What makes great technical support?

• March 22, 2006
• James Skemp

For work today, I sent off an email to support for a product that we purchased, FusionReactor (an application for helping analyze/debug ColdFusion). About an hour later, one of their support members called me up and talked me through the answers to the questions I had raised.  He also went above and beyond what I had asked by digging deeper into what we were looking for, and even went so far as to suggest that we could send on some log files for them to peruse.

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Google Page Creator and layouts (and CF 7)

• March 20, 2006
• James Skemp

I got my Google Page Creator invite a short time ago, and just setup my account (less than 2 minutes ago, as of this writing).

I haven't had much time to play around with it, obviously, but I'm impressed by the sample layouts they have. I might actually bounce around a little bit, until I find one that I can make my own.

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Adding PostgreSQL connectivity to ColdFusion MX on a local Windows-based, Apache, server

• March 19, 2006
• James Skemp

Having already added MySQL support for ColdFusion MX, it's time to look at adding PostgreSQL. For many of the same reasons we installed PostgreSQL with PHP, we'll be doing this to add to our potential resources. However, unlike our connection of MySQL with ColdFusion MX, we'll need to install some additional features to ColdFusion MX. (This guide assumes you've already installed PostgreSQL.) Downloading and installing the JDBC Driver The first thing we'll need to do is install a special driver for ColdFusion.

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Adding MySQL connectivity to ColdFusion MX on a local Windows-based, Apache, server

• March 18, 2006
• James Skemp

Until now, we've yet to setup a connection to MySQL from ColdFusion MX. This has meant that while we can do cool database things in PHP (like WordPress), we can't in ColdFusion. Until now. This time, we'll be setting up MySQL 4.1.18 and ColdFusion MX 6.1 on our local server. Because of some of the choices that we've made before, this installation is going to be fairly quick. Setting up MySQL database and user First, we'll need to setup a MySQL database and user for ColdFusion.

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Call for database requests

• March 17, 2006
• James Skemp

In a future tutorial I'll be walking through the setup of a database using PHP and MySQL (and possibly in the future, PHP and PostgreSQL). To that end, I'm looking for database setup requests.

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Error handling on a local Windows-based, Apache, server

• March 16, 2006
• James Skemp

This time, we'll be setting up very basic error handling, and setup our first .htaccess file.

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Installing PostgreSQL on a local Windows-based, Apache, server

• March 15, 2006
• James Skemp

While we've already setup MySQL, another popular SQL server is PostgreSQL. Like MySQL, PostgreSQL is absolutely free, and will allow us to create databases on our local server. Downloading PostgreSQL We'll be downloading the most current version of PostgreSQL, which is 8.1.3 at the time of this writing. You can download the installation file from http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/win32. We'll want to download the regular zip file, called postgresql-8.1.3-1.zip, and weighing in at 21 MB.

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Upgrading (our local install of) WordPress

• March 11, 2006
• James Skemp

In a previous guide, we walked through installing WordPress on a local machine. This time, we'll be upgrading WordPress. For this guide, we'll be upgrading from WordPress 2.0.1 to 2.0.2. Note that this guide will work equally well for upgrading to 2.0.3, 2.0.4 or 2.0.5.

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Kirby Puckett

• March 7, 2006
• James Skemp

I don't typically keep track of sports, but since Kirby Puckett was one of my favourite sport's people when I was younger, I have to at least mention his passing. It's funny, but now that I bought rabbit ears for the TV, I've been actually getting more news than I was before.  Unfortunately, and in some ways fortunately, the numbers I'm hearing from the news are quite high.  As in over 60% of troops in Iraq want out of Iraq, over 60% don't have confidence in Bush, and over 60% think civil war in Iraq is likely.

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'All Marketers are Liars' - Seth Godin speaks at Google

• March 6, 2006
• James Skemp

If you have the bandwidth, there's a great little video available from Google - Seth Godin's speech at Google.

"All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google

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