This isn't new news to anyone but I thought I should still mention it.

I was catching up on an old CFHour() podcast while driving on my commute to the office and back today when one of the Q&A sessions asked whether a ColdFusion'er should blog (they should!). It did make me think about myself and why I don't blog as much recently.

I've been blogging in some form or another for some years now but over the last couple of years my posts have dwindled. Not because I have lost interest, since Railo went open source I now host my own server, but because I've been busy with my main work either doing development which is trivial or stuff that's has been blogged about elsewhere. That is not to say I don't come across new issues & fixes but when I do I'm on Twitter talking about them nowadays.

I do plan to pick up the blogging as I have quite a few little sidelines projects which I hope to bring up at some point but till then make sure follow me at www.twitter.com/andyj

Daisy, my 16 week old kitten has a tendency to jump and sit on my keyboard often shutting down programs, renaming files & folders to say the least. After googling a solution I found Cat Nip

a program which, while running, detects “cat-like typing” and locks the keyboard, usually in under a half second. Optionally, CatNip will fade your desktop and display a warning message to your cat (which is of dubious value, since if your cat can read, your cat can probably type, too).

There are mixed reports about whether Cat Nip works on Leopard, but for me so-far-so-good

I've been looking at Wordpress for sometime and figured why not take the jump. There's a couple of reason for the move but mainly its the amount of tools, plug-ins, code etc out there for you.

So give me a while to settle in and everything should be back to normal :)

Please update your bookmarks and feeds for my site.

I now have a Mango Blog at:

http://www.andyjarrett.com/blog

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/andyjarrett

This morning I was randomly checking my blog stats which I haven't done for ages and found out my previous post was my 1000th!!! So with that I thought I should publish a few more stats for those interested, because I didn't even realise that this had been running for nearly 6 years!

Follow The Pirate Bay on trial tags, #spectrial to learn more.

I've modified my BlogCFC code a little today. Instead of having the usual Digg/Delicious bookmark links I've swapped them for a Add This button which is apparently the #1 bookmarking and sharing button on the Internet.

You need to sign up for a free account but this is only to allow tracking and stats that you view.

When you create your button there is no need to really change the code as its picks up the page URL. But if you want to specify an alternate URL because you want to have the button multiple times on one page then you need to use the addthis_url and addthis_title variables (e.g. addthis_url='http://www.andyjarrett.com/andy/blog/alternate-page.html';).

Below is the code I'm using for BlogCFC. All I've done is removed the Digg and Delicious links in the index.cfm template and replaced it with with the following:

Codeweavers gave President Bush a challenge to meet at least one of several goals before he left office. One of these goals was to lower gas prices in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon. Since this has now happened (though I doubt Bush had anything really to do with it, it was more Opex) they are offering their software for free, today (28th October).

At the time of writing this though Slashdot and Digg seems to of brought codeweavers.com, but thats not stopping them. You can still register your email address for a free serial and fully unlocked builds of CrossOver Mac Pro, CrossOver Games Mac, CrossOver Linux Pro, and CrossOver Games Linux are available as well.

Found via (Slashdot)

If you don't know already the UK is taking its orders from the music industry in terms to clamp down on file-sharers. The big six, BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse have all signed up for the proposed "three-strikes" system. In short, after a couple of letters you're going to be in trouble.

Up to now UK ISP's have had the stance of we supply the network we don't care what our users do, we're not the police. Part of this comes from the Human Rights law that we sit under that provides a degree of privacy in our communications.

But what bothers me the most with this is that the pressure is actually coming via the Government, and its them whom are actually telling the ISP's what to do. Now if its illegal, its illegal I get it. But shouldn't the Government be putting more energy into getting ISP to track terror chatter, child porn, sales of drugs etc. I can't see how a multi-billion pound/dollar industry is more of a "serious" issue to them. The music industry needs to stop looking at laws and wasting Government resource and use a little fresh initiative and ideas to prevent the file sharing in the first place.

Read more on this at here and here

Another week has passed and I still haven't gotten back into the swing of blogging and keeping up-to-date. I've also just realised that I am way behind on the ColdFusion Weekly podcasts, D'oh. But the biggest news I missed out on is the free open source BlueDragon edition. This should change the landscape for ColdFusion, and also giving no-one the excuse of CF being "to expensive". Now if we could start knocking out cheap hosting options like PHP has then CF will have an even stronger future.

Anyway, I suppose you're here for the joke, enjoy!

According to a news report, a certain private school in Washington recently was faced with a unique problem. A number of 12-year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom. That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick they would press their lips to the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints.

[More]

Its a sad day here as I never wanted to moderate comments. I like the idea of anyone coming along and being able to enter there thoughts and get it online immediately but it looks like the spammers have changed this!

In the past I was posting heavier and the amount of proper comments out-weighed the spam so I kept moderation off. The problem is this year I've been busy recently so the posts have come down along with the comments which has caused this state.

All I can say is please comment. I will add them as soon as I can (unless on holiday) so please don't think they will not appear on the site. I'm not even going to stop flames as long as they are on topic and not too derogatory :)

iwouldntsteal.net is a site set up to counter act the propagandamessage from media company's that downloading a movie is that same as stealing a car, handbag, or even shoplifting.

The Greens|European Free Aliance is a European parliamentary group made up of Greens and representatives of stateless nations ("regionalists"). Their argument is that sharing movies online does not equate to stealing and instead of spending money on adapting laws why not look into viable legal alternatives!

[More]

This is great news. In an effort to discourage piracy the BBC has released its iPlayer in a Mac OSX and Linux friend Flash version.

For those of you know don't know the BBC is essentially a public service broadcaster funded by a licence fee. Such a licence is required to operate a broadcast television receiver within the UK. The cost of a television licence is set by the government and enforced by the criminal law. You pay the fee for NO commercials or political influence and it answers only to its viewers and listeners!

The iPlayer is an online Flash player that gives users the chance to catch up on your favourite programs from the past week, in my case the season finale of Spooks :) There is of course digital rights management security embedded so the content will be automatically deleted from your computer once it hits expiry date. But I see that as fair as they are offering it for free and no doubt they will want to make a revenue from DVD sales etc.

I was invited to the private beta of Erepublik recently which is more than another social site. Its a social world. With political parties (you can create your own), companies, armies the list goes on.

Just like in real life, I notice there isn't an instruction manual, so I suppose we will just have to make it up as we go along.

I'm still quite a newbie on the site but I do have four invites for anyone interested. If you are leave your name and a valid email address in the comments.

Slashdot has reported that Gmail now offer IMAP support. Which in the grand scheme of things doesn't sound all to impressive until you realise that this now means that you can *upload* all of your email as well which is something that has always been bugging me.

N.B. as this is Google it will mean not everyone has this feature yet, so until then keep a lookout

There is a survery set up over at BlogCFC.com to see how users are implementing the application. If you run any version of BlogCFC why not take time to fill it in and give some feed back to Ray and the project.

http://www.blogcfc.com/index.cfm/2007/10/18/First-Survey

It doesn't ask about what you would like, don't like, etc, as that will come later.

Want to find out everything about next years Scotch on the Rocks conference before the blog posts? If so then follow the Twitter posts at twitter.com/SOTR

Be the first to know about the additional speakers, ticket pricing and availability of tickets here. We promise to keep the traffic down to one or two tweets a week. Well until we get closer to the event when it may become twice daily :)

If you're new to Twitter it's a free social networking and micro-blogging service. You can send micro-blog updates (up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, email, to the Twitter website. From there they are the the whole world can view your thoughts. Though from my perspective it also doubles up as a huge collaborative IM messaging service with a lot of inter-traffic [good] noise going on

I was at the petrol station early this morning (so early that it was still dark outside!) when I saw this! Now forgive me if I am wrong but surely this is one of those times when the two products do not complement each other at all?

Just been reading Kev's blog over at http://inner-rhythm.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2007/9/30/Friday-Thought-Lack-Off and found out you can post to your blog from Google Docs. Really I should look into the Google Office

So here is a quick test.

If you are looking to set this up as well it's simple

1. First and foremost make sure you have a gmail account. Once you've done that goto https://docs.google.com and settings
2. On the settings page look for Blog settings and Edit Settings a pop up window should open, enter the following settings:
   
1. Change the blog service to My own server/custom and select Moveable Type API
2. The URL should be http://{blog cfc root}/xmlrpc/xmlrpc.cfm
3. Enter your BlogCFC username, password, and a Blog ID/Title
4. Click Test, if evertyhing is ok click OK
   
3. Then Save settings.
4. Create a new document
5. Type your post
6. Once you've finished click Publish the Post to blog
   

Back in August 2, 2005 i had a post about a Free Mac Mini. Well 2 years later, 10 referrals, and waiting for them to offer Intel based Macs its arrived!!

WooHoo!! I am now the proud owner of a

• 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 1GB memory
• 80GB hard drive
• Front Row and Apple Remote
• Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger

I gotta say I always thought it was a myth, but I was sooo wrong and I'm glad. I don't know what I'm gonna do with the new machine ... any suggestions. I've heard some people use the mini as an Apple TV replacement. I'm even thinking a low end sever for my personal projects. Anyone got any ideas for me?

So what am I going for now; a Free iPod Nano. So if you want to help, follow the link and sign up please :o)

http://ipodnanogiveaway.co.uk/index.php?referral=173199