Winners never quit…

By Donnie Bachan | Published: January 2, 2012

My last post on here was way back in July and I should be ashamed of myself. I start every year with the hope that I'll be an amazing blogger and the internet will adore me, I will score fans and forever be admired. As I get older, I realise that this is not likely to happen, however, I'll continue to post here and be determined to make a little comment about something everyday.

So, for my first post of 2012 I will comment on my wonderful trip to Paris. I really love that city. I stayed at the amazing Hotel Jules, one of the GLA Hotels and had the privilege of being looked after by Mr. Jean-Louis Descoins and his exceptional staff. Don't forget to stay there on your next trip to the city of love. The weather was dull and grey most days but the sites never cease to amaze. I made my way to the Musee D'Orsay and Sacre Coeur, two sites that you must visit at least once. I did have the chance to catch up on my reading, and I'll tell you something, I really love my Kindle Keyboard! I was able to power through the last bits of The Once and Future King by T.H. White and knock off the classic The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thanks to some generous gift giving I've also got World War Z by Max Brooks and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson on my list. I know, I'm such an amateur when it comes to reading for fun but I'm hoping to turn pro pretty soon!

What's on your reading list?

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Google’s recent UI changes get a +1

By Donnie Bachan | Published: July 8, 2011

I finally had a chance to look at Google+ tonight and in all honesty it is everything I expected it to be. It isn't much at the moment since being on a social network without many friends is like being at a rock concert by yourself. However, the user interface really appeals to me. In fact, all of the UI changes implemented by Google in recent days are exceptional. Yes, people will still find faults but I like the consistency across the services. The design itself makes really good use of soft lines and subtle highlights. I've also loaded the new design for Gmail, which is particularly stunning. The additional white space and sparing use of color as prominent call to actions is really exceptional. I suppose it will only be a matter of time before this is rolled out across the other properties. I know this would be a welcome change to the Google Docs section.

All in all I like the direction that Google is taking. Consistency in branding is always a big plus.

Posted in Business, General | Leave a comment

Column formats in CFSpreadsheet

By Donnie Bachan | Published: May 6, 2011

I really like the spreadsheet functions added to ColdFusion 9. It makes my life so much easier but I discovered an annoyance with the spreadsheetFormatColumn function today. It would seem that you have to set the column formats after you add data to a spreadsheet. If you attempt to set it before calling spreadsheetAddRows it will set the column format to default. Not cool.

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Can Delicious be resurrected?

By Donnie Bachan | Published: April 28, 2011

I was a big fan of Delicious because keeping track of all the sites that interest me is a hard task. The problem with this service though is that it is difficult to easily access the information unless you install a plugin on every browser that you use. This is even more of a problem when you have several machines both at home and at work. Of course, you can visit the site but the workflow is not ideal. The advent of tabs in browsers can allow you to open Delicious in one tab while working on other tabs, however, do you really want to have to keep that service open all the time? It just doesn't feel important enough.

My current solution to the bookmarking problem is to use Gmail. I email myself links then use labels to organise them. Again, not ideal, but it has two advantages over Delicious.

  1. I typically always have Gmail open in a tab during the day
  2. Gmail is with me everywhere, including on my mobile devices

I believe that Delicious can be resurrected if it can overcome these two main hurdles. Can the YouTube founders do this? Maybe, but it would be very difficult. The incarnation of the service will have to be much more compelling than it is currently. A utopian solution would be to get the main browser creators to include a reference to a universal bookmarking service that uses Twitter or Facebook logins for access. Hey, I never said I wasn't a dreamer!

Posted in General, Web 2.0 | Leave a comment

Railo 3.2 + Tomcat + Mac Snow Leopard + Permission Denied

By Donnie Bachan | Published: April 24, 2011

I've finally started playing with Railo and tried installing it on my Mac with Snow Leopard installed. I wasn't able to get it to run initially but had to make two quick changes to get it running:

  1. Give the current user (the user under which you are currently logged in) Read + Write access to the entire* Railo folder, including all the sub folders.
  2. Change the default port for Tomcat from port 80, to port 8080 since I already had Apache running on port 80. To change the port, edit /Railo/Tomcat/conf/server.xml and change the connector port.

I have largely ignored Railo in the past but I am really eager to play around with it and get some stuff deployed on this platform.

* Note that I am using Railo in a development environment so I gave full Read + Write access to the entire Railo folder, in a production set up this would definitely not be a wise thing to do. I don't think this would be a problem in most development environments since the user under which Tomcat would be running would usually have the correct permissions.

Posted in ColdFusion, Programming, Tomcat | 2 Comments