Digital Ninja

I wrestle with this almost daily. I work in a place where we have years of legacy applications just lingering about, in need of service. These gnarled old dwellers of the servers don't know how to play nicely with each other, and they weren't made to talk to some API somewhere. They simply "are" and that's how they need to be repaired.

Or...

We can remake them in the image of ThePerfectApp(tm) born from an ultimate UML diagram and a sacred requirements document! It will be stronger, and faster than its predacessor and will last several years in its powerful domain of extensibility! (cue scary lightning sounds)

Or yet again...

We find a balance and be realistic about our resources and our needs and seek a balance where the old and the new can co-exist in harmony.ﾠ Yeah, I'm not so sure of that - or at least how to achieve it. All I see in this solution is a wild inconsistency across the enterprise that is sure to confuse developers for years to come. Can't we just "pause" life and go fix everything for about, say, twelve months or so?

Tonight I had one of those priceless "Ah-hah!" moments that we all seek in life. But this time I'm actually a shade depressed. The cost of the epiphany was too high at a bad time.

Here's the scenario: I'm tearing through a freelance contract, trying to get it finished and out the door. Of course my perfectionism won't allow me to just wrangle together some code, and I haven't had the opportunity at the office (read: day job) to experiment with some of the technologies I'd like to explore. So this project was my great chance to advance my "mad skillz" as it were. My self-learned epiphany goes something like this:

1. Decide it's finally time to use Coldspring for the first time.
2. Spend about 4 hours trying to use Coldspring and my Squidhead output of DAO's, gateways, and business objects.
3. Eventually discover a helpful thread in the Coldspring Google Group that tells me in one simple phrase, "Don't use Coldspring to manage non-singletons."

That's it!ﾠ That one little line, a nugget of truth, is all I needed. But it took so loooooong to get there. I didn't know what questions to ask, how to even phrase what I wanted into a Google search term.

If I weren't trying to rush this project I suppose it wouldn't have been a big deal. This is not a good time right now for me to sacrifice hours of productivity. I sure wish I had a mentor, someone I could call or ask to look over my shoulder and take a look at what I'm doing. I could have Tweeted my problem, but by the time I understood the question I was able to Google it up for myself. Knowing the question to ask can be the most challenging part of it all.

These mentor-less epiphanies are getting expensive!

Despite having worked with ColdFusion for some years now, I'm finding myself horrible at administering the server these days. Back in 5.0 and 6.0 I was pretty good at it and I knew what I was doing. But it's been so busy in the development world since then that I haven't lifted my head out of the code to soak up all the nuances that 7.0 and now 8.0 have brought to the table.

So far today the development server has hung up twice, both times with ColdFusion consuming over 640MB of memory. The first time it heeded a service shut down command. The second time I had to "End Process Tree" from the task manager. This isn't looking good, as I don't know what's causing it. Everyone is at lunch for crying out loud!

I rebooted the server and now I'm going to look into some of the code that I know is being run today on it. We'll see what that yields.

I've decided to fully replace my Blogger (Google) blog with Mango Blog. It's easy to configure, use, and it's free under the Apache license. Thanks, Mango Blog!

So far I've only hand-imported this year's posts. Luckily (I suppose) I'm not a heavy blogger, else that would have become a huge ordeal. I will definitely get to moving those other posts over here as soon as I have another small chunk of time. As I consider it, I shouldn't have used the time I did. I was actually over at Mark Drew's Blog and took a fancy to it. He's also using Mango.

If you have a ColdFusion server and want an easy to use, quick to setup blog, I highly recommend Mango!

I just came across this today... my tears lie on the wind of memories that echo a wonderful rich Internet experience. GBS - I shall miss thee.

Quoted from http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/:

Google Browser Sync

Google Browser Sync is no longer available for download. Instead, to get similar functionality, we suggest using Mozilla Weave, Google Toolbar for Firefox, or Foxmarks. Support for current Google Browser Sync users will continue through 2008. We've also posted the code to Google Code in hopes that someone will use it to develop something cool.