LeGros will like this.

I have submitted my presentation on using Flex without a framework to cf.objective() 2008. After all the buzz about Flex frameworks and the amount of interested Googlers that end up on my web site for the same topic, there's obviously sufficient interest to put this one up for the world (or at least the cf.objective() attendees) to see.

Here's my topic description. Let's hope it gets approved by the advisory committee!

Flex: No Frameworks Required
Adobe delivered Flex with an event model, a component architecture, and all the power of ActionScript. And yet, for some reason, many people feel compelled to strap a framework on top of this perfectly productive paradigm, which often just makes things more complicated than they need to be without introducing any real benefits. Join Maxim for a back-to-basics discussion on Flex application development, based on proven practices gleaned from tried-and-trusted software development techniques.

Make sure you head on over and register for this conference if you are a ColdFusion or Flex developer. While CFUNITED is a great conference, the topics at cf.objective() tend to be more on the advanced/esoteric side. Registration is $499 for the early rate, $449 for conference alumni and CFUG managers, and group discounts are available (check the conference home page for specifics on pricing).

What more do you need?

This could get interesting.

I must say, I absolutely love the concept and distribution model for the Kindle, but the UI looks horrendous. It's like everything that was bad about OS 9 in one box.

I'm reserving judgement until I see one in person. One of our VPs said he ordered one, so I should get the opportunity soon.

Probably the best $39.99 I spent this year on personal entertainment would be the copy of Dawn of War Platinum Edition I picked up. I used to play Warhammer 40K back in my geekier days, but having a computerized version is really much more fun than moving lead figures all over a huge table at the local Games Workshop (not to mention they don't have any Games Workshop locations in Orlando, FL that I know of).

So, I was showing off how DoW plays nicely in the experimental DirectX 9 support in VMWare Fusion, and a fellow coworker and Mac enthusiast showed me the demo for Starcraft II, which is going to be Mac native.

Check it out (I highly recommend the Terran download video)... and then wait, like me. Should be out in 2008.

This is such a neat and simple solution to the classic "client thinks prototype is final app" problem that I can't believe we didn't think of it ourselves. Nice work, Ted.

GA reports that I have a bunch of traffic on my blog this month from the keywords "cairngorm bad". Turns out I have the top hit on Google at the time of writing for these keywords, related to my post on the subject of Flex frameworks.

Looks like we at CFI are not the only ones who have doubts about the viability of Flex frameworks at the present time...

I couldn't get LambdaProbe to run on my JBoss 4.2.1GA release on my Mac. It would hit a recursive loop and then puke over a StackOverflowError.

Turns out you have to modify the code where LambdaProbe checks to see if it can bind to a particular server version. They must have renamed something in JBoss since the earlier releases, since LambdaProbe used to run without modification in the 4.0.3SP1 release.

In any event, the code change is painless, and since the project can be built with Ant and the source download comes with all the depedencies, you can have a working version in less than a minute.

See the solution on the LambdaProbe forum here.

We've been choosing a new app server platform to standardize our infrastructure on, and the choices we were working with were JBoss and Oracle's OiAS.

Stipulations were as follows:

1) Must be a supported app server for CF Enterprise and Flex on Solaris.
2) Must have commercially viable support options.

On the one hand, we just bought Oracle's Enterprise Management console (previously branded the "Grid Control" tools) to manage our databases, and it does a nice job administrating the app server too. This makes it really compelling to stay with Oracle's server so our DBAs can manage the whole kit and caboodle from one place. On the down side, Oracle's app server tends to lag behind in JDK versions, and support for CF Enterprise on Solaris is no longer available for this product.

JBoss is free, highly configurable, lightweight, and stays up to date with JDK versions. You can get commercial support from Red Hat (for a pittance compared to our other enterprise support contracts). On the down side, the admin consoles are pretty bare-bones.

So, I did a little Googling today, and what do you know - Oracle has a plugin for Enterprise Manager to let it monitor JBoss instances and give you almost the same level of administration as you get with Oracle's native server.

I'm not sure what's left to debate on which server to go with, but I'll know after I talk to Larry (our DBA team manager) on Monday.

I was really hoping to find a bus-powered Firewire hard drive enclosure for my old 60 GB Seagate drive (recently yanked from my aging Quicksilver G4 tower).

Lots of Googling turned up two results.

1) Lots of people think Firewire doesn't carry enough juice to power a 3.5" HDD.

2) Apparently these guys figured it out and then... decided it wasn't such a good idea? Not really sure, but their enclosures are discontinued; a shame, since their solution was both attractive and what I was looking for.

I really wanted a drive enclosure that would live at home 90% of the time, but could be portable if need be, and bus power is obviously nice since I would only have to lug around the drive (without the wall wart power supply) in addition to my laptop. Oh well, no such luck.

So, I settled on one of these. Decent 60GB bus-powered 2.5" Firewire portables (of the likes of those from Smartech, such as their Firelite series) run $60+, so I figured I could live with slightly less portability in Macally's option for $33.

I can now confirm that restoring from Time Machine is stupidly easy.

1) Leopard finishes installing, Mac restarts
2) Migration Assistant starts itself and asks me if I want to restore from another Mac, another volume on my Mac, a Time Machine backup, or not to transfer info at all. I choose a Time Machine backup from the internal 80 GB drive in my G4.
3) Leopard scans my drives, finds "1 Time Machine backup available" from my internal 80 GB drive. It also found my Airport Disk drive and lets me know I can log in to it to look for backups there if I so desire (thanks, but no thanks). I pick the discovered backup from my 80 GB Time Machine drive.
4) A list of stuff shows up: Users, Networking and other settings, Applications folder, Files and Folders from my old OS X installation. It also tells you how big each option is.
5) I open up the Users drop-down and select my account. I deselect the old user account for Postgres back when this box was my dev machine.
6) I click "Transfer".
7) Magic ensues.

Yes, my friends - stupidly, stupidly easy. So much so, in fact, that I am now stupider for having used it.

So now that I've had Leopard on my old Quicksilver G4 tower for two weeks, I decided to put Time Machine to the ultimate test.

Die Hard (Drive)
My G4 came with a 60 GB hard drive when I bought it, and I put an 80 GB drive in the expansion bay to use as a scratch disk for audio/video fun-ness and as a backup. When I got Leopard, I archived all the stuff on the 80 GB secondary drive so I could use it as a backup disk for Time Machine.

The G4 tower has pretty much been relegated to file serving for the PowerBook G4 in the living room (think totally overpowered AppleTV) since I keep my shared iTunes and iPhoto libraries on it. I also use if for new OS testing (obviously). However, considering the fact that my latest iPod is an 80 GB model and I can't even get 60 GB on the G4's main drive, it was time for an upgrade.

Earlier in the year, I bought a 250 GB MyBook USB drive to use with Airport Extreme's Airport Disk mode, but to be honest I haven't been very impressed. I seem to get better performance/reliability by just sharing drives over my network and connecting to them wirelessly that way. Since Leopard makes network sharing even simpler than previous versions of OS X, I figured I would retire the MyBook from Airport Disk duty and use it as a Time Machine backup for a new, larger main drive in the G4. $70 on NewEgg later, I had a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda on my doorstep to use as the G4's new main squeeze.

With it being a lazy Saturday and all, I figured I'd just pop it in the Mac this morning and reinstall Leopard while programming; after all, I performed the installation of the 80 GB scratch drive after coming home buzzed from a night out, so I figured it would take all of ten minutes for me to get the new 250 GB Seagate in.

What I didn't anticipate was that the screw holding my hard drive enclosure in was completely stripped. I probably did that when I installed my last drive (I have a tendency to overtighten screws, whether working on cars, PCs, furniture, or whatever). I tried everything from gripping the screw with pliers (not enough head to grip on since the screw is low profile), using an Allen bit (none would fit the gouged screw head well enough to twist), and trying to bash a Phillips head in with a hammer to get purchase (I was too much of a pussy to bash too hard in case I wrecked my Mac).

Nothing worked. Damn it.

Off to Ace Hardware I go, and sure enough, their very smallest extractor screw was just about the same size as the tiny hard drive screw. I got home, pulled out the electric drill, and gently/slowly drilled a hole in to the old screw (since the last thing you want flying around your Mac's innards are little metal shavings). Unfortunately, my old hard drives were stacked one on the other above the screw, and naturally neither the 5/16 drill bit nor the extractor were long enough to go in properly.

Great. Fine.

F**k it.

I got a large drill bit and polished the head right off the old screw. Out popped the hard drive enclosure. Now that I had enough room to work, I drilled all the way through the old screw and gave the extractor one last shot. Sure enough, the entire old thread assembly came out on the tip, and I was left with a perfectly threaded opening that was still completely usable.

Time for Time Machine
I've got Leopard purring away on the install right now, after which we'll see if TIme Machine can live up to all the hype and restore my system the way I want it.

I don't want to do a full restore, which is a shame because it's actually stupidly easy. If your hard drive ever burns out, all you need to do is drop in a new drive, pop in the Leopard disk, and you can actually restore your Mac in the Leopard installer using a Time Machine backup drive, resulting in a perfect restoration of your machine at the point of your last hourly Time Machine snapshot.

As opposed to this, what I want to do is just pull over my old user directory to get all my files, after which I'll reinstall all my apps myself. This is achieved with our good old buddy Migration Assistant. Migration Assistant will pull files from either another Mac connected via USB or FireWire (and probably over the network too), or from a Time Machine backup. I ran through the process as an experiement before I got going on the hard drive replacement, and you can basically pick individual user folders, and then either just your Applications directory, or just the root of your old OS X installation.

However, if you pick either the root of your old OS X installation or the Applications directory, then Migration Assistant will automatically copy over your old Library from the backed up OS X installation. This is necessary for all your apps to work properly (since shared libraries and config files your apps rely on live in the Library). The thing is, I don't want my old Library since I have a bunch of hacks in it from when I set my Quicksilver G4 up as a dev server a long time ago. So, while it will take me longer to reinstall everything myself, at least my system will be spick and span when I'm done.

So, what to do with the old 60 GB main drive? I think I'll get a portable FireWire enclosure for it and will use it as a scratch disk for audio/video editing on my laptop. Funny how things go full circle, isn't it? :)