I think at least I will be for the next few days, as I am waiting for a formal offer from a company.

So basically if you are looking for a ColdFusion developer who is passionate about web in general and Adobe line products to be specific, then drop me a line (felixt at felixt dot org).

hm.. I should have a contact form in this website, shouldn’t I?

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http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/12/top-10-flex-misconceptions

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Our company has three stages of application development:

1. Development stage, which means the application is being served on each developer’s workstation. There was also a consideration to run database server on individual’s workstation, but it’s decided that there’s no apparent advantage in doing so, thus we use common database servers in our development stage.
2. Test/Staging stage, ideally in this stage, the application is moved into the live server environment and obviously its own database server. In this stage, production manager and testers test the whole application for existing bugs, ideally client should also be involved. This is also the stage where client is usually giving feedback, requesting changes etc.
3. Production stage

I think these are the problems with our deployment process so far:

1. Who is/are responsible for the deployment?
   
   Is it a person on the project’s responsibility or is it shared responsibility? Which one is better? My opinion, the tech lead on the project should be responsible for the deployment. After a deployment, the deployer should do a global/general test to iron out the configuration or environment specific problems like Application.cfm/cfc, doing refreshAppVars etc.
   A functional testing then should be conducted by appointed testers, production manager should test as throughly as possible before client is invited to test.
2. When to move from development to staging? This is I think is very difficult question to answer. We must clearly define the purpose of creating a staging stage, is it to test production environment or is it to show client the project’s progress.

Our ex system administrator had done a good job in setting up the infrastructures to ease the stage progression. He introduced the use of Subversion for source control replacing Visual Sourcesafe, he also tried to automate the deployment process by using Ant script. The former has been one of the best move so far, the later has a mixed result. The problem with automating deployment at the moment is our lack of understanding on how Ant works. Out of frustation with Ant script, a colleague wrote a deployment script using Coldfusion instead, at least every developers in the company knows Coldfusion, it is yet to be known whether this approach is working well.

The headache at the moment is due to the fact that we have no specific person who knows all there is to know about deployment. Due to some internal problems, the company could not fill the system administrator role thus every developers now is sharing the responsibility but ONLY for the projects that they are involved in. There are just too many variables in live or even staging deployment that just break our projects over and over again. Some killer variables:

• Operating system changes
• Path (filepath, URL etc)
• Case sensitivity, eg MySQL database in Linux is case sensitive, Windows is not

I guess over the time we will be able to iron these issues out, but to do that we really need to hire someone that can concentrate in these issues and thus free up the developers to do things that they like most, you know things like programming.

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I think I made some progress in my understanding on my Model Glue project.

For the back-end (admin stuff), scaffolding really helps, because back-end work for my site is mainly for data entry for product table. I’m wondering how useful scaffolding would be for more complicated data entry (ie updating multiple tables for instance).

My biggest problem with Model Glue was how can I access data in my database, as this wasn’t explained in the tutorial. Luckily I read some articles by Joe in Fusion Authority Magazine. There are some Model glue messages that can be used for this purpose, for example this code snippet below is to display a single product.

     		<event-handler name="front.product.view" access="public">
			<broadcasts>
				<message name="ModelGlue.genericRead">
					<argument name="recordName" value="productRecord" />
					<argument name="criteria" value="id" />
					<argument name="object" value="product" />
				</message>
			</broadcasts>
			<views>
				<view name="body" template="dspSingleProduct.cfm" append="true">
					<value name="xe.add" value="front.product.add" overwrite="true" />
					<value name="xe.list" value="front.product.list" overwrite="true" />
				</view>
			</views>
			<results>
				<result name="" do="view.template" redirect="false" append="" preserveState="true" />
			</results>
		</event-handler>

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These last 2 weeks, I really feel unmotivated at work. Apart from stress from uni exam and assignment, there are things at work that really bring me down (I cannot be more specific than that). There are projects that I have to look after and these projects have been dragging on and on for months now without any indication of ever being completed. I probably shouldn’t have taken the responsibility for some of these projects, but I did and now I suffer.

Lots of things in my head now, I have to weigh everything, I have to look after myself and my family, I have to help my workmates and the company, I want to be trained, I want to have a change of scene, I want to work in more professional setting, I want to recognized and better awarded.. I need to assess where I am at now and how can I move forward. Am I still best fit for my current employer? Is there still room for me to grow?

It’s only fair for everyone if I make the decision sooner rather than later, I hope I can bring myself to make a decision before the end of the year. I am almost certain at what decision I’d make, unless things change drastically and I can find that passion for working again.. I really hate coming to work unmotivated, I hate being unproductive and not using my full potential..

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My brother in law bought a Dell’s Inspiron 1520, he asked me to install Windows XP on it. It has Vista Basic pre-installed.

I thought it will be a straight forward process, but all my install attempts ended up in the dead blue screen and I had to resort to re-boot the laptop. After the 2nd blue screen, I decided that it’s probably too much work to fiddle around, I am pretty sure it can be done. I have done quick googling, while I didn’t find any links showing how to replace Vista with XP, I found some good links detailing how to have Vista and XP dual boot, well I don’t think my brother in law is that desperate for XP that he wants to sacrifice disk space to have both OSes running.

Vista does feel a little different to XP though, glad I don’t have to personally use it yet.

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Currently ru
ing:n- Apache for PHP n- Tomcat for JSPn- IIS for ASP.NETn- Abyss webserver for Gunbound hack

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At last, it’s here Internet Explorer 7, it’s still in Beta 2. Will it comply to W3C standards esp with CSS???
Will testing it soon.
Update 01/05/06: Done some testing for some of our clients, none of the design is broken, so it’s all good so far.
The interface is quite minimalistic compared to standard browsers, takes time to get used to not having too much “control”, i’m pretty sure the control is still there, but I just haven’t got chance to explore more. For me the interface is not interesting at all, but the most important thing is how it renders pages. And so far as rendering is concern, it’s quite good, no complaint here.
Update 01/05/06: some Javascript stuffs don’t work..

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This is go
a be mad, today we have decided to make an online game store for our subject COMP9322: E-Commerce Implementation.
Will finally have chance to use Webratio. From what I’ve seen during the demo, it’s quite crazy.. create the data model and site model and then on the click of a button it builds the whole site (and the database) for you.. talking about rapid prototyping..

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