I left Washington DC at 3pm (local time) yesterday and flew via Atlanta (don’t ask!) to the UK arriving this morning (Tuesday) at 9am and now i’m back at my desk and have been for a few hours.
I’ve got so much great stuff to blog about from over the weekend (i can’t believe it was only 2 days!) Fusebox 4.1, Blackstone, Duck Feet, Hooters, George Bush - check back later to read!
I’ve got a flight at 10:30 to hop the pond just for the weekend to attend the Fusebox conference in Maryland. Mainly it’s to catch up with old friends but we’ll be launching the beta of 4.1 (ps. have you noticed i’ve been running it on this site for 2 weeks?), and Team Fusebox. I’ll post more when i get back on Tuesday
Like most developers I run the developer edition of CFMX locally on my laptop so i can test my code before it goes into production - i also like to have BlueDragon installed and any other CF server that may be around at any one time. However, i’ve been hit before by the nasty blue screen of death when i’ve messed something up completely unrelated to my development environment and needed to rebuild everything! Not pleasant!
Since a copy of Microsoft Virtual PC arrived on my desk sometime ago i’ve been hankering to give it a try and build a ‘development virtual server’. So now, i’ve now got a virtual Windows 2003 Server instance running developer editions of Jrun4 with CFMX and Bluedragon in their own instance. I’ve used vmWare before now and always found it a little resource hungry but that’s not the case with the MS offering, i was still able to run all my applications locally and have reasonable performance. There’s also a really neat feature called ‘Undo Disks’ - basically these are like transaction logs for the virtual pc, at the end of the session you can either decided to ditch your changes or commit your changes for the next time you boot your virtual PC.
The best bit is, if i want to move to another machine i just take my USB disk drive with my virtual pc on, install Virtual PC on the computer, configure it to read my virtual disk and hey presto up pops my virtual server.
After yet more digging around on the firefox website I came across spreadfirefox.com. Mozilla’s first target is to get 1 million downloads of firefox over the next 10 days, there’s a counter here showing the progress and links to loads of other firefox goodies.
If you’re thinking about downloading Firefox, please use my affiliate link on the right hand side, there’s no reward for me - just recognition for promoting a great browser
I was just on the Fullasagoog website and noticed a new RSS icon in the status bar of Firefox, so i clicked on it - up pops a list of the RSS feeds which you can then click to subscribe to. When you subscribe to it, the link is bookmarked as a ‘live bookmark’. If you go to the bookmark then you’ll see all the entry’s - quite a neat feature!
So naturally I’ve now added similar <link….> tags to my site too.
Just in case you didn’t already know, today Mozilla have released the 1.0 preview release of the Firefox browser which you can download from here
i find it hard to believe that i’m still yet to find a CFMX host that offers virtual instances of CFMX. All the hosts (including my current one) use a single instance of CFMX on their shared servers for potentially hundreds of customer sites, so if one customer site drags down the CF server then all the customers are affected.
I’ve contacted my host to see what their thoughts were on the matter and at the end of the day it seems (as always) to come down to cost. If a host can run say 200 customers sites under a single CFMX instance on a single server but could only run 25 virtual instances on another server (due to added resources of jrun etc) then you end up with expanding costs of building more servers to support the same number of customers. By using the single instance they can offer robust solutions at a decent enough price.
Even with the additional cost, I think a hosted virtual instance CFMX server would serve as an interim solution between shared servers and dedicated servers and offer CF users the robustness of a ‘virtual’ dedicated CFMX server in the shared server environment. I’m certainly going to be keeping a close eye on CFMX hosting options as well as the administration options that Blackstone is touted to open up for us developers and our clients.
No don’t worry, Microsoft haven’t suddently ‘released to manufacture’ Longhorn - I’ve recently been spending time researching and playing with Longhorn and the new UI layer, codenamed Avalon. I came across some great ‘new’ meanings for RTM that tickled my fancy that i thought I’d share
- my favourite and the entry that one the competition!
This is another theory lesson so there’s no code examples, it introduces the few remaining pieces of Fusebox XML grammar, do’s,prefuseaction, postfuseaction, loops, and if blocks
Despite the impending Fusebox 4.1 beta release JohnQ has found the time to update the Fusebox 4 corefiles to to 4.0.4 as of yesterday. Only a minor bug fix that fixes a problem if you use <loop> and <if> in the same fuseaction.
The new core file can be downloaded from here
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