use strict;

Cross-platform file copying is fun

Last week, my Windows partition on my MacBook Pro died.
During my restore (yes I had back ups), I realized that my backup drive is formatted in HFS+, which means I could not copy the files to my new Windows partition.
Whoops

Luckily, I am not the only one with the desire to read HFS+ from Windows.
I found someone who wrote a nice program that lets you do this.
It really made my day. check it out if you ever need to read OS X shares.

Code Monkey likes TAB and Mountain Dew

If you are a programmer, I bet you’ll enjoy this video.
You might have heard the song before, it’s the theme song for the Codemonkeys cartoon on G4.

Okay, so no one watches G4, but like me, you might have seen the commercial for the show.
I still love the song and this video though.

Thanks for the video JB

Well, I am 10 days into my Month of Macintosh, and I have some things to report.

Renaming files in Finder is easy, but not very intuitive. Thanks to these folks for showing me the way.

Macs have some interesting screen capture options, but to execute them you need flexible fingers.

A client sent me an MS Word doument. This client likes to do very ‘fancy’ things in MS Word, such as overlaying text fields on top of images. As a result, I spent a good amount of time searching for a Mac/UNIX friendly program that would read this file correctly. Purchasing Office for Mac was not an option; I think giving Microsoft more money defeats the purpose of this game. Besides, I already have a Windows copy of Office, and I refuse to buy another one.

After trying a couple programs, I came across NeoOffice, a port of OpenOffice to the Mac’s Cocoa GUI. It rocks!

I have a lot of new keyboard shortcuts to learn. Some of the Mac shortcuts make more sense than their Windows counterparts, though. At this point, I am comfortable using COMMAND-[ and ] to go Back and Forward in Mac Firefox.

Cyberduck is a great FTP client.

I waste too much time staring at and configuring my Dashboard. iStat Pro is one hot widget!

I am enjoying my time in Macintosh world so far.

Cheers!

I bought a 15″ Intel MacBook Pro last November, and I set it up to dual-boot Win XP and OS X.

It is my primary workstation, but I hardly ever use the OS X partition (okay, stop booing).

I aim to change this practice, or at least to give OS X a fair shot.

So, until the end of this month, I will use my OS X installation exclusively. When I need to do something and I don’t know the Mac way, I will research it and post about it here.

I was going to title this “30 Days of Mac”, but I’m a big fan of alliteration.

I kicked this off last weekend. I will post my first impressions later.

Last week, I saw a 2-hour demonstration of the newest version of ColdFusion. The CF development team showed off all the new bells and whistles, and I liked quite a few of them. Here is a rundown of a few things I saw during my formal introduction to Scorpio.

Implicit Array and Structure creation
At last, ColdFusion developers can create arrays like other languages!
Well, sort of…
Here is how to implicitly create an array.

<cfset arAwesome="['one','2','three']"/>

You can create implicit structures in a similar fashion.

<cfset structWicked = {flea = 'germaine',arch='Roman',lucky=5}/>


Support for JavaScript/C-style operators
You can increment/decrement counter variables and perform other functions using ++, +=, and others.
The support isn’t 100%, but it presents a nice alternative to the classic CF/VB 6 “myCounter = myCounter + 1″ syntax.

Scorpio also will introduce new comparison operators.
However, you still can’t use > or < because they are CF tag boundaries.
Please note that the old comparison operators (gt, greaterthan, gte) work the same as ever.

CFSTOREDPROC and CFQUERYPARAM work with the ‘cachedWithin’ attribute!
What more can I say about this? How about SWEET! Get out there and cache some queries!

Thread Management Tools
You can use the new CFCACHE tag to create multiple concurrant threads in your ColdFusion applications. Hot!

Built-In Server Monitoring Tool
I use SeeFusion to monitor my ColdFusion MX 7 servers.
Scorpio will have a built-in monitoring tool that looks even better. It tracks everythingfor your application server!

Microsoft Exchange Hooks
Scorpio will let your code interact with a Microsoft Exchange server.
At long last, I can write a web application to replace Outlook!

Better Image Manipulation
Use the CFIMAGE tag to crop, rotate, and skew your images from within ColdFusion.

Built-In AJAX/Web 2.0 Support
Scorpio comes with Yahoo’s YUI framework built in. You can use this for all your Web 2.0 needs. This does not prevent you from using a different JavaScript framework, though.

PDF Support
Since Adobe bought Macromedia, most of us have been waiting for PDF integration for ColdFusion. Here it is!
With the new CFPDF tag you can do a lot more PDF manipulation.
You also will have the ability to use a PDF form as a front-end for a CF application.

There are a few other new features, like reporting changes, on-the-fly Adobe Breeze presentations, and the ability to invoke Microsoft .NET components.

I don’t know about you all, but I am looking forward to the release of Scorpio!