Wednesday, June 21, 2006

A good laugh

From The Daily WTF? website.

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/75718.aspx

Nachooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Last night I decided to take in the new Jack Black movie, "Nacho Libre" from the Director of Napoleon Dynamite and I must say - I liked it.

Jack plays a Padre who believes that he was made to wrestle, which is looked upon as a sinful sport because of its fans following their favorite wrestler is similar to the worship of a false idol. He finds a way to make his dream come true by wrestling to win money for the orphan children who live with the

Jack's antics are in the style that you would expect, a little over the top and there are also quite a few jokes that you'll need to be paying attention to understand.

As with most movies that I watch - you must be in the right mood to enjoy this flick. If you go in with your expectations set to high, you might be disappointed. I arrived at the theater just hoping to have something take my mind off everything else that's been going on lately and this movie delivered. There were lulls where the story was slow - but then there would be parts that would keep you laughing for a while.

I must say that my favorite parts came when Jack would break into tune, Tenacious D style.

Overall - 3.5/5

Monday, June 19, 2006

Installing ColdFusion w/ Windows Remote Desktop

If you're installing ColdFusion over a remote connection on Windows 2003 and the installer package seems to start but then just stop - it could be because you have SP1 loaded to the server and DEP is now blocking you from running the executable.

Find out more info about the feature here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875352

The workaround that I found was to log off and then remote back in, you should then be prompted with a popup window that will allow you some configuration options to allow the Installer package to run correctly.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

In Search of the Right Road

I ran across this while looking at the Digital Photography School blog that I recently was introduced to by Garrett, one of my co-workers.

I found it very moving and thought I'd share it out. I think of myself as a compassionate person, but lately I've found myself being less caring and these pictures and audio made me appreciate what I have.

Vongo = No Go

This is my experience with the service Vongo, and why you should think twice about signing up for the service.

Last Thursday evening I decided to give Vongo a try. If you're unfamiliar with Vongo, it's a service that allows you to download "DVD Quality" movies to your computer to enjoy at your own leisure. The service cost is $9.99 per month and you can select movies from their extensive library of second rate movies.

I installed the software, there is a client install that is needed for this to work. Signed up for my account, gave my credit card info and was all set to go. They charged my card immediately for the service, there was no "FREE" trial.

I took a look at their movie listings and noticed right away that they had older, crappy movies available for the service price - but then had newer DVD release movies as a "pay per view" option. Oh and then I noticed that they were part of Starz and even offered a "view live feed" of Starz Network movies.

WTF?

So - I decided that I'd try and grab one of their older movies to at least check out the quality. Added a movie to my download manager, and BAM - nothing. It acted like it was trying to connect and then just dropped the movie out of queue. I tried this several more times with the same result. I tried the live feed option - and BAM - nothing!

At this point it was about 1am, so I decided to contact tech support, emailed through their contact form in the client software and was greeted with a message that said my issue was sent and that a representative would get back to me in 24 hours.

As of last night - I had heard nothing. No email, no call... nothing! That's 5 days - with no contact.

I decided that this was a big waste of time and effort, so I tried to cancel my account through the client software - which just tells you to call Customer Service to cancel your account.

I waited on the phone for 35 minutes, which was filled with an annoying "your call is important to us, please wait" - every 20 seconds! No information like what number I was in the queue or my approximate wait time.

Finally someone answered - and I was able to cancel the account.

This was by far the most unprofessional experience I've had with any company, next to Comcast.

Take my advice and steer very clear from this company and it's services, stick with reputable companies like NetFlix for your movie needs.

Monday, June 12, 2006

Tasting Model-Glue


No, this is the not the same model-glue that I used to eat in grade school, this is the framework for ColdFusion!

After watching Joe Rinehart's video tutorial that he did in preparation for Adobe Developer Week, I decided that it was really time to take a look at a framework to assist with my development projects.

To get started with this framework visit the website and grab the files.

Next - take a look at the QuickStart Guide - this is a sure way to get you up and running with Model-Glue in no time.

This is where I started.

I copied the application template directory and pasted it into my web root. Renamed the folder to my application name and made the changes as in the QuickStart Guide. I should make mention that I had to add these lines into the ModelGlue.xml file as they weren't there in the files that I had downloaded.


Are they really needed? Not sure, I've only been messing with this for a little over 10 minutes. I'll get back to you on that.

So - after making those changes and the change to the Application.cfm in the root of new application folder, I figured I was ready to go.

Launch browser... point to new application directory... BAM - Error.

For some reason it couldn't find the /ModelGlue/ModelGlue.cfm template.

Weird. Tried changing some things around and still couldn't get it to work.

Thought about it a bit more and thought I'd double check my mappings in my CF Administrator just to make sure that there wasn't some hokey mapping causing all my frustration. Well - there was!

I had a mapping for "/" set to my CFMX root instead of CFMX7 root.

Once I deleted that mapping, it worked like a charm!

Now it's time to turn one of my older applications into a lean, mean, Model-Glue fighting machine! I'll post about my experiences along the way.