pf » Archives for July, 2005

Learning UNIX is a seemingly daunting task, there are thousands of commands out there, each with hundreds of options. But in reality you only need to know a few of them.

I use unix quite a bit, usually either on one of our Linux servers, or on my Powerbook with OS X.

I am retiring my poll Do you use RDS? after 129 responses, 51 people said Yes (about 40%), and 78 people said no (about 60%).

New poll coming up.

Forbes has released their best of the web for Summer 2005. Much to my surprise my dealazon blog was ranked in the top 10 shopping blogs by the Forbes Editors.

Here's their review of the dealazon blog.

Photoshop news has posted tons of behind the scense photos of the Adobe offices. They look pretty swank!

In the far Southwest corner of the 10th floor is the official Photoshop Lounge.

An EE Times Article about two Purdue researchers attempting to create Cold Fusion:

But hard-headed physicists have grown wary of "fusion in a jar" experiments.

Don't they know that Macromedia has already done this? cfusion.

Ignore the fact that this page looks like it was made in 1995, because the content on it is quite relevant. It contains a list of over 100 factors that effect your ranking, either positively or negatively in Google (and they don't hurt your standings in other search engines).

MossyBlog is asking about how people setup their new web servers. I though I'd post my thoughts on directory structure here.

This is web server directory structure that I have used for long time (probably 6 or 7 years). A former co-worker Eric Griff helped me come up with it I believe.

I tend to forget the syntax every time, but one of the first things I do when I setup an Apache web server is add/edit these two directive in my httpd.

I just noticed last week that some of the online web aggregators (such as bloglines, newsgator online, live journal, etc) will send the number of subscribers in their HTTP user agent. For example:

NewsGatorOnline/2.0_(http://www.newsgator.com;_20_subscribers)

Bloglines/2.

According to some stats released by OneStat only 18.23% of browsers are using 800x600 these days, down from 24.66% last year.

A whopping 57.38% use 1024x768, the rest use something higer (I'm sure there are still a few 640x480's out there viewing the web with CGA graphics card).

I have noticed two CFML developers have made the switch to Ruby On Rails (a Rapid Web Application Development Framework for the Ruby programming language).

PJ Hyett has discovered that his out of date google sitemap was the reason for his drop in traffic from google. So if you created a sitemap when they first came out and forgot about it, you either want to keep it updated (creating it dynamically would be a good way to go), or remove it from google.

I have added a new blog poll titled Do You Use RDS? I'm just curious how many people use it. There are lots of reasons not to use it, but I think its still pretty popular.

Here's why some people might use it:

Easy way to edit files on a remote server.

Google recently held a webinar for AdSense publishers. They gave out some adsense optimization tips that they have gathered over the past few years. The transcript is pretty lengthy, so here's the summary:

Ad Location - "the middle, above the fold location perform best.

Tim Buntel posted a message to the CFEClipse users mailing list with the subject, Does that mean you're working on RDS support?

Generally, we've found that folks who want "RDS support" are really looking for 2 things; remote server file system access and database connectivity (e.g.

You would think that by having custom written blogging software (only two other blogs out there are using this code), and not allowing HTML in comments, that comment spammers would not waste their time on me. But they do.

Oracle has released a critical patch update for several of its products, (database server, enterprise manager, application server, e-business suite, workflow, forms, reports, JInitiator, developer suite, and express server).

The Boston Globe's weekly business podcast called the Bizcast will soon feature an interview with Jeremy Allaire. While he will probably be mostly talking about his new company BrightCove, it's likely that ColdFusion will be mentioned when they introduce him.

Via arstechnica, The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is taking a closer look at Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia.

Has anyone else noticed all the 10 year birthdays going on?

Nathan Strutz recently said that client variables are no good to use. From reading his entire post, he isn't saying that the concept is flawed, just the current implementation. He even suggests how they may could be improved.

I went ahead and annotated the bloggers BOF photo from the cfunited conference on Flickr. I annotated the names and blogs of each mug (except for one unidentified blogger). It was cool to put some faces on the blogs we read.

Steven Erat has posted an entry about the BOF here.

Eric Hamiter, author of several FireFox extensions is soliciting ideas for his next extension:

Lets have a brainstorming session. Ive been tinkering around with a few old ideas that are going nowhere, and its been ages since Ive released an extension.

Another thing I missed last week, was that the Eclipse foundation released Eclipse 3.1.

I have been using the beta's of 3.1 since they first came out, because I am working on a project that uses all the new features in Java 1.5 (generics, new for loops, enums, new api's, etc.

The Eclipse community is doing a million download challenge for Eclipse 3.1. Over 40 Eclipse community members have agreed to pledge time or money to a charity every day from the time they reach 1 million downloads up to 60 days from the release.

Jack Schofield asked Jakob Nielson what is holding up progress on the web? Nielsen responded with three things:

Evil Design

"Google has made billions by putting the ads where people do want them, rather than where they don't want them."

That is an excellent point.

I redesigned my homepage last week. My goal was to help readers find some of my older posts that may be interesting.

So to start, I added a prominent search box at the top left, I simply use google's search my site for this feature.

If you were at the cfunited conference last week, if your like me you have might have missed out on some things that went on last week.