http://www.pragprog.com/wishlist/chris-simmons-63403-de6fd2bc84

A few things you should know about me:

1. I like lists.  A lot.  I make them all the time for everything.
2. I hate repetition and drudgery in my work.  If there is a (legitimate) shortcut I want to know about it.
3. I’m a ColdFusion web developer who dabbles in jQuery.
4. I dig Firefox for helping me with all of the above.

Now this is where you come in… What are your favorite/most useful Firefox Ad-ins that help you get your work done on a daily basis?

Here are mine (alpha order):

• ColorZilla – Eyedropper/colorpicker
• Dummy Lipsum – Generate “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text.
• Evernote Web Clipper – For selecting text to evernote
• Fast Dial – Visual bookmark homepage
• Firebug – My main usage is debugging AJAX
• FIreGestures – Executes commands with mouse gestures
• FireShot – Screen shot utility
• iMacros – Awesome utility for building test cases or automating repetitious tasks
• TinyURL Generator – Generates TinyURLs
• Web Developer – Adds tons of tools (too numerous to list)
• Xmarks – Sync your bookmarks across multiple machines (and platforms!)

Thanks, I look forward to hearing from you.

• Click the Project Window Tab
• Hit FN+CMD+F10
• Select “Filters…” in the dialog that opens
• Check the boxes beside all the types you want to hide
• Click ‘Ok’

Pretty simple.  So why did it take me an hour to figure it out

Today’s Global Knowledge newsletter letter informed me (in very cheeky fashion) that ColdFusion is # 5 on their “Dying Technology” list:

“If any of these skills are your main expertise, perhaps it’s time to retrain.”

Here’s the whole article: http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/generic.asp?pageid=2347&country=United+States

The notion of ColdFusion being dead has been debated into the ground so I’m not going to belabor it.

IMHO, ColdFusion is the best thing that ever happened to me from an IT standpoint.¬† If you want to get things done quickly, easily and reliably use it.¬† If you are thinking of ColdFusion along with COBOL, Netware, Flannel Shirts and “Grunge” Bands From Seattle, and¬† you might want step outside your house more.¬† It’s not the mid 90′s anymore.

I have a ways to go, but this is a start.¬† Next up… jQuery proficiency.

1. Create an svn dump file of the xproject repo: svnadmin dump C:\code-repo\xproject > c:\xproject.dmp
2. Create the new yproject svn repo: svnadmin create C:\code-repo\yproject
3. Load the dump of the old repository into the new one: svnadmin load C:\code-repo\yproject < C:\xproject.dmp

Sweet.

Get the update here.

Read the original post here.

Today I achieved something I am very excited about. ¬†I got a couple of lines (and one of those is a comment) of code included in one of Ray Camden’s projects at RIAForge. ¬†The project is GoogleCal. ¬†It’s a ColdFusion CFC for interacting with Google’s Calendar service. ¬†My tiny, wee contribution: helping to submit an “all day” event. ¬†It is such a small, small, small, small, small (keep going), miniscule piece of Ray’s project, but just to be able to contribute ANYthing to someone who gives so much to the CF community is freaking AWESOME.

Check it GoogleCal out here.

One of the problems I came across was that the hosting company set the mail server to be a different one than what we had for CF7. Why did this matter? Well, there were about 300 messages sitting in the “Undelivr” folder that needed to go out. In each of those messages was the old (now incorrect) mail server info. Since I was under the gun to get the mail out I pulled them all down via FTP to parse through them with Dreamweaver.

I used this article to configure Dreamweaver to edit my extensions.txt file to be able to open and perform search and replace on .cfmail files:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_16410

Here is a what the extensions.txt file looks like:

Once I got all of the .cfmail files updated, I FTP’d them back into the spool folder for re-processing. No dice. ColdFusion moved it all back to the “Undelivr” folder with a cryptic error:

The ColdFusion Mail Spool Encountered An Invalid Spool File In The Spool Directory. The invalid file MailXXXXXX.cfmail was moved to the undeliverable directory.

The next step… Hot Fix. Read about it here.

After the Hot Fix I again dropped the .cfmail files back into the spool folder for re-processing. This time… Sweet Success.