Twitter moved their offices and I guess didn’t tell very many people. The current tenants of their old offices decided to put this sign up. Classic!

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Google Webmaster Central is doing 404 week all this week in their blog. We as developers sometimes forget that the most minor of error handling can mean major consequences in your Search-Engine-Optimization.

Head on over to Webmaster Central and check it out.

We all know that programmers run off pizza and caffiene.. at least we want to until our wives make us eat healthy. Anytime we can get away from that and have a party of our own Pizza and Soda will always be present.

I am soliciting some monthly sponsorships for the Nashville ColdFusion User Group to the tune of $50. Basically we get lots of great shwag from vendors but in the end we have to pay for the pizza out of pocket and we want to give your company the opportunity to do that!

It’s pretty basic. We need to buy food to the tune of about $50 a meeting and in return you will get…

1. Included in the announcements that go out on NCFUG.com, JeremiahX.com and TrajiklyHip.com… all PR6 blogs, 2 of which are aggregated in all the popular feeds and the links will be dofollow and permanent!

2. 10 minutes at the start of the presentation to present to the group or let us pass out some of your marketing material

3. Our undying love and adoration for getting us food.

So if you are a recruiter, SaaS provider, hosting company, software company or just want to be super nice then click the Contact Me form on the blog or email me at jay@cyber-jay.com.

From Scott at Vaco:

6 month contract…rate up to 50/hr for the right person!

Job Description

• ColdFusion design, development and support of various applications
• Work on upgrading applications from CF5 and CF6 to MX7 version.
• Work with the team to understand the business requirements and functional specifications
• Solution design and documentation using ColdFusion MX 7, JavaScript, AJAX, Flex, Flash, Visio, MS Office etc.
• Code development and unit testing
• Participate in peer code review
• Work with QA/SCM team for code build/releases, test case design and defect resolution
• Work with Team Lead/Project Manager for planning, estimation, documentation and status reporting
• Mentor other teammates on ColdFusion design and development.
• Any other tasks necessary for completion of project deliverables and application support.

Design skills

• Highly skilled in Web Application architecture and design.
• Experience in developing applications with heavy transactions volume.
• Highly skilled in use of Design Patterns and development frameworks like MVC, Fusebox etc.

Programming skills

• 5+ years of ColdFusion development experience
• 1+ years of MX7 experience
• Expert in developing CFCs, UDFs, Custom tags
• Expert in Java Script and AJAX
• Skilled at SQL
• Skilled at XML
• FLEX experience is highly desired.
• Web Services experience desired.

Send resumes to Scott Gordon

DATE: July 31, 2008
TIME: 6:00 PM Food — 6:30 PM Presentation
LOCATION: Dealerskins (404 BNA Dr. Nashville, TN 37217)

Special thanks to Dealerskins and eChurchOnline for providing the meeting space and the pizza.

(Want to sponsor the pizza for a meeting? Contact me via the contact me link and we can talk. It is cheaper then you think!)

PRESENTATION:
Introduction to Building Applications with Transfer ORM

When developing an Object Oriented web based application, it is normal to have a database with relational tables and a series of objects that represent that data. Often, the amount of time and effort it takes to manually map these objects back and forth from a database is large, and can be very costly. Object Relational Mappers (ORM) were developed to cut down the amount of time this process takes, and automate the translation between a relational database and an Object Oriented system. Transfer ORM’s main focus is to automate the repetitive tasks of creating the SQL and custom CFCs that are often required when developing a ColdFusion application. Through a central configuration file Transfer knows how to generate objects, and how to manage them and their relationships back to the database. This presentation will outline the basics of what an Object Relational Mapper is, the use case for using one within web application development, as well as taking a code centric, step by step view of how to install, configure and use the basic functionality of Transfer ORM.

** All attendees must RSVP by sending an e-mail to rsvp AT ncfug DOT com. **

SPEAKER BIO:
Mark Mandel is the author of several open source projects, most notably Transfer ORM and JavaLoader and has been has been working with ColdFusion for a number of years, including at his very own dot com bomb back in the late 90’s. Mark can often be found blogging and consulting at www.compoundtheory.com, which has housed his thoughts on ColdFusion, Java and various other aspects of software development for several years. He can also be found as a regular poster on ColdFusion mailing lists as well as generally causing havoc in the #coldfusion channel on Dalnet irc network. When he’s not too busy writing open source software and consulting he enjoys spending his extra time getting beaten up, training martial arts in a wide variety of disciplines and reading way too much fantasy literature.

ACROBAT CONNECT INFORMATION:
This meeting will be broadcast via Acrobat Connect.

Visit the meeting detail page for the link.

I joined DropBox yesterday and have 10 invites to give away. I have been really impressed with the service and it has been nice for keeping things in sync between my wife’s PC and my Mac.

First 10 to comment get them.. Just make sure you put you email address in when it asks for it.

UPDATE: Scot Hershman has given up 5 of his so keep entering to get the remaining 4

CNN has an amazing story about Randy Pausch, a CS professor that was diagnosed with terminal cancer and decided to do his last lecture in style last September. The lecture was put in YouTube and has over 3 million views. He passed away today and his lecture is an amazing insight to life and the meaning of it.

Best line is “I had a deathbed conversion… I bought a Mac“

If you haven’t seen it check it out below:

I read a lot of blog posts (no thanks in part to Google Reader) and I came across a post by good ole’ 37Signals titled “Why would you want to call me?“. For you insouciant types it goes on to talk about why they don’t do phone support on their products because it is very inefficient. I see their point but more on that later.

Today Freshbooks.com did a post called “37Signals, Call Me” which was basically a web 2.0 version of the east coast/west coast throwdown. Essentially they responded saying that one of the best things about their customer service is that they DO answer the phone during the day.

I can see both of their points. They are both small companies, 37Signals having about 10 total employees at last count and Freshbooks.com at about 18. Manpower is always a problem and having someone that has to spend 10 minutes on the phone with someone taking care of an issue that could have been squashed in about a 2 minute email can be inefficient.

In my experience I have found that customers love to talk to you and it can put a nice personal spin on your company and allow customers to have an affinity to your products. I know that when my boss called Freshbooks our 1 time we had to that he was very impressed with the customer service and was an immediate sold customer.

In my side business I would love to offer daytime phone support but since there is only one of my it is virtually impossible. I have to do the email thing because I may not get to the tickets until 8 or 9 at night or on the weekends when most people are not in the office. I do have an 800 number but it is going to force you to leave a message which gets emailed to the support ticketing system.

In the end it is best to offer as much online help as possible so that if someone is calling they need specific help and it will keep those issues to a minimum.

So are you a small business and do you offer phone support to “smaller” customers?

I am a large fan of coffee. I love it just about anyway I can get it. I am also a fan of small businesses so every time I go to a Starbucks it makes me cringe. Living in Franklin, TN you find that there are VERY few independent coffee shops in the Cool Springs area so I was shocked and amazed when one opened up in the new Meridian area off Carothers. My company used to have an office right next to the new development so I was interested to go over and check it out.

I had a few hours to kill before an appointment so I decided to find some wifi. I decided that Panera didn’t sound very cozy so I headed over to the new Paccini’s Tazza d’Oro Caffe to give it a try. I ordered my usual, Americano with White Chocolate Syrup and no room, and sat down for a few hours of coding.

First off the real kicker are how comfortable is the seating? They had nice leather lounge chairs that were scattered throughout the front along with lines of tables in the back. I settled in to one of these lounge chairs and I was very impressed. There was a couple of power outlets and the internet was nice and free.

The coffee was great. It had a nice warm aroma to it that made it not too sweet and very smooth. It was bold but not bitter.

All in all it was a good atmosphere and I look forward to another trip and taste the drip coffee of the day.

Price: $
Power outlets: 3/5
Espresso: 4/5
Coffee: N/A (Will update when I try it again)

Location:

Paccini’s Tazza d’Oro Caffe
2000 Meridian Boulevard, Suite 120
Franklin, TN 37067

So this may come off as a rant but it really isn’t. Yes it was inspired by 2 frustrating sign-up processes in a row and most rants start off that way but I promise it will have an educational twinge to it.

So last night I was signing up for something and I filled out their rather short form only to be given an error:

OK, So my name is J.J. but they won’t allow that. What the heck? I feel like I am being discriminated against. So I decide to just put JJ in…

Good Gosh Almighty I am starting to get angry! I mean come on. My first name has to be 3 characters?! How many people do I know with 2 letter names? Well myself for one.. my brother Ty… my other brother Al… yeah you get the point.

So I just chalked this all up to someone not really thinking… or their name was Indian and really long.

Well I went to order some prints from the local Walgreens and had to signup for an account there. Lo and Behold I submit the form only to get this…

You have got to be kidding me! Fortunately for them I didn’t go all Internet jihad on them and they allowed “JJ” to pass.

The moral of the story is this. You have got to think though all scenarios when doing your testing and building your code. I know that speed is of the essence but you have got to make sure that your validation is going to accommodate your customers… not tell them that their God-given name is not allowed.