Fridays Joke: Bottle of scotch

The first post of 2008 is here and its a joke, of course. Hope everyone had a good christmas/holiday. Enjoy the first of many Fridays of the year!

A fellow decides to take off early from work and go drinking. He stays until the bar closes at three in the morning, at which time he is extremely pissed. After leaving the bar, he walks home. When he enters his house, he doesn't want to wake his wife, so he takes off his shoes and starts tip-toeing up the stairs. Half-way up the stairs though, he falls over backwards and lands flat on his back. That wouldn't have been so bad, except that he had a half bottle of scotch in his back pocket, and it broke; the broken glass carved up his ass terribly. Yet, he was so drunk that he didn't know he was hurt.

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Scotch on the Rocks pricing announced

Scotch on the Rocks pricing announced

Also going to be title Comparing Costs of conferences. If you haven't seen already the SOTR blog has announced the pricing for next years conference.

£199 + VAT - Early Bird (Available until February 29th 2008) £299 + VAT - Full Price

I only really started attending conferences in 2006 at CFDevCon and since then have been a big advocate of them for many reasons! With Scotch on the Rocks just announcing it's prices I'd thought I'd see how it measures up against the other European options.

I've broken down the prices into two simple bands, early bird and standard. I've also not included bundled prices which add the pre and post tracks as these fall out of the scope of the general conference and are basically specialised training sessions.

Adobe Max (Europe)

Full-Event pass: 3 days October 15-17th 2007

CFUnited Europe:

Full-event pass: 2 days March 12-13th 2008

Scotch On The Rocks

Full-event pass: 3 days June 4-6th 2008

Just looking at the price in a plain format shows you what a good value SOTR is this year. Nearly half the price of its competition and a good speaker line up already. It looks like i'm heading back for some <cf_beer>

Can you keep a secret about SOTR?

I don't know if this was meant for Andy Allan or me but I've come across this YouTube vid!

Scotch on the Rocks Podcast now available

Stephen Moretti has just posted a new podcast with Andy Allan of Fuzzy Orange, the organiser behind Scotch on the Rocks.

In the podcast Stephen and Andy discuss what's coming with the next SOTR, covering how the next conference will be bigger and better, now 3 days and three tracks. From the sound of Andy, though nothing is confirmed, the prices will still be as reasonable as it's been this year which is a help, especially when either paying for it out of your own pocket or asking the boss to pay.

http://www.scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2007/9/3/Scotch-2008-Podcast-What-is-Scotch-on-the-Rocks

CFUnited Europe dates and hotel

CFUnited Europe has released details about the conference on the site.

It looks like this will be a 2 day'er being held on March 12-13th 2008 at the Novotel London West, UK. The site is advertising a call for speakers still here, and i'm still thinking of added a Friday Joke category :o)

The hotel itself looks impressive with "5,500 square metres of highly adaptable space, a choice of 32 meeting rooms and 630 bedrooms"

CFUnited touching down in Europe

To celebrate 10 years of CFUnited it's coming over the "pond" to Europe.

CFUnited is the only conference of its kind that is run by developers, for developers. The topics offered are exactly what web developers need to learn now and are based on real world experience.

The website doesn't have much content at the moment but it's coming along but at last it looks like Europe is starting to get its fair share of good conferences now!

If you want to present at the conference check out the CFUnited Blog there is an open call for speakers. It's times like this I wish there was a topic for Friday Jokes :o) I always liked the idea of speaking but just don't think I could cover a subject for an hour. Maybe 10 minutes in a pub with drinks ;o)

Scotch Keynote Day 2

Adam Lehman carried on where Tim left yesterday going into some of the new tags/functionality coming in the "highly anticipated 8th version of ColdFusion"

Below is a brief summary of some of the new features that i've seemed to of missed up to now:

1. cfstoredproc and cfqueryparam to start supporting caching, AT LAST
2. cfprint - server side printing. Probably the one reason my company doesn't use it for some internal apps is the lack of this!
3. nested cftransaction tags
4. An interesting tags for the ORM's cfdbinfo which introspects the datasource
5. New Eclipse based debugging (see below)
6. Coldfusion pluggin for Eclipse(i.e CFEclipse) to be pulled out of Flex (though still offered with it) and to be offered as a separate download for developers including:
   • RDS dataasource browser
   • RDS file system browser
   • Service Browser
   • Flex Application wizard
   • CFC Code generation Wizard
   • Ajax Application wizard
   • Coldfusion log panel
   • Step through debugger!
7. Remote calls to .net assemblies over http(fast) and TCP/IP(faster)
8. User based ColdFusion Administration and RDS. No longer is it "one password to rule them all"

Scotch End of day 1

Wow, what a good day it was yesterday, I got to say that its been well organised all around including a good internet connection, which meant that I could do some work between sessions as well as twitter/blog. As with any conference its been good to meet and chat to the likes of Peter Bell, Gert from Railo, Tim Buntel as well as regulars from the UKCFUG etc I think I've said it once or twice, but if you are a developer and you don't go to conferences you don't know what you are missing.

I'm now looking forward to the sessions today, so gotta go and catch Adam Lehman Keynotes

Scotch Railo on the rocks

The last session of yesterday which I didn't get a chance to blog about, due to discovering the free <cf_beer>, was Railo on the Rocks.

Gert spent the first part of session detailing what Railo is and how its changing from the 1.1 beta to the 2.0 version due to a change in the underlying architecture. He then went on to explain some of the key differences with the Railo administration functions, and how it offers more control to the overall server admin, which then cascades down into individual admin account per web context (domain/web site).

Next was resources. Resources at the heart are mappings with one key differnce the mapping no longing has to be a physical drive. You could apply a mapping to an FTP account even a zip file. With an FTP account mapped you can then use cffile action="write" to upload file specifying the destination as your mapping! No need to go near the dreaded <cfftp>

I'm now waiting for part two today.

Scotch on the Rocks Flickr

Check it out at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/scotchontherocks/

Including the elusive <cf_beer>