The Left Side of Normal Airplanes, The Internet, and Everything Else

For the last decade or so I've used Homesite+ as my primary editor when working on ColdFusion applications, HTML, or pretty much anything web related.  Homesite is essentially a text editor with lots of features that are specialized for HTML and ColdFusion specifically.  It includes inline help and code assistance for the language.  I start typing a tag or function name and it finishes it for me and fills in a lot of the details.  Homesite was eventually turned into ColdFusion Studio many years ago but had stability problems.  Homesite+ included all of the features of studio but actually ran properly.  It's been running well for me for many, many years.  Unfortunately, Homesite is no longer supported.  It's an old application and ran great on Windows XP.  Last year I upgraded to Windows 7 and had to run Homesite in the "Windows XP Mode" within 7 for it to run at all.

ColdFusion Builder is Adobe's response to cries from CF developers for an updated development tool.  Many people had been using Dreamweaver which, like Homesite, was a glorified text editor.  It had a lot of features for GUI development and was really more oriented toward designers than developers.  There was also the open-source CFEclipse editor, but in the past I found it to be clunky at best.  I wanted something as agile as Homesite.  My workflow doesn't really fit into the "project" model that eclipse if built around.  Adobe decided to build its own IDE with Eclipse as well, much to my chagrin.  I tried the beta versions last year and had nothing but problems with what should have been simple tasks (like creating a new blank file on an FTP server).  Fast-forward a year and Builder has been out for a while and the first updater has been released to fix some nasty bugs in the first official release.  I can't use Homesite forever, so I decided to give Builder another shot.

I downloaded the trial installer yesterday and the install went fairly smooth, or so it seemed.  When I loaded it I was greeted with error 148:3 which said I needed to reboot.  I rebooted, reloaded, same error.  Adobe's website says that if you get this error you should uninstall, ensure the Windows Installer service is running, then reinstall.  Did that, still no luck and the same error.  I did some more digging and found a discussion which said that one of the licensing services that is installed with Builder may not get installed, producing the error, if something else is running at the same time as the installer which is "using a lot of memory."  How much more specific could they be?  I uninstalled again and unloaded most of my background programs, one of which is ColdFusion Server itself (using a measly 512MB of RAM or so; I have 4GB so I just leave it running all the time for local development).  Reinstalled Builder and this time it loaded up without any complaints.  It would seem that Adobe has some work to do on the installer if something so simple can botch the entire install without any warnings, but I digress.

Once the editor was loaded it seemed foreign.  Builder really shouldn't be called an editor though, it's an IDE.  The editor is just one small part of the overall package.  There are debugging windows, server management windows, log viewing windows, project navigators, file navigators, object explorers, and a lot more.  Each piece is really just a plug-in to the Eclipse back-end, so everything has its own actions, settings, etc.  It can be very confusing at first for someone who has never used Eclipse.  Eventually I was able to hide the windows I won't be using often (or at least don't need to see all the time) and rearrange the windows to at least look a little but like my familiar Homesite layout.  I found that switching out the color scheme to use the "CFEclipse" profile almost matched my existing Homesite colors.  With a few adjustments I created a custom profile which comes even closer, though I do not think it will be possible to match exactly.  The other thing I noticed is that the default text size in Eclipse is 10pt whereas Homesite was using 9pt.  I adjusted the font size down and the editor immediately seemed a lot more familiar.  One difference is that the Eclipse editor uses anti-aliasing when rendering the font where Homesite does not, so there is still a subtle difference in the way text is rendered.  Homesite also puts more space between the lines, so the text in Builder looks slightly more compacted and seems to run together more.  I'm sure I'll get used to the closer lines and font-rendering with time though.

My plan is to use Builder for the next week or so and see how it goes.  I'll report back with the good, the bad, and the stuff I can't figure out once I've had a chance to let it sink in for a while.  Wish me luck!

As anyone who works with ColdFusion knows, it's built on top of Java.  It also provides ways to easily leverage pretty much anything Java is capable of.  I saw a post from Todd Sharp about using the "faint" Java project to enable facial recognition in ColdFusion.  You would think that something like this would be fairly complex, but all of the hard work has been wrapped up in the faint engine.  With ColdFusion, a few lines of code loads the Java object, sets up a Java thumbnail object, then points the faint engine at an image an asks it to find the faces in the image.  Easy!  Java passes the results back to ColdFusion which then writes the images to disk.  This could be great for helping users to crop uploaded avatar images or create a facial thumbnail for dating sites.  Of course the amazing part about this isn't the facial recognition, but the ability for ColdFusion to simply pick up any Java class and use it without any fuss.

Back in April, we took on the responsibility for raising two awesome ducks that were only a week old.  They started out in a small plastic swimming pool with a bed of wood chips huddled under a heat lamp.  The wood chips quickly gave way to straw, and they began to grow very quickly.  Within a couple of weeks, we set up a portion of the back yard as their pen and built them a shelter to live in.  Within a month they were nearly fully grown and feathers were replacing their cute yellow fuzz.  After a couple of months, we took them out into the lake and let them swim around.  They've made several supervised trips into the lake, but they prefer to hang out in their pen instead.  They're always in a hurry to waddle back up the hill to get back to their safety zone.

Overall, the ducks have been awesome.  They're gorgeous, incredible animals, and raising them and having them with us has been an amazing experience.  Unfortunately, as they mature, the environment we can provide just isn't suitable for such incredible animals.  Ducks really need water to be happy.  We set up a kiddie pool for them, but that really just doesn't do them justice.  We considered leaving the fence open so they could commute to the lake, but there was too much danger of them wandering off and getting hit by a car or leaving the lake in someone else's yard and doing damage, not to mention the neighborhood cats, dogs, and other wildlife that could put them in danger.  It just wasn't fair to keep them penned up in such a small area without ready access to a pond or some other water to swim in.  The noise was also beginning to become a problem for us (and probably our neighbors as well) with fairly loud quacking from Peaches fairly early in the morning every day.

So, it was with a heavy heart that we decided that change was at hand.  Jeanette wanted to put them on a plate with a garnish, but I decided that we should try to find them a loving home before we resorted to taking their lives in the name of dinner.  I made a few calls to farms in the area with little success (one at least promised to call me back but as yet has not).  Craigslist has usually been a good way to find things or sell unwanted stuff, so I posted a note in the "farm and garden" category that we were seeking a loving, suitable home for two mature Pekin ducks.  As usual, craigslist did not disappoint.  I had a couple dozen e-mails from people who were interested, though mostly from people who had no experience with ducks.

Then, a message came in from a lady in Arcadia that looked promising.  I gave her a call and we spoke for a few minutes.  She lives on 40 acres of rural land and takes care of a wide variety of animals including horses, cows, llamas, goats, geese, and ducks.  She said they had six Pekin ducks, one of another breed, and two geese.  A small stream runs through their property and they've created a pond off of it with a large pen where the ducks live (right next to the pen where the goats and the llama reside).  It sounded perfect and we made arrangements to make a visit and drop them off if we were satisfied with the location.  We packed them and their remaining food and straw into the car and made the trek out to northern Arcadia, nearly an hour away.  When we arrived (in the middle of nowhere), I was happy with what I saw.  They did, indeed, have a very nice area sectioned off for the ducks and geese with an adjacent pond for them to swim in.  The ducks she had were similar in age and looked very well fed and cared for.  We let them out into the pen and they seemed disoriented for a few minutes.  The other ducks began checking them out and sizing them up.  Since they are new to the flock, there will of course be some jockying for position to see where they will fit in.  After a few days, they will be full members and have lots of new friends to huddle up with.

The new location isn't perfect, but it's far more ideal than we would be able to provide for them.  The pen is a lot larger and she said they have plans to make it even bigger.  The pond is adequate for all of them to swim in, and occasionally small fish come up the stream that they can chase after.  Overall, our experience with the ducks has been amazing and I wish we were in a better position to better provide for them ourselves, but it wouldn't be fair to them or our neighbors to keep them here.  I do not know if we will see them again, but she did say that if we're in the area we're welcome to drop by and visit if we like.  I'm very happy that we were able to find what I hope will be a much better life for them.  Quack quack!