Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

As I hope nearly everyone has heard by now, Railo finally went open source yesterday, you can check out the new Open Source Railo site at http://www.getrailo.org and as well that Railo Technologies has started up http://www.getrailo.com

But this post isn't about that. I have been involved with the guys at Railo for a long time and been very impressed with the work that they have been doing, so much so that I have decided to buy join them.

So, as from today I am the CEO of Railo Technologies UK.

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It has been a while in the making but finally I can announce that Mark Drew Consulting will be up and running as from the 9th of March.

Mark Drew Consulting is a little firm based in London specializing in CFML development, ColdFusion and Railo administration and deployment, process, development tools, ajax, frameworks as well as training and support. If you have any needs why not come and talk to us, we are friendly, and have cookies.

The new website should be going live before the 9th so you can have a look at some of the offerings and if you are interested you can always email me or use the contact form!

It has been a long time coming and I am sad to be leaving the guys at Design UK, if you have design, ecommerce, emarketing or content management projects you should definitely go talk to them! The smartest people I have worked with in my career and the most fun.

There are a number of projects I am looking forward to taking off the ground, some that I want to devote more time too and other ideas and developments that I really look forward to sharing with you all in the near future!

I have been so excited about this for the last few weeks, I can tell you that the future is bright!

Andy Allan, the man behind the "fast-becoming-legendary" Scotch-on-the-rocks conference has announced that tickets for this year's conference are finally available! The conference spans three locations: London, Manchester and Edinburgh all in a week and should be a blast as always! The tickets are priced at £49 + VAT for each event or if you want the full madness of the event, £129 + VAT for all three days. With some great speakers and awesome content, this shall be a great tour of the British Isles at least!

Next tuesday the UKCFUG is having a meeting about Cloud, Elastic and Virtual computing and how it can improve your deployments, expandability and reliability

Head over to the UKCFUG website to register for this event, it should be very enlightening!

 

I found something that I am not sure if it is a bug or a "feature" whilst developing some functionality in our CMS. Essentially imagine you have the following directory layout:

• index.cfm
• level1/
  • level2/
    • index.cfm

In the root index.cfm I want to expand the path to level2, that is, get the full folder path of "path2", you would do something like:
<cfset mypath1 = "/level1/level2">
   <cfdump var="#expandPath(mypath1)#">

Which (in my case) returns: /Library/WebServer/Documents/scratch/level1/level2

BUT if you add the forward slash to the path:
<cfset mypath2 = "/level1/level2/">
   <cfdump var="#expandPath(mypath2)#">
You get: /Library/WebServer/Documents/scratch/level1/level2/index.cfm/ ?!
Where did "index.cfm/" come from? I can understand how that might be useful in 0.1% of cases but not when you are simply trying to find the path to the folder. If you remove the index.cfm from the folder it all works fine.

Shome mishtake, shurely?

Would you like to own a Railo 3.0 Enterprise license all of your own? I am sure you would!

All you have to do is answer the question posed during Episode 3 of the CFDocs podcast and send your answers to podcast at ukcfug.org

You can get it via: iTunes , RSS or download the episode directly

Why don't you head over to the UKCFUG site and submit your questions about these topics?

We shall be discussing these topics in the podcast with the usual crew and hopefully get some wise people to share their thoughts!

Either Leave a comment, send an to podcast at ukcfug.org or call the ukcfug via Skype to have your question discussed (and maybe even answered!)

In a record breaking time, I managed to edit the latest episode of the CFDocs podcast for the UKCFUG. This time with a new "refreshing" intro tune and as per listener requests, I have shortened the intro (I mean sheesh! Was 30 seconds TOO long?)

I am looking at getting a couple of microphones for the next recording, but the problem is doing multi-track recording and getting it all setup. Some listeners (and in fact Brian Meloche from the CFConversations podcast) have recommended the Blue Snowball but alas, it is not available in the UK yet. So I might have to see about some other nice microphones, of course, any suggestions are warmly welcome!

My current workflow is as follows, we record on multiple laptops using Audacity, I then get those recordings and merge them into one recording and edit out all the bits, do some enveloping and trimming and then export an uncompressed file that I can use in Garageband. I then split the podcast track adding whatever images are required and URLs and export that.

The next part which I might change, depending on costs, is to upload it to Libsyn, which allows for FTP uploading and you can then put the title and description etc, and it will then publish an RSS feed and publish it ready for iTunes to publish out.
Although I have been using Linsyn for a while and it's pretty cheap at $5 a month for 100Mb fast access storage, I am thinking I might move all of the stuff over to Amazon S3 and use a Railo Amazon EC2 image to publish it out, so I shall let you know how that goes!

You can check out this month's edition, with myself, Kev McCabe, Andy Allan and Gert Franz from:
iTunes , RSS or download the episode directly

This is a bit of a personal posting, but Joe Rinehart's wife Dale was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) just after Christmas. You may have heard about it and if not, you can read more about it on his blog.

I have met Joe a few times and apart from being the brains behind Model-Glue, the framework that I use daily he is also an awesome person who I would love to help, and I presume (because I am like that) that if you are a member of the CF community you would too! Head over to http://www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com/ to show your support. Do it. We are a small enough community that we should be supporting the stars in it.

So finally, after the whole being ill and Christmas holidays hiatus, I finally managed to edit the CFDocs podcast from December (Follow the link above to get more details on the episode).

One of the things that has been concerning me was how to record the damn thing! I have a Yamaha 8:2 Mixer but still the mic's that we got for the first podcast turned out to be unpowered so we couldn't use them. This left me with a problem... how to record four people (and the audience) and keep the quality at *some* acceptable level.

What we did was put two MacBooks (one Pro, one not) and record the whole session down using Audacity and the built in Microphones. This worked well, and to get the synching of the two tracks at edit time I simply banged my finger sharply on the desk (to the hilarity of other people present) to get a nice spike that I could see in the track.

After editing both tracks, removing the "erms" and "arrs" and "so..." as well as some idle chatter I rendered down the recording and moved it into GarageBand to make the actual podcast and mix in the music track.

I would love to hear people's opinions if it worked or not, as well as any suggestions on (cheap!) setups to hopefully improve the sound quality. Remembering of course that there are usually four people speaking as well as maybe questions from the audience.

Otherwise, just enjoy the podcast!