In the past few weeks, I've gotten around 10 or so emails from people having issues downloading projects at RIAForge. Because RIAForge allows folks to point to external download locations, I typically just check to see if that is the issue. However - I've never been able to replicate any of the problems the users are having. They typically report that they get about half way through the download and it then simply stops.

When it was only a few users, I was willing to blame a bad network on their side - but now it is apparent that something is up. I just wanted to give folks a heads up that I'm looking into it. If any of my readers have seen a problem like this before and have some advice, I'd love to hear it.

RIAForge uses Apache 2.2, and for the most part, it just always works. (Although last night it stopped running for some reason. I haven't seen it to do that ever.) When project admins edit their projects and enable or disable SVN, we do perform a graceful restart, but as far as I know, that does not impact downloads.

Please note what follows is an especially personal, especially rambling, look back at 2009. I don't think this blog entry will be useful to anyone but me, so be warned before reading any further!

As 2009 comes to a close, I have to say that it was a "pretty good" year. Not great, but not horrible either. As I hear more and more people on Twitter say that 2009 wasn't so hot but they are hopeful for 2010, I have to say that isn't the case for me. 2009 had it's bad spots for sure, but overall, I'm pretty satisfied.

On the work front, I began the year at Broadchoice, working hard on Workspace, an AIR/Flex/Groovy/Hibernate/Spring project. Things ended at Broadchoice in April, and not in a great way, but before then I had the opportunity to learn a heck of a lot. Thats much more invaluable then any one job. One of my resolutions for the year had been to become an "intermediate Flex" developer, and while that is somewhat of a vague term, I think I'm finally there.

After Broadchoice came to an end, I did a lot of contracting (and thank you to those of you who hooked me up). I began doing consulting for FirstComp after CFUNITED. For those who don't know, that's the company Jason Delmore ended up after Adobe. I'm happy to say that as of Monday of this week, I'm now a full time, "real" employee of FirstComp. While I never hurt for work (not looking forward to the tax bill this year), I"m happy to have a stable full time gig with one company. There are a lot of really nice, smart folks at FirstComp. Before meeting them I had no idea how big their ColdFusion implementation was and how much they had invested in it for their business. I also got to meet ImageTrend. They do consulting with FirstComp as well and are probably the largest ColdFusion shop you have never heard of. Lots of a smart guys (and gals!) there and I hope they get more exposure. They deserve it!

One resolution I did not mention was in regards to speaking. I felt like I had gotten into a "presentation rut" in 2008 and earlier, giving the same presentation over and over again. I decided that in 2009 I'd do my best to give all new, all fresh presentations. (I made an exception for the Online Meetup, where I was able to give presentations for free that I had earlier given at conferences.) This was a great decision. I gave new presentations on ORM, ColdSpring, Model-Glue, charting, and other topics. It was stressful, but fun. I'm going to try to keep it up for 2010 as well. I've submitted a topic to on FW/1 to cfObjective. If I'm not chosen to speak (not holding my breath this year), then I'll give it to the online meetup. I'm no FW/1 expert, but I plan to use it a lot more in 2010. While Model-Glue continues to be my favorite framework, FW/1 is damn skippy and comes in a close second for me. In a similar vein, I've fallen behind in my Flex skills recently. I want to spend some time researching Swiz. What better way to learn it then to force myself to present on it? I used Swiz back at Broadchoice, and it really helped me with what I considered to be my biggest issue with Flex - complexity.

This was the year I finally embraced Twitter. I'm still not exactly sure how useful it is - but not everything has to have a vital purpose, does it? And I'll be brutally honest, 2000+ followers does wonders for my already overblown ego. And while I'm on the topic of ego, it was very humbling to take home multiple community awards from CFUNITED this year. It's nice to see the community grow and expand. I'm adding new blogs to ColdFusion Bloggers every week. I hope more people decide to share their knowledge and experience in 2010. I know it's scary - but at the end of the day - we can all learn from one another.

This was also the year I pretty much stopped using Spry. I've taken the jQuery koolaid and am quite addicted. While I recommend jQuery to everyone with ears, I still have a lot of respect for Spry. It was my gateway drug to Ajax in general and is still, in my opinion, the best framework for non-technical folks or people who want a gentler introduction to Ajax development.

Oh, and Adobe released another ColdFusion. And it kicked ass. I'm still shocked at how fast ColdFusion 9 runs, and ORM has redefined application development for me. I've said in the past that ColdFusion is so RAD I could probably do more with version 4 then a PHP dev could do with their latest version. While I still think that (warning, I may be biased), I can't imagine going back to any earlier version of ColdFusion. That - to me - is how radically improved version 9 is. It's truly a high point in the history of the product. And yea, I'm biased as hell (hope to get my ColdFusion tattoo sometime soon), but that's what I think.

On a negative side, I discovered one aspect of my personality that I'm not happy about. I'm negative. I don't know if I come off as negative on the blog, or Twitter, and it may have just been temporary, but when things got bad at Broadchoice, I got unhappy (nothing wrong with that) and I don't think I handled it very well. Ok, I'll admit it - I think I handled it like crap. I think when things get rough, I can get into a mood that is just hard to shake off. I'm really happy I recognized that. I won't kid myself into thinking that I'll stop being so negative, but at least knowing I do gives me perspective. It's something I'm going to watch out for in the future.

So I'll wrap this now. I'm probably going to do a post tomorrow as well with more specific resolutions, it just depends on how crazy things get tonight. I want to say one last, very important thing.

Thank You

I want to thank everyone who reads this blog. I want to thank everyone who comes to my presentations. Thank you for your feedback. Thank you for your participation. I love code. I love talking about code. And without you guys, I'd be talking to myself, which is only slightly more weird for me than normal. I hope you guys stick around for 2010. I'd lie and say there will be less OT posts, less Star Wars jokes, and less rants, but, well, I think everyone here knows better.

This weekend I worked on restoring and updating some functionality to RIAForge. RIAForge used to support the ability to browse SVN repositories via the site. It allowed you to browse the repo, view files, and examine the history. This was removed for a few reasons. Today I've restored the functionality and added the ability to view changelists as well. So for example:

Top level SVN repo for FW/1
Code view for /trunk/Application.cfc
History for Application.cfc
Changelists for FW/1
Details for revision 94

This will work hand in hand with the SVN post-commit support I've got coming this week as well. As always, if you find a bug, please be sure to report it.

Thanks go to Rob Gonda's for his original SVN work and Sean Corfield for help in testing.

I'm happy to announce some pretty big updates to RIAForge. While this is mainly for project admins, I thought it made sense to blog about it as it may encourage other folks to give RIAForge a try next time they need a place to host their open source project. Many months ago I added the concept of project admins. This was the ability for a project owner to assign other RIAForge users as project administrators. The idea being that they would help manage the project. Unfortunately when I set this up, I never really got past the first stage 'trial' test. Project admins could edit the main project page and create releases, but not really do anything else. Tonight I made it so that project administrators can work with screen shots, edit the wiki, edit (and close!) issues, and edit blog entries. Basically they have the ability to do everything but edit the list of project admins themselves or modify SVN credentials. Oh, and they also get CCed on updated issues. All in all - this should - I hope - really encourage multi-admin projects. We really need less projects being run by lone developers (and I put myself squarely in that category as well). I also have another big update that may go live this week. I'm hesitant to say what it is in case it doesn't come through, but part of me feels like if I say it, I'll obliged to ensure it does happen. The update will be support for SVN/issue commit messages. This means you can do something like:

I added a dang var statement so it fixes #29.

Subversion will pick up the message, pass it to RIAForge, and RIAForge will then actually mark bug 29 fixed for you. No promises yet - but I'm working on it (which in reality means I asked a smart friend for help and I'm hoping he comes through!).

Just a quick note to say Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it. I want to thank all my readers here. Your questions, your comments, even your arguments, help make this a better blog. Thanks!

Ok, let me start off by saying that I do not condone knocking other languages. I do it - in jest - mainly because I've had to deal with so much in return. I figure if we ColdFusion developers can take it, we can, from time to time, "vent" a bit and deal it back. As it stands, we get our code down in half the time anyway so we have the opportunity to goof off. A few weeks back I held a "You are CF Dude" contest. Jim Leether won that with this beauty:

Today its time to reverse it, go Bizzaro, or however you want to say it. Today's contest is "You are Not CF Dude". As an example...

Submit your best picture (work safe please) and the winner will get another Amazon gift certificate. All languages are open - in fact - if you want to tease ColdFusion a bit, that's fine by me. Just have fun with it.

And again - folks - it is in good fun. I don't hate PHP or any other language. If this contest makes your mad, I suggest backing away from the computer and taking a few deep breathes. It's Friday - have fun!

I've found that my blog typically gets spammed between midnight and 6AM daily. This isn't a big deal normally as I just use the "one click delete" feature of BlogCFC to clean up the spam. Last night I got a butt load of spam though so I've decided to simply enable comment moderation before I go to bed. Hopefully this won't bug my non-American readers too much!

I got home from Boston last night after attending RIAUnleashed. I want to thank Brian Rinaldi for asking me to speak there. He ran a tremendous conference. One day - densely packed - and a great combination of server side and client side sessions. I'd highly recommend folks attend next year. I know that not everyone can afford the money and time for the "big" conferences, so you should definitely consider RIAUnleashed. If any of the attendees read this blog, I'd love to hear your feelings as well.

Today's contest is 100% non-code based. I've got a 20 dollar Amazon gift cert to the best impersonation of the famous (imho) ColdFusion Dude:

I know you guys can do better than this...

Contest ends at 5PM CST.

So I don't typically get too personal on this blog (outside of my Star Wars and video game obsession), but I had to share this. About once a month or so I have what I call a "stress-mare." These aren't nightmares in the typical sense, but a session of what feels like 100% pure stress. I typically wake up from these dreams feeling like I've been through battle. It's almost worse than a traditional nightmare as there never seems to be a climax of any sort. It's pure "lead up", like a scene in a horror film that you know is going to lead to a brutal death.

[More]