After probably four or five years of having the same start page I took half a day to overhaul it.

Other than a handful of the links on the original version, 95% of the use I'd get out of it was the integrated Google, Dictionary, and IMDB search fields. For the new version I had several ideas. One was using tabs for various link categories, another was integrating more search fields and making it streamlined, and the third was displaying a random image. The latter two are what I went with in this new version.

There are 16 buttons across the top with Google selected by default. Whatever button is selected is what the search field will post to and if you CTRL+Click on one of the buttons it'll take you to that site. The whole thing is pretty much driven by javascript. On load, the page will randomly select an image out of a collection and set it as the background image. It cookies both the background image and search field for 1 day to keep it from resetting every page load. I've included a small refresh button at the bottom left which will clear the cookie, default the search engine back to Google, and randomly pick another background image.

I haven't tested it out thoroughly in browsers other than FF, but I will when I get a chance. The framework primarily loads PNG 24 images which IE 6 doesn't support without some trickery. But since I'm the only one who will likely use this I won't bother with older browsers as much.

If I'm bored or itching to play around for a bit I'll add a link library to the page arranged by category.

Two posts in a week, what?! So rather than referring to my upcoming project simply as "project" I figure I'll give it a codename to put it into context. This one is particular will be known as Nibbler, based on the character in the Matt Groening series Futurama.

What can I tell you about Nibbler?

• It's a social website
• I'm not a big fan of social websites in general so I'm a bit selfconscious about the whole thing.
• It surrounds a niche market of which there are already several others in the space.
• Written in CFML, currently Coldfusion, but I'll certainly test it with the various open source engines.
• The framework used will be Fusebox.
• Launch date: when it's done (maybe September)

Additional, I have thought of another possible site I'd like to develop. If I can spend a weekend spec'ing and coming up with a mockup I may attempt to work on both at once utilizing the same general components (session, error, user generation, login, etc). No codename determined, yet.

It just so happens the same day I open up my arms to invite in Open BlueDragon Sean Corfield posts about departing from the steering committee for Open BlueDragon because of Alan Williamson's "true feelings about the CF community." And then there was seven.

Good for Sean for sticking to his beliefs. Still, I don't see this as the demise of the project, but it will likely lead to more posts for Open Railo and against Open BlueDragon.

I am nevertheless very excited to try out both platforms for my projects and interested in learning the differences between the two.

Last month Open BlueDragon was released by New Atlanta. At first I was excited, I thought it was a great idea and wished I could utlize it for my next project. But I was afraid of losing functionality, not only with what I had already integrated into my code, but also the features I have yet to implement. However, that was my initial off-the-cuff response before actually reading up and learning more about it. After listening to the CFWeekly podcast with Vince Bofanti on Open Source Bluedragon it gave me the push to say "yeah, I think this will work."

This isn't a small open source project with one or two guys managing what goes in it whenever they get the time to do so. It's pretty huge. New Atlanta is will continue to sell and support its paid version. There's a great steering committee of nine people committed to carefully decide what goes into each release. And already the Coldfusion community has immediately taken in and is quick to respond to the OpenBD version by releasing a VMWare, Amazon AMI, and an admin interface. I'm no longer fearful that this will stall and not go anywhere, or it'll fork and not try to keep up with what Adobe is doing.

I see this helping out the current CF community and really bringing in new developers who are looking for a solid, mature, completely open platform. Not only that, but with the open source, feature-rich applications in PHP, this gives us an easy opportunity to run both PHP and CFML side-by-side. Where you can install PHP forums and blogs on part of your site without having to reinvent the wheel. Then spend the rest of your time developing your actual application quickly in a powerful, mature, and free language.

Next weekend I'll install Open BlueDragon on my dev server and see how far I get converting things over. Expect my next post to cover this.

This week I was only able to get this one blog post in. It's quite hard to come up with topics if I'm not actively programming and busy with work. I did spend a lot of time looking at properties online all over Oregon and there's one in particular that I think I've fallen in love with. It's cheaper than the place I have now, but is a nice step up. Ideally we'll find a place that's ready to go and isn't too big so we can fill it in comfortably. This way we'll have the time to plan our next move to find the perfect plot land to build a longterm dream home on.

During our trip up there in September we'll stop by a few places to see if I'm looking in the right areas. I must thank Google's Satellite view for doing most of the work. I'm surprised at the number of places that have pools which will be one of the main buying points for me :). Others include plenty of acreage, privacy, lots of grass, trees, and hopefully public forest close by.

Places I'm not too interested in:

• Riverfront property - it usually means you have a neighbor close on both sides and not a lot of trees for privacy.
• On the side of a hill - I'd prefer the acre surrounding the house to be somewhat flat, beyond that it can be anything.
• Farmland/open field - I have no need for horse stables or garages for farming equipment.
• Blue/purple carpet, overly rustic accents, or where each room in the house looks like it was built in a different decade.
• Lack of natural zombie defenses such as no fence lining the property or the house being right next to the main road.

Enough about that. This plan to move up there is several years away. All these places I'm interested in, sadly, probably won't be available then. Time to put these thoughts in the back of my mind for awhile.

A friend from work mentioned the television show Man vs. Wild on Discovery to me last year. I finally picked it up and watched through the first three seasons, in a week! It's very entertaining and is inspiring me to go hiking out in the woods, off path, away from camp sites, and setup camp somewhere near water.

We're going up to Oregon to visit in September with the dogs. There are many places to rent for a few nights which allow dogs. Hopefully we can find a rental that sits on plenty of land lots of BLM hiking nearby.


With a few months to plan it out and gather camping/hiking gear, each week, I plan to research different items like knives, boots, backpacks, tents, water filters etc. We already bought a pack for Ender to help carry some stuff :)

Last November I started a new project which I'll post about in the future. Over the first few weeks things progressed rather well. I came up with the requirements doc, initial site design, and setup the Fusebox 5 framework. I also did quite a bit of reading to catch up on new Coldfusion features that I had missed out on since MX. Most my learnings came from the CFWACK 8 volumes 1-3.

Alas, when I thought things couldn't get any busier at work they did. This entire year has been both crazy and amazing. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of taking on a side project which in turn uses up my free development time, but that's to wrap up soon.

The next thing to do is find the self control and motivation to keep me busy. My girlfriend and I have started a workout routine with specific guidelines. Work out 6 days a week (switch to 5 after a month) by running on the Bowflex Treadmill I bought myself for Christmas. I converted my old server as a media pc to use while running. Watching an episode of a TV series is the perfect amount time (42-45 minutes) to burn some calories. The deal is we have to earn 6 "points" a week, one for each session, and for every point missed one has to pay the other $50. Pretty steep, but that's the point :P.

The plan worked out really well the first month so I'm extending it to Reading, Blogging, and working on the new project. I'm not sure if I'll stick to the same dollar value scheme, but why not?

Above is a snapshot of the printout I'm using to replace the whiteboard on the fridge. For each task I have the number of boxes I want to commit to each week. Now I need to make sure I keep the chain going. I know months don't split up into four even weeks, but the idea is to prevent any ugly blank spaces from appearing as I progress.

To keep the momentum going I've started rewriting all the code for the media player starting with the same display page I discussed last week. I have already integrated with CLamp and so far it has worked out well. I'm able to send all the status commands in at once and convert it back into a structure to call whatever value I need. It sure beats having to execute it individually for current status, track length, track position, playlist length, playlist position, shuffle and repeat status, etc.

The other feature I welcome is being able to use ColdFusion CFCs, something that wasn't available when I originally developed the controller. CFCs make the code I write reusable, easier to manage, more flexible, and easier to call and reference. I could reuse the same code to generate the Winamp playlist as I could the active playlist viewable in the browser. Not to mention generating various RSS feeds of what's currently playing and available playlists if I were to post that data elsewhere, like on this site.

If all goes well I'll have the display page completely rewritten by the end of the week. This weekend I'm going to jump onto a separate design project to spread my time out. I should also catch up on listening to new music, too. Ever since the third harddisk in my array went down I've left my desktop offline until I can get a replacement drive. In the meantime I'll copy what new music I have down to my server to listen to.

Ever since we moved offices at work I've been busy all days of the week, but finally this weekend I was able to really relax. The only thing I wanted to accomplish was getting my playlists in order. They were a bit scattered between machines and a few weren't stored in the DB. After I got started, I got the itch to upgrade the display page that scrolls across my TV of what's currently playing.

It went pretty quick. It only took about 45 minutes to design on Saturday and half the day on Sunday to integrate it with my current code. It looks great in Firefox, when I have time I'll fix it in IE 6 & 7. One good thing about work is it has allowed me to become pretty experienced with cross-browser CSS support. I received a new notebook and finally installed IE 7. Looks like I may have to make a few adjustments to this site!

While integrating, I ran into a bug with Winamp not playing songs with special character in the name. It worked before so my guess is it was the upgrade from ColdFusion 5 to 7. I ended up having to specify the charset of the outputted playlist file.

What else is new? While looking for a solution for the Winamp issue I came across Clamp, another command line program for Winamp. Currently, I use Clever, but it only supports basic commands and is the main reason why I wanted to switch to using VLC rather than Winamp. Now I'm thinking of sticking with Winamp for music and use VLC for movies. It's perfect because I did test running a playlist through VLC and kept crashing after a dozen songs.

I'll be happy to add support for skipping to a particular place on the player timeline and being able to move items around on the current playlist. I'll probably have it reload the playlist during a song change so you're less likely to notice the change.

I've also begun spec'ing out plans for other projects I have interest in doing. I'll share details on those as soon as I have something to show in a couple months.

This weekend I got around to creating a gallery archive and added a whole new set of images to the main page. I need to snap a lot more photos, particularly ones that don't take place inside my house.

The other update I made was populating the 'favorites' section to the right. Originally I was going have it show posts of mine I consider my favorite, but since I don't post enough I decided to set it to my favorite third-party blog posts. The great thing about this is it's being populated through Google Reader as my shared feed. What I do is star certain items I read from the 40 or so blogs I subscribe to. Once or twice a week I'll go through my starred list and click the share link to add to the feed Google Reader generates for me. Then I have this site grab that file hourly and display it in the sidebar.