Well, for almost as long as I can remember I have been complaining about never taking a vacation.  I either never have the time or the money, or some strange mixture of the two.  Well, that is all about to change.

As you may or may not have heard, my friend Joshua is organizing the RIAdventure cruise.  Five days of fun, sun and all the geeks you could pack on a cruise ship.  It will be all the fun of a major conference, minus all the conferences but it does sound like a great time to mingle with all your fellow ColdFusion addicts.

I plan on being there and I hope to see you there as well.  To find out more, check out http://www.riadventure.com. 

It would seem 2008 is officially here.  I hope everyone was happy and safe bringing in the new year.

Last year had it's ups and downs, but overall it was a great year.  I have my health, a great family and good friends here and abroad.  At this time last year the latest version of my agency management system was a little more than a page of roughed out divs, now its an application I am not ashamed to say I developed.  WhosOnCFC has had more success than I would have thought, heck, someone other than me is actually using it.  I have made the jumped to OO programming from the spaghetti code of the past and I even finally picked up an MVC application framework.

Take care all and I hope you have a great year!

Well, this will be my last post for a few days as me and my family celebrate the season.  We are wishing you and yours have a very happy, very safe holiday.  I shall return Thursday for business as usual.

Also, greetings and cheers to all my friends out there: Ray Camden, Dan Wilson, Scott Stroz, Scott Pinkston, Jen Larkin, Jim Carlow, and all the great folks out there in #coldfusion on DalNet and anyone else out there I forgot.

I hope Santa is good to you all!

I am in the process of changing my layout on the Blog and some how, some way the configuration files got ferked when I was moving them over from the development machine to the blog.  I am getting everything straight now (I hope).

Well, it is not very often I have a distinguished author grace my blog other than perhaps Raymond Camden.  So I was extremely surprised this weekend when I was going through the comments on my blog and found a comment left by Mr. Tim Cox.  He will be back on the air with Walton & Johnson Thursday, December 13th at 8:30 AM.  Anyone who does not know about Mr. Cox, I would highly recommend you check out his interview on the 13th.  If you are not lucky enough to be in the Walton & Johnson listening area you can find his web site at http://www.goooh.com.

If you would like to know a little bit more about Mr. Cox and his web site, I will let him tell you in his own words:

The revolution is gaining momentum each day. Thousands of people are visiting www.GOOOH.com and becoming members. Many are already sending in there $100, though you do not need to make that decision until next Spring.

We understand many are skeptical when they first hear the plan; politics and politicians have worn us down. New ideas and inventions are not always easy to accept. But, we encourage you to engage and become part of the solution.

Tell eveyone you know about GOOOH. Let each person evaluate the merits of the process. GOOOH will work if we can get Americans to participate. The only thing that will cause it to fail is if we do nothing, and if we do nothing, the corruption will continue and our country will continue to decline.

If you are tired of being represented in Congress by politicians who tell you what you want to hear to get elected and then totally forget about you, this is your chance to actually do something about it.

Well, I have spent most of the afternoon pouring through web server logs and my file system.  It would appear that someone in France was kind enough to infect my server with an IRCBot.  I do not know exactly who is involved, but they were using irc.powerserv35.net:16667 in the #psyko_home channel.  I tried to log on and find whoever was the bot master, however I was K-Lined from the server pretty quick.  Such is life.

Going back through the directories and files they were kind enough to leave on my server I tracked down where the files originally came from.  The server is hosted in Japan (p11093-ipadfx01kobeminato.hyogo.ocn.ne.jp [220.98.242.93]).  You can point an FTP client to that address and login as anonymous/anonymous@OnThe.net .  Konichiwa bitches.

Anyway, it looks like next week I am going to be plugging security holes wherever I can find them.  I thought I had things tightened down pretty good.  That is what I get for thinking.

Well, I guess it is about that time of year when things slow down while everyone is getting in the Christmas Spirit.  I have been taking advantage of some of the downtime trying to catch up on some of my projects.

WhosOnCFC now has a SVN repository thanks to Ray Camden and the nice folks over at RIAForge.  I have never used a SVN repository, but it would seem it would be considered a best practice.  Since my last round of updates I have only made a few changes and added in a new function to return a CSV list of users online.  You can find the newest version on SVN at http://svn.riaforge.org/whosoncfc.

The guts to ExplorerG3, my Agency Management System, has completely been rewritten.  What was once a bunch of spaghetti code to load and save customers, policies and policy data has been rewritten using CFCs.  The result is a much more readable and hopefully stable code-base.  I also decided to put my money where my mouth is as far as WhosOnCFC.  This is probably the most active web application I have and WhosOnCFC has integrated seamlessly into it with no problems what so ever.

Other than that, most of my time has been dedicated to researching all the new Coldfusiony goodness that abounds in CF8 and trying to find a job developing instead of being a developer/customer service rep.  Maybe if I am a good boy Santa will bring me a new job for Christmas.

I will probably just get lumps of coal.

Well, first, let me say I hope that if you celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you had a happy and safe holiday.  I don't think my family is used to dealing with two year-olds so mine was interesting to say the least.

Over the holidays it looks like Joe Danziger was playing with my last release of WhosOnCFC and he found an error I cannot believe I let slip by.  The UserID field was not getting updated once it was set in WhosOnPageTracker().  This means that the value was initially set to Guest, if the user logged in later in the session, the UserID was never getting updated and would still show Guest instead of the actual username.  So my thanks go out to Joe for finding it.

Also, now WhosOnPageTracker() returns a boolean value which indicates whether a user was already being tracked or not.  If the user is already being tracked the function will return true, otherwise it will return false if a user is not being tracked.  This comes in handy in secured applications when you want a user to be redirected to a login screen, etc. when they first log on.

GOOOH | Get Out of Our House: A non-partisan political party!

I do not often blog about politics, one because I am not a very political person, and two, because politicians as a general rule just make me sick to my stomach. 

On my way this work this morning I was listening to the Walton and Johnson show, as I do every day as I am a loyal 10%'er.  On this morning's show they had a Mr. Tim Cox on that just released a new book, REVOLUTION: Get Out Of Our House.  The premise being getting the politicians who are paid by big business and special interest groups out of Congress and putting in the people our government is supposed to be representing, the working class folks.

Well, it has  been two years, two months and three days, but who is counting.  Some time this evening two lanes of the 6-lane bridge will be opening, allowing a trickle of traffic between Harrison County and Jackson County for the first time since Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast.