JohnBs personal blog

Today was a day of mixed results. Firstly, trying to get Sandboxing working with multiple CFMX instances failed horribly - no matter what I tried I couldn’t get it to work, nor for that matter could a fellow CF’er. The default instance worked fine (with a few tweaks). I think we’ll be knocking on a few MM folk mailboxes cos we’re both convinced it doesn’t work….

As for Verity - success there! In our previous Solaris, CF6 environment we were able to have two CFs talking to the same verity collection but now with CFMX7 it appears this is not possible. I’ve got another day of playing with it tomorrow and probably a massive blog posting tomorrow recounting my exploits but this new verity stuff is pretty cool! I’m not sure what I’ve managed to setup right now, rather I do but i’m not sure the benefits of it - when I’ve figured it out I’ll be back here…

Read more. Doh!!!

So for people that don’t know, here in the UK we have to pay a license to own a TV. It’s not an optional thing, if you own a TV you have to have a license else you risk being fined. The license funds the BBC - hence no advertising on the BBC.

Here’s where it gets interesting - the BBC has announced trials of ‘Watch Again’ for BBC shows. You can already currently listen to various BBC radio channels over the web and radio show repeats but being able to watch an entire show is a new one. They’ve talked about downloading the show with a license so it’s locked to your PC but how’s it going to stop shows being viewed by anyone on the web? They’ve said its going to be a free service - could it be the end of the TV license? Could it be locked down to license holders only? Certainly times are changing at the BBC!

A few weeks back we launched a site we’ve been working on (Royal Arsenal) for one of our developments in London - I’ve followed just about every hint/tip to make sure it’s good for search engines, it meets Priority A accessbility, HTML is all valid, CSS validates yet a simple search for ‘Royal Arsenal’ on Google doesn’t show the site anywhere in the results! And yes, it was submitted weeks ago! Google indexes the site daily but still nothing…

If you’re an Xbox fan then you probably already know that tonight (in the USA) on MTV at 9:30pm Eastern and tomorrow in Europe (uck, Friday 13th - 8pm UK) Microsoft will preview the Xbox2 due for release later this year. What’s it gonna bring? Will it be a black box Media Centre? A few things have already leaked out - Xbox Live is going to move to a tiered service, Gold and Silver - Silver being a free ‘reduced’ service…in anycase least the new box looks smaller than the current black box sitting under my TV!

‘Why move to XML?’ was one of the questions posed to me when I was up in Scotland a few weeks back talking about Fusebox4.1. I think there potentially a number of reasons;

1. Platform Portability - hmm, touted as a reason but I wonder how many people have built a Fusebox 4 application on CF and then moved it over to PHP. Granted having the single XML language for all platforms makes the application ‘readable’ by all developers at a Fusebox level but i don’t consider that as a primary reason
2. Reducing logic at circuit level - moving the circuit definition files from using a CFSWITCH in Fusebox3 to an XML definition in Fusebox4 meant we can no longer use CF code in our circuit definitions, thereby reducing the amount of logic and forcing more of it into the individual fuses. We now have a limited grammar which we can use within the circuit definitions so we should all certainly be able to ‘read’ each others applications at the circuit level - but custom lexicon kinda throws a spanner in the works to this reason.
3. Performance? Does getting rid of the CFSWITCH indeed increase performace? I wonder i if Fusebox4 had retained the cfswitch and got rid of all the other stuff, nested settings, circuit etc and brought in the stuff FuseQ introduced - how would it perform?
4. cos XML is cool? Well yes it is, but when Fusebox 4 came out it was built on CFMX6 - with that we got CFCs - Fusebox 4 could have gone down the XML/CFC route (in fact I still have an unreleased version using CFCs and XML which ultimately led to MachII) but it was seen more prudent to keep Fusebox procedural and leave the OO stuff for MachII

So my excuse this time is that since last weekend I’ve got myself a Sony PSP. I got fed up with Sony moving the European launch date all the way to September 1st!!! A relative was visiting the USA so i got them to grab me a PSP.

Buying an out of region device often concerns folk but I think I know most of what I can and can’t do. Obviously I can’t buy any games yet here in the UK (well I can from some shops that import but sell them for over £45, that’s almost $90!!!). The unit itself is region 1 meaning I can only play Region1 UMD movies. As for games any unit can play any region game (no NTSC/PAL incompabilities obviously!) but apparently cross region games can’t be played against each other, so Ridge Racers (ASIA) can’t play Ridge Racers (USA) - I’ll be able to confirm this at a later date.

I had a right pain get the PSP to talk wirelessly to the net via my Linksys router and it appears I’m not the only person but I did in the end get it working after lots of tweaking on the router. So now, I have my PSP and only Wipeout Pure to keep me going - thankfully (thanks to dvdboxoffice.com) I’ve got Need for Speed on the way.

But before any of my work mates jump on here and say I can’t have played it much cos I’ve only needed to charge it once since I’ve gotten it - I’ll need to think of another excuse for not posting much!

just got in from my long weekend up in Edinburgh thanks to the Scottish CFUG and Edinburgh University. I think both presentations went well, we certainly had some good discussion and good questions raised - these will be subsequent blog posts. Huge thanks to all that arranged the trip - you know who you are!