Making the world a better place with ColdFusion, Web Startup, and Software
Having a profitable business alone isn’t success.
Every business needs cashflow (and profit) to survive like the body needs oxygen, food, and air. Just because a business has cashflow, doesn’t mean it’s a success, much like we aren’t a success in life just because we sat around and survived.
If you have to mislead to make a dollar, it’s like tricking a girl into liking you. You might make some money/trick her for a while, but it won’t last.
The better the mutual fit, the better the relationship. As is often the case it’s best to see if you can work well together. The client, or the vendor, alone, can’t make the relationship work. Both have to be present.
As for finding the right work..
Know your product. Know the value you deliver. Know the clients it will benefit. Only sell to them and you’ll have a lasting business.
Always generate more value than which you are paid. Otherwise your client turnover rate after they feel “had” will be much higher than it needs to be.
It’s easy to try and be someone else in business. The problem is it always comes back full circle. If you like honesty, and integrity, and when people eat their own cooking before giving it to you as advice, do it yourself.
Not every customer values it, but not every customer is for you. There’s a big difference between a good dollar and a bad dollar. It’s tough in the start but it’s worth it.
Be a defender of keeping goodness and kindness fashionable. Your startup is your declaration of your moral and professional independence.
I recently decided to switch over to it full time instead of using Entourage 2008 and discovered a strange crash with Apple Mail whenever I’d try to start it up.
Trying to start Apple Mail would leave me with a message of “Mail had quit unexpectedly.”..
A distant lightbulb went off in my head and I realized it might have to do with my Marketcircle Daylite software and it’s plugin to the Apple Mail, and the Daylite server, which syncs my calendar, todo, projects and contacts automatically over the air.
I switched over to Daylite which was running, and it had a dialogue which told me that Daylite needed to re-connect to the server (I guess the connection gets turned off when you put your computer to sleep).
I let Daylite re-establish it’s connection, and once it did, Apple Mail fired up just fine. This lead me to believe that the Apple Mail Plugin was looking for something from Daylite that it couldn’t access.
How does Daylite accomplish it? They have a Daylite Mail Integration plugin for Apple Mail that lets you link each and every email to any number of projects, people, etc. Daylite, combined with Daylite Server and Daylite Touch is the real deal for productivity. The more and more I use it (and let myself spend some time with it) the more I think I am forever hooked to it. I just hope they come out with a version of Daylite Touch for Android and other devices.
I just saw the neatest feature in the Linux text editor VI.
All of the links in the code are surfable. You just drill in through the includes between all of your files. Very cool.
I wonder if there’s an extension to do this in CfBuilder, or from the Eclipse world?
It’s well known that RDS shouldn’t be enabled on a production ColdFusion Server.
Over the years I haven’t been much of a user of RDS anyways so I usually just left it disabled.
Lately though RDS is starting to have a lot more value to me, I have been using ColdFusion’s Report Builder a lot more in addition to ColdFusion Builder itself, which use RDS a lot more to expose a lot of neat functionality.
ColdFusion Report Builder lets you connect and browse your ColdFusion data sources to build your report either through wizards, or construct (and test) your queries in real time. Since ColdFusion Report Builder is from what I can tell, a repackaged Jasper Reports binary, it’s actually really nice to have a lot of the CF shortcuts built in.
ColdFusion Builder is something I’ve been using more and more in the past year. I started slowly with the betas as the CFEclipse worked just fine for me. As ColdFusion 9 came out though, a lot changed. The integration between ColdFusion Builder and CF 9 is great.
I ended up having to find a mechanism to enable and disable (if needed) RDS. Searched high and low, and forgot to check the knowledge base over at Adobe.
Lo and behold the explanation is simple:
AND RDS WORKS! Reverse the steps to disable RDS on production servers.
Hope that helps, I know I’ll be back to reading this post when I forget in the future. The knowledge base article to enable or disable RDS in ColdFusion in this technote. The ColdFusion MX instructions are applicable to CF 6 and up: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/172/tn_17276.html
In my original ColdBox 3 review, I mentioned that I would be starting a brief ColdBox Series to cover my experiences and any questions that came my way.
I have used the past few months to approach ColdBox in two different ways:
This approach has had me learning and playing with ColdBox to learn the best way of how I want to do things, and why. Along the way I have been writing posts (while coding) to quickly document any discoveries where the examples and documentation was found to be a bit lacking. My idea was to come in later and ColdBox has excellent documentation but I have found that there could be a lot more examples provided to get developers up and running even quicker.
In the past few months I have written a few dozen tips/discoveries.
I thank everyone who has sent in their questions and responses, please keep them coming and I’ll get through them as best as I can.
I’ll publish this post to the blog but not advertise it until I have a solid few tips that I can publish on a regular basis.
My ColdBox 101:
Einstein wasn’t wrong when he said the only thing that got in the way of his learning was his education. Learning how to think — creatively to solve problems, to find dots and connect them, are skills that are hard to find, hard to develop, especially when we can get into a trance with technology.
I think we’re most alive when we create.
So that’s all I’d do. Create, create, create. Solutions for lots of problems, in lots of ways, to realize that everyone just wants to answer one question with their solutions nearly every time. “Where is everything at?”
Learning how, and why to think from multiple perspectives when looking at solving a problem is infinitely more important than the tool(s) you pick to use them.
The tools you pick will be better based on the clarity and your ability to boil things down to their essence. Tools that increase clarity and decrease confusion are good. Tools that let you (and users) get more done with less effort, are good.
Helping people make the world a better place by letting the system manage the details, and letting people manage the system (and relationships with others) is what can empower software to change the world for the better, instead of dealing with the 70% of failing projects out there.If
So… had a bit of a mixup.
February was a bit of a busy month for me so I wrote some content in advance to publish for sure, and to add more when I had the chance..
Evidently, PHP and wordpress do not work out of the box to automaticaly publish scheduled content.
Maybe I should go to a ColdFusion blog.
In any event, my apologies, I’ll post the rest and it should show up on the RSS feeds.
In creating software, be it a startup or a client project, key decisions need to be made and implemented based on security.
In building secure applications that let me sleep at night, I have learnt a few things:
Why? Most unscrupulous attempts to access a system aren’t really about you. Most valuable is the most generic. Your server resources to be illegitimately used to send out spam, etc, and not necessarily for what your application itself does. The reality is most attempts to break into your site will be automated scripts/botnets that sweep the entire internet. While you can build mega security features, a lot can be said by good design and putting up multiple “walls” instead of one big “wall”. Design your application to inherently check and enforce security as much as it can internally. Package it with smart public facing interfaces, properly hardened and tested with client and server side scrubbing and validation, and we have a start.
One of the biggest things you can do if/where necessary is to store your passwords securely. This is a great article on How to safely store a password.
If you have any ideas to add to this list, please leave them in the comments.. I’ll update the list!