More conference speaking engagements!

My blog has been sorely neglected. Work had taken over pretty much all free time, but I’m starting to get a handle on things again. That being said, I’m diving deep in to Flex 4 development, and I should have my first iPhone application finished this summer. Oh, and I’m speaking at a couple conferences.

cf.Objective() – April 22-24, Minneapolis
I’ll be presenting “Build a Better Search with Apache Solr”. I will not be covering CFSEARCH in ColdFusion 9. We’ll be looking at the real Solr engine, and everything it has to offer. If all you’re doing is sticking a few flat files into Verity, and you’re happy with the results, this isn’t for you. If you’ve ever hit Verity’s custom field limit, if you need to search structured data, or if you ditched using Verity for expensive database queries, then you need to see what Solr can do for you. You do NOT need to be running CF9 to implement Solr.

CFUnited – July 28-31, Lansdowne, VA
I’ll be presenting two topics, the same Solr talk as cf.Objective (scroll up just a little bit if you forgot), and “Getting the Most Development out of your Mac”. This is a fast-paced session in which I’ll be covering some of the best free and commercial tools to get your job done, along with plenty of tips & tricks, shortcuts, and things you probably didn’t know your Mac could do.

ColdFusion conference speaker hat-trick!

I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted to speak at bFlex/bFusion. This makes for the third conference I’ll be speaking out in the next couple months. Here’s my schedule:

CFinNC (Oct  17-18)
Topic: Searching with Apache Solr

bFlex/bFusion (Oct 24-25)
Topic: Learn Apache Solr in 90 Minutes

RIA Unleashed (Nov 13)
Topic: Getting the most Development from your Mac

CFinNC and bFusion/bFlex are both free to attend, but you need to register. RIA Unleashed tickets are $50.

September Madison Adobe User Group

Greetings, Adobe Feed readers! Just thought I’d get some last-second word out that the Madison Adobe User Group meeting is today at MATC. Paul Trani is going to be presenting “Trick Out Adobe Photoshop CS4”

For more information and to RSVP, check out the Adobe Groups page.

Adobe Creative Suite does not work on Case Sensitive file systems

I spent a few hours yesterday formatting my Mac Pro and reinstalling OS X. When I formatted the drive, I thought that it would be great to set the file system to be case sensitive. A few hours later, with my OS updated & set up how I wanted, I started installing applications. I went to install CS4, and got a lovely dialog box telling me that CS4 will not install onto case sensitive file systems. Apparently, CS has had this limitation forever, and Adobe has ignored many, many complaints about this.

There really is no good excuse that I can think of. There are workarounds if you go into the adobe folders and start changing the case of the first letter of various directories & files, but then the Adobe Updater will fail when you go to install updates. Adobe, please fix this. I know it’s not a huge feature you can blow your horn about, but it’s very, very annoying to have to format & reinstall an OS because of a silly limitation.

MySQL Databases for the Adobe ColdFusion Curriculum

Adobe wrote these great, free ColdFusion Curriculum projects for new and intermediate ColdFusion developers. I recently had a friend interested in getting started with ColdFusion, and I pointed him in this direction. He came back to me a few days later, wondering if ColdFusion was really supported on the Mac. I asked him why he was wondering that, and he said that the curriculum databases provided were Access files, and ColdFusion doesn’t support Access on the Mac.

This was a silly oversight, and I ended up using the MySQL Migration Toolkit to convert those Access databases to MySQL dump files for him. And here they are for all of you!

cf8_curriculum