse for the delay to April 2004. I can't understand why they would think they need to re-write things completely just to release the game. Granted, I haven't looked at the code to see what aspects of the game are in there, but I can't see why you'd need to re-write the whole thing.
Weekend Update...
Well, I had a busy weekend. We had band practice Friday night. We were supposed to be trying out another drummer, but like the 3 previous tryouts, it didn't end up working out for scheduling reasons. The guys wants to reschedule, he just had to work. It's probably for the best anyway, as it gave Todd, Eric and I another chance to practice. I really need to force myself to practice for at least 30 minutes a night. It just seems like every time I put a ton of time into practicing, we stop playing for a month or more and then I get depressed about not playing. Anyway, I need to buckle down.
Saturday was Justin's bachelor party. We met up at BW3s around 6pm and got Justin pretty liquored up. We then proceeded to another location, but Justin was a bit too inebriated to really enjoy himself there. I ended up hanging outside of the club with Justin and until he was able to compose himself a bit and I was sure he was feeling better. It was a little after midnight, so I just decided to call it a night. About half the guys were headed home, while the other half decided to hang around the club.
Didn't do much of anything Sunday, just took the day off. I did finish Jedi Academy. It's was a cool game, but a little too short. I wish there would have been a few more missions. I liked the relatively short mission length, but another 5 missions or so would have made the game even more enjoyable—especially because the first 5 are pretty boring.
More blogging about qForms...
Christian Cantrell recently blogged on the issue of server-side and client-side validation in entry "Validation - Client or Server-side?." While he doesn't mention qForms specifically in his writings, many people commented on the usefulness of qForms and how it makes implemented the validation a cinch. Anyway, it's always good to read others viewpoints on my projects—especially when some of the comments come from people I respect. :)
Dream Theater's "Train of Thought"
Here's the album cover for Dream Theater's Train of Thought CD—which is going to be released in November.
PengoWorks LLC
Well, I got my LLC agreement back from the attorney yesterday. PengoWorks LLC is now an official corporation—instead of just my private consulting business. I'm still waiting on a few things to file with the state, but that stuff should arrive through the mail any day now.
New System Built
Well, I got all my pieces for my new box yesterday (well the pieces that I mail ordered anyway.) I bought the wrong Coolermaster Aero Fan (I read the socket specs wrong on it,) but other than that I got everything I needed. I decided just to put the stock Intel fan on, but I did use the Artic Silver "Ceramique" that I bought. I got Windows XP loaded on it last night and got most of the patches installed before shutting the thing down for the night.
I did wrong in to one snag that I'm still trying to work through. When setting up a Serial ATA (SATA) drive, the system won't recognize it as a boot device unless you map it in the BIOS to one of the IDE channels. At least this is the way it's working on my Giga-byte GA-8KNXP motherboard at the moment. I bought two hard drives: a Western Digital WD) 36GB 10,000 RPM SATA drive (which I'm using as the master) and a WD 200GB 7,000RPM ATA/133 drive I'm planning on using as a storage/game drive.
Anyway, I'm still trying to figure out how to get the 200GB drive to recongnize while plugged in to the first ATA/133 port as IDE1, while the SATA drive is mapped to IDE0. It sounds like I'll have to plug the 200GB drive in the to the third IDE connector into the IDE5 slot.
Image: Colin "Dio" Powell
Colin "Dio" Powell
I didn't know Colin Powell was a Ronnie James Dio fan. :)
New PC components on its way!
I bought the components to buy a new PC yesterday—they should be here tomorrow! If I plan on doing consulting, then I want to make sure I have a machine which will really do what I want to do. I've decided I really needed a dual monitor system—that way I can have source code in one monitor and the application in the other. (Plus, Flash development is just a pain without dual monitors.)
I'll post specs and pictures of the boxes when I get everything done.
Work sucks: Office relocation...
Well today was a pretty shitty day. For those of you who don't know, my employer has been planning to move office space locations. They still have the building I was in leased until February, but they decided to go ahead and move everyone today. The move has been in the planning stages for months, the actual move has been delayed several times over the past 8 weeks. Anyway, last Thursday evening we got a company wide e-mail letting us know we were going to move on the 24th.
I can't say I was enthusiastic with the idea of moving locations—especially since my last day is just several weeks away. It seems like a real waste of everyone's time. It also hasn't helped that they originally forget to assign me and my fellow soon-to-be-ex co-worker Joel office space (have they forgotten about us so quickly?!? :) ) but they also jammed us in to small little cubicles—well, I don't know that it fits the definition of cubicle; our desks only have two walls.
Anyway, after setting up my two work PCs—my desktop and my notebook—it pretty much takes up all my desktop space. They also didn't bother cleaning any of the desks. I opened my desk drawer only to find the words "Clean Me" written by some using their finger and dragging it through the dust. Since I'm only going to be there for a few weeks, I don't think I'm even go to bother cleaning up. I'm just going to throw what I have where ever. I'll probably get bored enough to actually clean it, but I sure don't feel like I should have to clean it. The building should have been cleaned up before we moved in.
Image: Hurricane Isabelle
Found this picture of the Hurricane Isabelle out at sea on another blog site. Thought it was a impressive image.