burningguitar

An interesting video about desks. There is one person interviewed in the video that talked about how their desk at work is much different to their desk at home. At work my desk is minimalist. At home my desk is cluttered with this and that..and of course the other thing. Public space vs private space I suppose. I like the idea of a nomadic lifestyle. Give me a laptop or even an ipad with a net connection and I’m in business. Still, even though there is the allure of being able to work from anyplace on the planet I find that having my own space is essential. I just spent a ridiculous (for me anyway) amount of money for an Aeron chair on ebay. It makes spending time in my space much more comfortable. I make web stuff and music in my space. I don’t need many material things. A laptop, a guitar, a net connection and of course a desk.

Click here for the video...thought provoking

My blog is so dismally pathetic. No posts since 2010. I actually forgot it existed until I did a search on myself. So basically the last couple of months can be described in two words…tragic upheaval. You know the kind that spins you around 180 degrees and makes you look at your life from a completely different perspective. For one I had to put my dog to sleep. A companion for the last 10 years. That unfortunately wasn’t the worst part, which I really don’t want to go into publicly. If you know me, well you know…sometimes life throws you a curve ball.

Curve balls can be a good thing if you have the courage to swing at them. I swung, I connected,  I think it may just be headed out of the park.

I’m currently in the process of moving some of my sites from Coldfusion to the open source version Railo.

I’m experimenting with installing and configuring on a local VM of Ubuntu, if that goes well I’ll rent a vps package and install there. Helpful instructions for installing Railo on Ubuntu can be found here.

I’ll post the pitfalls I run into (if any) later.

My son Dylan is having a photography show at Joe Sippers in Effingham. He’s very talented. Check out his photo gallery

Not much about music lately. Not much about anything.

Except

Listen to the album, cd or whatever label get’s attached to a group of songs these days
“Inner Speaker” by Tame Impala
“Street Songs of Love” by Alejandro Escovedo
How to Destroy Angels if you are into Nine Inch Nails or West Indian Girl, otherwise it will drive you crazy.

My posts to this blog have been seldom lately but putting this out here in hope that it will help someone out of the same sticky situation I’ve been in for the past few weeks.

I took on an intranet project that had to integrate with Medact which uses Sybase as the database. We installed Coldfusion 9 on the server and used an ODBC connection to Sybase. Everything worked swimmingly until I encountered seemingly random dropped connections between CF9 and the ODBC/Sybase connection. Several calls to Adobe failed to remedy the situation which appeared to stem from the datadirect driver. The solution appears to be pausing and flushing the thread at the java level.

If you run into the same issue try copy and pasting this just before your <cfquery>,

<cfset thread = CreateObject(“java”, “java.lang.Thread”)>
<cfflush>
<cfset thread.sleep(5000)>

especially if you are looping through and pulling back records. In my case I had to pull back 330k records out of approx 1330000 from sybase into mysql using a scheduled task. Since implementing this I have experienced zero errors. My suspicion is that the issue doesn’t actually stem from the datadirect driver but from a bug Medacts implementation. I’ve connected to all sorts of databases in the past several years with CF without a hiccup with the exception of unidata on a Datatel application (which is a trainwreck anyway).

In addition, another quirk I encountered was that after initiating the query manually (looping through records in increments of 20K )CF would return a blank page, however the query continued to run until finished.

If you landed on this page in a frantic search for a solution, give this a try, it worked for me.

I plopped down 600 this morning for an ipad. Ridiculous right? Not when you consider I’ve spent that on two book cases that take up a ridiculous amount of room. Not when you consider I’ve schlepped around big thick heavy technical manuals back and forth from work for the last 14 years. Then there is the fact that the other half of the information I need resides on pdf which up until April 3 have to be read on a computer screen or printed, eventually lost and then reprinted. I’ve looked at the Kindle, the Nook and their ilk and have never clicked the buy button because they couldn’t properly format complex pdfs.  The ipad will handle pdfs fine, it will handle books, it will lighten my load, it will sort of change my life in a subtle way.

I’m not a materialistic person.  In fact my quest for the last few years has been to cast away non essential posssesions, to be able to fit everything I need to earn a living into something I can take anywhere. The ipad is the missing piece of the puzzle. Freedom from paper, freedom from a file cabinet, freedom from throwing out my back trying to get my bag out of the car.

The ipad will also open up a world of opportunity for web designers and developers. Epub is based on xhtml. Many apps for the ipad can be made using xhtml and javascript. It also opens doors for writers and publishers. I believe it will finally be the opportunity to re-monetize information. I hope it saves journalism. I hope it saves the New York Times. I have high hopes for the transition away from paper. I have high hopes of being able to fit everything in my bag while leaving both hands free for my umbrella and coffee. Maybe I can pay for the thing by selling my bookcases.

Rework – Jason Fried, David Heinemeir

Basically a book about how to run a business in the 21st century. You need an idea and a spark, forget the project plan because how can you even know what you are going to do until you get there? “In Search of Excellence” for the 10’s. Highly inspiring , relevant and disruptive. The MBA? Why when you have Google?

Factoid from the book: Every wonder where Kingsford Charcoal came from? It was a by product of Ford, thats right the company that makes cars. When they were building Model T’s they spun the wood scraps into charcoal. Kingsford Charcoal.

Yeasayer – Odd Blood
Field Music – Field Music
David Bowie – The Reality Tour (this is better than you’d expect)
Spoon – Transference
The Velvet Underground – Loaded
Arthur Russel – Out of Context (Get Around It should have been on the radio)
Bach Goldberg Variations – Murray Perahia