Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Having a GIANT in your corner

I swear - I really dig Mark Cuban and what he stands for...

Been reading the Grokster news lately and came across this article on ZDnet.uk and think that it's great that Mark will help this company out in the upcoming Supreme Court fight.

Most of the statements that he says are right on about the death of innovation due to companies like the RIAA or MGM just using all their resources to crush everyone cause nobody in the world has the wealth to be able to afford to stand up to them and fight a fair fight.

Other courts have already came to the conclusion that the companies that make the P2P software should not be held responsible for what people trade over them and now maybe this company will be able to stand and fight a bit longer.

Success = Hard Work and Determination

I've been reading quite a bit lately (actually - when don't I?) about being successful in business and I came across two very inspiring stories.

The first is a blog post from Mark Cuban, talking about how in business you only have to be successful once and that's reason enough to never give up trying. You can read it here.

The second is from Jeffrey Fox's book, "How To Make Big Money In Your Own Small Business", and talks about how some people think that success or being great at something always looks like it comes easy to that person. In particular Jeffrey talks about the baseball superstar, Ted Williams and how he was asked

"how come hitting a baseball came so easily to him. 'Simple,' answered Ted Williams. 'I take a thousand swings a day.' Ted Williams went to batting practice, to the locker room, to his kitchen, to his bedroom swinging real and imaginary bats. He took 1,000 swings a day. Ted's 1000 swings were probably 900 swings more than anyone else. And 1,000 swings a day is why hitting "came easy" to the great Ted Williams."

Friday, June 24, 2005

Installing Fusebox 3 Apps with CFMX7

Just a note, in case you are installing Fusebox 3 apps on a CFMX 7 server, you may need to edit the index.cfm file to change the variables.fuseboxVersion which is set to check if it is less than 700, to less than 800. This has been addressed in the Fusebox 3 core files by basically checking to see if it's version 4.0 (lt 450) or 4.5 (lt 500) and if not it forces the use of the latest core files for FB3 which would be fbx_fusebox30_cf50.cfm. (fbx_fusebox30_cf50_nix.cfm if using a Linux based system)

I found this out when I was trying to get the Wireframe Viewer/Editor ver. 3.9992 beta installed and all I would get was a blank screen when I brought up the index.cfm file.

Oh and while I'm speaking of it, the Wireframe Viewer/Editor can be found here and pretty much rocks my world. It can be used while sitting with a client to wireframe a site and gives the client the actual "click through" that some like to see. It will also help in a big way as you'll be able to layout the entire site with pages that should be included and the entry and exit points for each page - allowing you to give a certain level of sign off on what the client really wants right from the start!

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Office 12 and XML Standards?!

There's a whole heap of stuff going on in the industry these days. Apple computers getting Intel chips, Adobe and Macromedia kissing, making up and proposing marriage.... and then I stumbled across an article about the next version of Microsoft Office that will use XML as the default standard for document formats.

You can read more about views on this here.

I love that MS is calling it "Microsoft Office XML Open Format"

I want my...
I want my...
I want my MOXOF please....

I'll be interested to see what other open formats they'll claim and then tack the M$ name on.

They'll probably start a new community - the Microsoft Open Source Community. Membership will only cost $129 and you'll get a *free* copy of XP!

Sarcastic comments aside, I am excited to see this happening as I'll be able to leverage content created with MS software much easier.

If you're interested in getting news regarding the next version of Office as it comes available, you can sign up here.

Thursday, June 02, 2005

NADONweb: A new home

I've recently moved NADONweb over to a new web host. I'm excited about this as I'll actually be able to get some work done on it now. The new host has CF7 installed - so expect to see a bunch of the new ColdFusion features in use.

I'll also be posting more about the FLiP process as I prepare to get this site up and running.