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No, I won’t use your CMS

So I’m doing some ColdFusion research (the Adobe kind not the physics kind) and thought it might be time to bring CFNinja.com back to life (not that it ever had much of a life). I hesitate to turn CFNinja.com into a WordPress site since CFNinja originally started with the intent to be a central location for ColdFusion developers to collaborate and it seems silly to use a PHP driven application for a CF site. The recommendations for a CF CMS seems to be Content Box. I figured I would install it real quickly and compile some of my research using Contentbox on CFNinja. First, the online documentation goes to a 404 page:

contentbox404

Not good for a content management system to not be able to find its own documentation. Even the older docs 404. Ah! Just went to reproduce the problem and found another path to the docs. Hmm. Maybe I’ll do this afterall.

Any other alternatives for ColdFusion CMS systems?

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SQL Query Conundrum

Here’s a interesting SQL challenge:

Say you have a query returning a result set that in some cases one row cancels out another. For example, let’s say there are 5 columns: A B C D E. One result possibility is: row 1- A B C 4 E with row 2- Z Y X 9 E Naturally those are completely separate data elements. But when row 1 is A B C 4 E and row 2 is A B C -4 E row two is a data correction to row 1 (think double entry accounting) and row 1 and row 2 need to be excluded from the result set. So, right now if the result set returned 20 rows and had the situation above, we really only want to be returning 18 rows. What’s a good approach to this?

Here’s a better representation of the problem:

Row Name Account Rank Value Status

  1. G H I 5 J
  2. A B C 4 E
  3. A B C -4 E
  4. Z Y C 4 E
  5. A B C 7 E
  6. Z Y C 22 E

We really want to return rows 1, 4, 5, and 6.

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Happy Father’s Day!

I tried writing some sappy Father’s Day post and it sounded so forced and fake. I love my father! He’s my hero. As I’ve gained wisdom in life, I’ve both apologized to my father (for my shenanigans) and thanked him for allowing me to live (how he restrained from selling me to the gypsies is beyond me). Thank you Dad for everything!

So, in lieu of sappy, I give you video!

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This NSA thing is old news

Can’t believe I forgot about this! I watched this story with great interest in the wayback. This started in 2003 and was publicly outed in 2006:

"the NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing “peering links,” or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data — the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s text — per second,"

[Source, The Washington Post, A Story of Surveillance]

Google "Room 641A" for more information.

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Wired claims Google Reader killed because RSS delivers news old school

Wired makes a good point in this article but they write from a newscentric view…it reads like someone in "the industry" writing about "the industry" and screams that Wired has lost touch with the non-industry Internet user who doesn’t view everything as news. I blog. Is that news? In essence yes but you don’t need one of my blog posts flashing across your breaking news app. I write stuff that, according to my stats, people read three months after I write it. My flickr rss feed? Not news. But it is news. Yes, we could lump all media into news but that’s not really what Wired is talking about. Wired is claiming that as content is produced (they call content news) that people want it immediately. Frankly, that’s the Facebook model. And the Facebook model irritates me to no end. I miss things. Granted, there are not enough minutes in the day for me to consume everything but with an RSS reader I can selectively choose what I skip. Wired’s approach would deem that because I was in meetings in the morning, content that was published in the morning is not relevant to me.

Back in 2007 I would tell my clients that people come to the Internet for three things:

  1. Information
  2. Utility
  3. Entertainment

[Source, RealityMe, Why do people web?

I contend people go to the Internet in that order but you can go back to 2007 for that explanation. Getting back to Wired’s article, my point is that even as a very connected person, most of my day is not spent consuming media. I spend my day doing my job. Once home, I want to catch up on things. I peruse the content I enjoy on the Internet which might be an audioboo by Christian Payne, or a podcast by Jason Jarrett, or an insight from Cathy McCaughan. I don’t need it shoved at me as it happens and if that is why Google killed Reader, they made a poor decision.

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State of Me

There is an inexplicable weight to me today…a sadness out of nowhere for no reason. Perhaps this is a side affect of skipping my blood pressure medicine for the second day in a row. Perhaps this is a result of setting the bar too high for the weekend and my subconscious is lamenting the "failed" tasks. I believe weekends should be relaxing and recuperative but too often I pressure myself with unachievable mental todo lists which steal from the relaxing times. That doesn’t really fit the bill for this weekend. This weekend was relaxing and fantastic! Perhaps its my staticy headphones and poor music choices today. Perhaps I need a win. Micromilestones to the rescue!