Monthly Archives: October 2002

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leaf peeping

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Took off yesterday (Saturday) to do what all good New Englanders do: leaf peeping. We (Craig, Kristen, Karen and myself) drove up to Franconia Notch State Park, home of the Flume Gorge, the Old Man of the Mountain and close to Kancamagus Highway.

We hiked the short 1.4 mile hike up into the Flume Gorge while taking a bunch of pictures of things like the Flume Covered Bridge, beautiful rock formations, breathtaking fall colors, and stunning waterfalls. This is my favorite picture. No wait! Maybe this one is. Or maybe this one… 🙂

After looking at leaves on the Flume Gorge trail, you have to look at leaves while you’re driving, because it’s all about the leaves. So then we drove to see the Old Man of the Mountain and snapped this picture, which doesn’t do the Old Man justice, but get a New Hampshire quarter if you want to see him up close.

We ended our leaf peeping day by ‘gorging’ (ha ha!) ourselves @ Horse Feathers in Conway, NH. Conway is described as the “… hub of outlet shopping in tax-free New Hampshire”, a sentence which should strike fear into the heart of any knowledgeable husband.

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Trio Service Manager

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Here’s the demo/presentation I did for the Rich Internet Applications Seminar we had two weeks ago. I was able to get it setup on my laptop quite quickly using ColdFusion’s standalone webserver, but getting it running via IIS turned out to be a bigger deal.

To get the most out of it, use the ‘4KEH833’ license plate.

After you complete the demo, make sure to hit this page to restore the original data to the database.

This app took me awhile to get working because Flash remoteing wasn’t working to well w/ the IIS/Virtual Hosts and because I’m not sure that I fully understand CFC’s and pathing issues… I solved the CFC issue by putting the appropriate CFC’s into the c:\CFusionMX\wwwroot\ directory… turns out that these particular CFC’s need access to the application scope so you have to keep an application.cfm in the c:\cfusionmx\wwwroot\[yourfolder] AND [drive]:\hosts\[yourhost]\wwwroot\. This seems kludgy to me, but whatever… The Flash Remoting trick (at least it worked for me twice now) is to run:

C:\CFusionMX\bin\connectors\Remove_ALL_connectors.bat

(which removes all CFM mappings from IIS)

and then run:

C:\CFusionMX\bin\connectors\IIS_connector.bat

which adds them all back…

restart CF and voila… it should work for you.

You’ll notice that running IIS_connector.bat adds a ‘JRunScripts’ virtual directory to each IIS virtual host you have setup.

Books

Weaving The Web

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Finished ‘Weaving The Web‘ by Tim Berners-Lee tonight. Tim writes like he talks, moving quickly one from thought to another. Reading the book is a reminder of how nascent the WWW is, it was just over 10 years ago that he formally proposed the WWW while at CERN. We’ve seen so much so fast the last couple years.

Not to be outdone by Tim, here are my scattered notes:

Quote from Michael Dertouzos, the director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science: “Many people in the world believe that technology is dehumanizing us. At LCS, we believe that technology is an inseparable child of humanity and that for true progress to occur, the two must walk hand in hand, with neither one acting as servant to the other.” (postscript: Michael died on 8/27/2001)

“The fundamental principle behind the Web was that once someone somewhere made available a document, database, graphic, sound, video or screen at some stage in an interactive dialogue, it should be accessible (subject to authorization of course) by anyone, with any type of computer, in any country.” (page 37) — And that folks, is the Web, in a nutshell.

“Atoms each have a valence — an ability to connect with just so many other atoms. As an individual, each of us picks a few channels to be involved in, and we can cope with only so much. The advantage of getting things done faster on the Web is an advantage only to the extent that we can accept the information faster, and there are definite limits. By just pushing the amount we have to read and write, the number of emails we have to cope with, the number of Web sites we have to surf, we may scrape together a few more bytes of knowledge, but exhaust ourselves in the process and miss the point.” (page 202, emphasis mine) — I know some people who should take this principle to heart. Yeah! You! 🙂

It’s interesting to note (as Tim does on page 195) that most radical innovations are at first scorned or thrown aside; “… A few people get it; most don’t.” Do venture capitalists look for ideas like this? How are innovations like this grown and matured into feasible entities?