Rob's Ramblings

Turns out converting a blog in the middle of the night isn't the best idea. You sometimes forget things. Like testing all the functions of the site before calling it a night. In particular the mobile site was down because it needed a soft link to the components so it could, you know, actually see them. Oops.

Judging by the 100+ errors I got overnight, I owe a few people an apology. Sorry!

This entry was posted on June 1, 2011 at 11:17 AM and has received 661 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

If you couldn't tell, I switched blog engines. What gave it away? Was it the fresh coat of paint, done in the classic "default blog theme"? The "new blog engine" smell? What's that...? Oh, I gave it all away in the title? Talk about anti-climactic.

Okay so the reasons are varied, but I am now running on Blog CFC. I used Stephen Moretti's guide to port my entries and data over from Mango. It was pretty smooth overall, with only a couple of issues related to my Mango setup being a bit different than normal.

One thing to note, all subscriptions were lost in the move, that's the one known downside to the porting scripts. I tried to manually update the entries here, but I may have missed some. So I apologize but you'll have to do that part again possibly.

At some point I'll get my own look and feel on this blog. It's not quite in the top 10 on my to-do list, but it's close.

This entry was posted on June 1, 2011 at 2:41 AM and has received 836 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

I pose this three-part question to anyone that reads this:

If you own a tablet of any kind...

1. Why did you get it?
2. What role does it fill in your life?
3. Are you glad you made the purchase?

Now the background for this: I am a full-time developer who works from home, and my wife and I have three kids 3 and under. I live in a fairly tech-deficient area, where most people own computers more than 5 years old and maybe you see some smartphones here and there. Ever since the iPad started the tablet revolution, I've always thought I might like one, but that was my inner geek talking, the one swayed by shiny new toys. But recently when attending cf.objective(), I noticed a lot of people had tablets of some kind. And it got me to thinking that I should poll people of a more similar background to me about why they pulled the trigger.

I'll be upfront and say that if/when I get a tablet, it will be from the iPad family. That's because I am a big fan of Apple products and use them every day, so I like to keep things in the same family. Nothing against Android or Blackberry, just not my personal cup of tea. Also, my birthday is coming up in late September, and I'm thinking that if I got ideas on how it could be a good fit in to my life in a useful way, I might answer everyone's question of "what do you want?" with an idea of all going in together on a tablet.

So... anyone willing to share their stories, please comment to this. Please don't spend time trying to convince me of which one to get, like I said I've already made up my mind on that front. I just could really use help on why to get it.

Thanks.

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This entry was posted on May 22, 2011 at 3:36 PM and has received 1221 views. There are currently 8 comments. Print this entry.

So my blog has gotten a little dusty, this is going to happen from time to time. This is beginning the my busiest time of the year annually at work, and I also had some elective surgeries done in January to repair some longstanding issues finally fixed. While being doped up on Vicodin would make for some interesting blogging, I felt discretion was the bestter path to take...

But today Viviotech gave me a late Christmas present and upgraded my VPS to ColdFusion 9 (woo hoo!) and my old Mango Blog bit the big one because of it (boo!). I'm not sure why this happened, I had not altered the code in any meaningful way that shold have caused it to bomb. And to be frank, Mango Blog's error handling is... less than informative - even with Coldfire running I couldn't find much in the way of meaningful error messages to work on.

So, I backed up the database (God love MySQL for making this task a cinch compared to MSSQL), and nuked my old blog code and installed the latest (v1.4.3). Then after a little trial and error with the database, I got it all back running. In doing so, I had lost the mods I had made to the old design, so I am using this one as a starting point. I like the layout, but not a big fan of the blue, so on my to-do list now is a revaming of the color scheme.

Now that I have CF9 on here, I'm looking forward to some big things in 2010. It will get even better when my day job finally gets out of the Stone Age and gets up up from CFMX7 to CF9 in a few months! It feels like being caged when there's so much that you either cannot do, or have to jump through so many hoops that it's more cost-effective to wait for the CF9 cavalry to arrive.

This entry was posted on February 5, 2010 at 1:45 AM and has received 387 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.