Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

Would you like to own a Railo 3.0 Enterprise license all of your own? I am sure you would!

All you have to do is answer the question posed during Episode 3 of the CFDocs podcast and send your answers to podcast at ukcfug.org

You can get it via: iTunes , RSS or download the episode directly

Why don't you head over to the UKCFUG site and submit your questions about these topics?

We shall be discussing these topics in the podcast with the usual crew and hopefully get some wise people to share their thoughts!

Either Leave a comment, send an to podcast at ukcfug.org or call the ukcfug via Skype to have your question discussed (and maybe even answered!)

In a record breaking time, I managed to edit the latest episode of the CFDocs podcast for the UKCFUG. This time with a new "refreshing" intro tune and as per listener requests, I have shortened the intro (I mean sheesh! Was 30 seconds TOO long?)

I am looking at getting a couple of microphones for the next recording, but the problem is doing multi-track recording and getting it all setup. Some listeners (and in fact Brian Meloche from the CFConversations podcast) have recommended the Blue Snowball but alas, it is not available in the UK yet. So I might have to see about some other nice microphones, of course, any suggestions are warmly welcome!

My current workflow is as follows, we record on multiple laptops using Audacity, I then get those recordings and merge them into one recording and edit out all the bits, do some enveloping and trimming and then export an uncompressed file that I can use in Garageband. I then split the podcast track adding whatever images are required and URLs and export that.

The next part which I might change, depending on costs, is to upload it to Libsyn, which allows for FTP uploading and you can then put the title and description etc, and it will then publish an RSS feed and publish it ready for iTunes to publish out.
Although I have been using Linsyn for a while and it's pretty cheap at $5 a month for 100Mb fast access storage, I am thinking I might move all of the stuff over to Amazon S3 and use a Railo Amazon EC2 image to publish it out, so I shall let you know how that goes!

You can check out this month's edition, with myself, Kev McCabe, Andy Allan and Gert Franz from:
iTunes , RSS or download the episode directly

I have met Joe a few times and apart from being the brains behind Model-Glue, the framework that I use daily he is also an awesome person who I would love to help, and I presume (because I am like that) that if you are a member of the CF community you would too! Head over to http://www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com/ to show your support. Do it. We are a small enough community that we should be supporting the stars in it.

So finally, after the whole being ill and Christmas holidays hiatus, I finally managed to edit the CFDocs podcast from December (Follow the link above to get more details on the episode).

One of the things that has been concerning me was how to record the damn thing! I have a Yamaha 8:2 Mixer but still the mic's that we got for the first podcast turned out to be unpowered so we couldn't use them. This left me with a problem... how to record four people (and the audience) and keep the quality at *some* acceptable level.

What we did was put two MacBooks (one Pro, one not) and record the whole session down using Audacity and the built in Microphones. This worked well, and to get the synching of the two tracks at edit time I simply banged my finger sharply on the desk (to the hilarity of other people present) to get a nice spike that I could see in the track.

After editing both tracks, removing the "erms" and "arrs" and "so..." as well as some idle chatter I rendered down the recording and moved it into GarageBand to make the actual podcast and mix in the music track.

I would love to hear people's opinions if it worked or not, as well as any suggestions on (cheap!) setups to hopefully improve the sound quality. Remembering of course that there are usually four people speaking as well as maybe questions from the audience.

Otherwise, just enjoy the podcast!

A quick heads up about next week's ColdFusion User Group in London, UK. It's going to be an awesome event!

Our main speaker will be Gert Franz from Railo presenting, of course, Railo! But that is not all, we shall also have some very special guests turning up. I can't mention their names yet, but they are very big in the CF world and its an event not to be missed!

We shall also be doing a live recording of the CF Doc's podcast where we will be interviewing Gert as well as getting opinions from our very special guests on "2009 and all that Jazz" with what will be hot in the upcoming year!

As always send us your questions either to myself or call in your question via skype (UKCFUG).

This will be an event not to be missed and as you know seating is limited so get in early by emailing your attendance to reservations at ukcfug.org

For details about the event and how to get there, check the ukcfug.org site

The UKCFUG is having it's monthly meeting tomorrow night, with the topic being a Adobe Max 08 De-brief

After the presentations by Neil Middleton and Kev McCabe, we shall be recording live and direct the next episode of the CF Docs podcast!

If you would like to send questions to be answered by the CF Docs in the next podcast, email mark@ukcfug.org or skype: ukcfug to have a chance of your call being heard on the podcast!

Liz has posted up a nice big menu of choices for presentation topics at CFUnited 2009. Go cast your vote for the ones you like (I am not going to hint that Atomic Reactor and Model Glue and you are my presentations and they will be a LOT of Fun!... oh.. I just mentioned it! Ooops!)

But I was going to ask the reading public the this: Would you be interested in Model Glue/Reactor/ColdSpring training on the day before? Yes, I mean ME running the training! Dont be scared, it will be fun! (that's what Todd said)

Is one day enough? Maybe you would like a bit more? Or another topic? What would you like to be trained on by me? 

Here is how I do it, I add a contact form to my website from a nice service called http://wufoo.com/ and then I forget to mail them to myself. 

So what do I have now?  A year's worth of contacts that I have ignored. So apologies there! Since I am now using Mango Blog, it comes with a nice plugin to do FormToEmail that you just have to enable and put simple tokens in that create a nice form, which sends an email. Does what it says on the tin eh?!

So, without further ado, you can actually now contact me over at the new intelligent form! (Intelligent since I am not!)

This question has started to raise its head amongst various forums and I have been asked (and misquoted) that the CFEclipse Project will be discontinued now that "Bolt" has been announced. 

I just want to clarify to everyone that this is not the case. I am absolutely looking forward to Bolt being released. It is a great step forwards for CFML developers out there. But what will happen to the CFEclipse project?

Bear in mind that CFEclipse isn't just an editor. There are other features that I personally (ok I built them, I should like them) like such as the CFUnit tests, the Frameworks Explorer, Snipex and Snippets and the Dictionary view. These plugins are part of the CFEclipse project but they can be used standalone with a bit of coding. 

Also, think about how hard it is to get some developers to change their IDE. At the moment Bolt is in production and I am sure when it is released people will find some "quirks" that they are not used to and complain and switch back. Sometimes it requires a crowbar to separate a coder from their IDE. 

Regardless, the CFEclipse project (and even the editor) will keep on going, at least it means that we will have choice. Homesite, Dreamweaver, CFEclipse and Bolt (and others like TextMate etc). 

As with any ecosystem, they can live together, and be as individual as the developers that use them. CFEclipse will evolve and keep on going. 

I salute the CF Team as they have (from opinions of people at MAX) produced an IDE that is obviously wowing the crowds! And who knows, I might even submit bug fixes to Bolt given the chance ;)