cftopper.com

Carlsberg Don't Do Egos, But if They Did...

Hahahaha - what an ejit. This guy is somebody I know through some mutual friends. He's from Cork and now lives in Dollywood where he thinks he's the next big thing.

Its always been apparent that he's full of himself but this takes the biscuit. Now, that you've seen the video, checkout Peter Walsh's personal website:

• http://www.peterwalsh.net/

 Aside: 72 virgins - very good

ps. Added code for easily embedding flash movie code to this website so expect more videos from now on.

Minutes ago, I'm sitting on the couch with the lads watching CSI:Miami when Brian, one of the other guys I live with, returns after a weekend 'at home' in Bantry.

Jokingly I say "Hey Brian, how was Bantry, any fighting this weekend?".

He starts to laugh and says "Yo, check out my fucking nose".

We stare in disbelief at the clear bite marks on the underside of his nose - "What the fuck?!".

Apparantly he got in some kind of drink-comatose-fight that he barely remembers and came away with bite marks on his nose! You should see it - it's incredible.
We are still laughing.

At first glance through my RSS feeds, it seem that nothing too exciting occurred on the Web2.0 mini-sphere in my 2 week absence.

But yesterday I met Dan for a coffee and was excited by the news that http://www.itcork.ie/ - (an organisation that Digital Crew are a member of) received a Cease & Desist letter from CMP/O'Reilly publishers for using the term "Web 2.0" in an upcoming conference.

• Keith outlines the story well.
  Definitely worth a read if your a developer.

My thoughts on this:

Can you believe CMP/O'Reilly's cheek. Should it really bother them if a networking group is the South of Ireland is using "their" term. Bullying tactics. Where is their Integrity?

I'm literally just in the door, returned from Thailand, and of course the first thing I do is boot up the laptop. I've got lots of email to catch up on.... But what have i missed on the whole Internet/web2.0 scene in 2 weeks? Well I plan to spend at least part of the day figuring that out and another chunk playing Oblivion.

I'll also upload the remainder of my holiday pictures and some notes about the whole Thailand experience. It was awesome. I can't believe it's over, seems we just left. Back in Ireland and apparently the weather has been shitty while we've been gone, but, I must have brought some of the Thai weather back with me 'cos it seems nice a nice clear day outside now.

Sawasdee Khrap

For those who don't know I co-own AREA51 Internet & Multiplayer Gaming Cafe with 2 good buddies. The internal cameras can be accessed via the web - i'm sitting in an Internet Cafe in Thailand thousands of miles away checking out business. How cool is that.

OK, 1/3 of the photos are uploaded, rest are burned to CD.
Must go, things to do.

ps. I sent the Boys a pic of me posing, hand-on-tit with a well manly ladyboy for a laugh. I should have known better. Dan uploaded it to the AREA51 forums for everyone to have-a-laugh, the bastard 

This country is class! We're just back from white water rafting - a day trip - and it was outstanding bundling down the river rapids. I always wanted to do it, can strike it from the list now.

Yesterday we went on a full-day Island-hopping canoe expedition. On one part of that trip we were taken into a breathtaking lagoon though these low sea caves... what an experience. So beautiful over here. I can't even begin to tell you about all the things we've done such as... when we went shooting .45 cal hand guns the other day.

What else? Hmmm. Can't think.

Update

Guys, guys, guys, check this out, watch a load of tv shows instantly online in high-quality. This is definitely a site to bookmark.

• http://www.peekvid.com/

I also recommend that you download this tool that I got somewhere along the line that will allow you to nail the video player to the screen while you program in the background.

• Nail It!

Currently watching the Smurfs - Ah! The happy memorys. Run!, it's Gargoyle.

O great day, I've finally got around to adding smilie support to cftopper.com.

I came in to the office today to do some work but am in no mood for it so I just spent the last 15 minutes goofing off adding automatic smilie conversion from code to image code to the cftopper CMS.

Excellent!

I've gradually been making other improvements to this site also - I added an archive, tag search, permalinks, etc. When I'm happy with the engine, i'll give it out completely free. Honest.

Recently due to lazyiness, candlewax and lack of coordination I had an accident with my laptop resulting in a messed up LCD display. Moving swiftly along...

I'm delighted to report that I managed to fix the screen on my laptop. I painstakingly took apart the LCD monitor (some 20 screws) and poked around, checking that the connections weren't loose (I suspected it was a loose connection since the LCD seemed ok apart from the complete lack of the colour red)...

Some blind poking and prodding (I'm not a hardware guru) and I booted her (she's called Natasha) up to find it works perfectly again.

Amazing when I put the whole thing back togther I didn't have a single screw left over - very proud of that - i usually have loads of itty-bitty screws left all over after a reassembly.

Damn, I'm some hardware guru!

ps. forgive my spelling, IESpell doesn't seem to like IE7 Beta 2.

pss. Holiday to Thailand in T-5 days. Looking forward to going diving in tropical waters and lazing in a hammock. Switching off from programming for 2 weeks. Oh yes, roll on Friday. Life is good. Hope your seething with jealously whomever you are.

Shhhssss, don't tell anyone - but I stayed in the office all night playing Oblivion. I'm in love with the game. I even uncharacteristically shunned drinking for the game. I must have played for 10 hours straight.

Trying hard to limit myself to just one session as the weekends, but it's hard. Think I need to join GA.

Why the office? Well you see, I had a little accident with my laptop during the week and now it doesn't display the colour red too great, which as you can imagine doesn't make for the best gaming experience (blue blood isn't quite the same), so I have it hooked up to a 19" screen (that I stole from Adam) in my office instead.

Anyhow, I must go home and sleep now; must go drinking tonight.

p.s. I honestly think Oblivion is one of the best games ever made and should be played by everyone. So so so emmersive, varied and ..zzzzzzz

p.s.s. I have all this work to get done before my holiday to Thailand next Friday - shame on me for playing O all night instead of getting things done.

p.s.s.s. IE7 is still rocking my boat - i like it more than Firefox - sorry Firefox zealots.

I have just finally got around to testing IE7. I'm about 1 minute into it and so far I'm loving the clean easy-to-use interface. What was all the fuss about. So far all my sites I've checked work perfectly, no CSS issues.

Stay tuned...

I went back to karate last Wednesday for the first time in 10 years. I used to be fairly good at it IMHO so it's tragic that I didn't stick at it. 2 days later and every muscle below my waist is absolutely aching.

It was meant to be a beginners class - I have to start from scratch again obviously - but alas it wasn't. I was surrounded by a small selection of elitist black, purple and brown belts.

My new club is fantastic. I enjoyed it (even though I'm sure the girl who unluckily got stuck sparring with me wasn't too impressed with my inability). I'm going to stick at it this time.

Can you imagine the luxury of never having to program a form again! Well. I am here adding some functionality to a 5 year old website (the programming behind of which is so... awkward; that it really highlights how much we, Digital Crew, have developed as CF programmers over the years) and...

I was just about to program another "input form, validation, update database, send emails" combination when I sighed and thought fuck this.

I've been comtemplating updating my UDI project to be able to work standalone with single forms so that I never have to do this shit. Just pop UDI onto a page, mess with the wizard that appears and bingo - job is done.

Stay tuned, I'm about an hour into this upgrade - the time invested will reap major rewards.

So it's been a week since my last post. That's pretty bad - I made a rule for myself that I'd post at least once every 2 working days. Guess I didn't have anything of note. So what have I been up to? Advanced caching for one thing...

Last Monday I decided to finally get around to adding content-caching to the Digital Crew site engine. With proper advanced caching, a single server could host up to 10 times the amount of websites, leading to cost savings and an overall improvement in website speeds. So I pulled out my old dcCache tag. I then re-factored (to use some bullshitty programming jargon) the tag bringing the code into the CFMX age. The tag works like so:

<dcCom component="dcCache" key="stuff"> CONTENT HERE </dcCom>

If the tag detects a cached version of "stuff", it just loads up that HTML page and spits it out, then exits the tag using <cfexit method="exittag">.

By the way, I had an old note in the tag saying that there was a bug with <cfexit> in which if the exittag option was called, it would still execute the content nested with the tag. I tested and this bug seems to be gone so I reimplemented the <cfexit> code.

This tag is used to cache various items around a web page. A "Top 10 Movies" content snippet could be cached for example so that it only updates when the database behind it is updated saving the execution of a query and parsing of result on every page of the site. Also an entire page could be cached. That entire page might contain the "Top 10 Movies" cached item. I got thinking about this and wanted a way so that if the "Top 10 Movies" snippet is reset, the parent cached item, the full page in this example is also reset.... I won't bored you with the details but with a REQUEST.dcCacheCurrentList variable I was able to make this magic happen.

I'm a little concerned that repeated loading the cached content from disk might be slow - it might be better to cache the most popular content in memory, but then again the operating system should know that certain disk items are being repeated accessed and make them easily available.

To reset the cache, the dcCache component is called using

<dcCom component="dcCache" action="resetlist" resetList="Top10Movies">

I used all this caching milarchy for Digital Warehouse and after some teething problem, the site now seems to be nice and fast - it's basically just spitting out pre-rendered HTML code for 90% of the web page. That's the beauty of dcCache, it can be used for just parts of a web page.

In our implementation of www.digitalwarehouse.ie, the CMS is one application and the website is another so I use CFHTTP to send a request from one app to the other to reset items when an update is made in the CMS. So far, it works pretty well. Anyone have a better idea for inter-application communication than CFHTTP and I don't want to hear about using SERVER variables - that's a no-no on a server that could host hundred of sites. :D

Oops, this post is way too long. Way to rant. I was going to give an overview of my entire week but that explanation of one days work has done me in. Stay tuned for another post later today.