It was my second year attending and first year presenting!

I’d like to thank a few people:

• The folks at CFUnited for selecting me to speak!
• Dan Wilson for giving me a ride
• Anant Pradhan for volunteering (go TACFUG!)
• Everyone who attended my session :)

There was certainly a different vibe this year. Online there was a commotion about the demise of CFUnited and what it meant for ColdFusion.   Dead? Dying?

Who cares!  At the conference I only overheard great things about:

• The ColdFusion community
• The ColdFusion conference scene (NCDevCon anyone?) :)
• The open source trends (RIAForge projects, frameworks, CFML engines, etc)

I don’t think CFUnited coming to an end has any reflection at all on our community.  There will be already are conferences to take it’s place.

They are not  as big and extravagant as CFUnited…

And moving forward maybe that’s a good thing.

For more reading:

• Dee Sadler’s:  The Last CFUnited
• Brian Rinaldi’s: The Final CFUnited – Conference Review

CFUnited 2010 – Digging Into The Developer Toolbox

Thanks to all that attended! If you have any questions or suggestions for new software for me to check out please let me know!

I am looking forward to seeing everyone, meeting some new people and giving my first (and last) CFUnited presentation.

I’ll be talking about all the tools I use to work smarter/less/faster/lazier…

• Learn why I favor AutoHotkey over IDE snippets…
• Learn about tools that let the computer do the hard work
• Learn how to get organized and load/start/find things faster and more efficiently

The schedule still seems to be in a state of flux but right now I’m scheduled for Friday 3:15-4:15.

I guarantee you’ll learn something if you attend and I may just have a give away or two!

( image found at flickr by bionicteaching)

Guess who’s coming to CFUnited?

Me!

When I first noticed CFUnited had submissions open for 2010 I wanted to get something in quickly – but wanted to be a bit more organized and formal than I was during last years submission!  I think I entered one short paragraph sorely lacking in details last year – oops.

This year I’m completely honored to have made the first round announcement for 2010.

I’m really looking forward to presenting (and frankly a bit terrified) but I am going to try to put together a fun experience and hopefully everyone will take away something that helps them work a little bit smarter.

I guess I have a presentation I need to start working on…  See you in 2010!

A few people I want to thank:

First I’d like to thank Dan Wilson for dragging me along.  We had a great drive up and back and talked to a lot of people about CFinNC.  Next time I’ll bring my Iron Maiden CD!

Dan and I drove up early on Tuesday. Dan hit the golf course and I was fortunate enough to meet up with Jason Dean and Kurt Wiersma and we headed over to the Air and Space Museam and wandered around for a few hours looking at planes, missles and other cool stuff.  I just realized I think I still owe Jason $.50 for the shuttle trip back to the hotel. I’ll buy you a beer next year!

Next I’d like to thank Liz and the Stellr team for putting on such a great conference.  As we get deeper into the planning stages of CFinNC I’m coming to the realization that planning a conference is hard!  Planning something the size of CFUnited must be a monumental effort and Liz and her crew did a fantastic job!  Listening to other people at the conference that seemed to be the general consensus… I heard a lot of “best CFUnited ever” going around.

It was great meeting Rachel, Dee, Josh, Brian and everyone else I’m probably forgetting from the Adobe User Groups.    I still think the user groups are Adobe’s most important asset. We had some great discussions and I look forward to seeing how we can help increase exposure to the user groups and get even more great people involved in the Adobe Community!!  Maybe next year we could have a session or BOF just talking to people at the conference about finding, joining and participating in their local user group.

Two people I didn’t get to talk to as much as I would have liked were Adam Lehman and Mark Drew. Wanted to chat with them both about our favorite IDEs! :) I did sit in on Adam’s preso about CFBuilder extensions and I think that one feature will be a huge selling point.  I’m looking forward to getting back to the office so I can tinker!

I also enjoyed sitting in both Doug Hughes’ and Marc Esher’s presentations, both of which dealt with Ant and automation. Marc even kindly pointed me out in the crowd which was completely embarrassing. :)   Both of these sessions were packed and it was great to see people so interested in these topics!

Overall it was a great time. I was a bit burnt out prior to the conference but I feel as though my batteries have been recharged and I have a few things I hope to blog about in the near future!

If you weren’t on this list I apologize, I met so many great people!  Hopefully next year I can attend again and maybe even speak?  And I look forward to seeing folks again at CFinNC!

Since I’m a Linux geek I’m familiar with cron on Linux and went looking for a version for Windows.

Cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run automatically at a certain time or date.

Turns out there are quite a few cron solutions available on Windows.  Most of them however were commercial solutions.  After a bit of digging I found nnCron ( http://www.nncron.ru/ ).  nnCron has a commercial version but they offer a free “lite” version which covered the basic features I needed:

nnCron LITE is a small, but full-featured scheduler that can start applications and open documents at a specified time or with specified frequency. nnCron LITE is a perfect freeware Windows clone of a well-known UNIX scheduler Cron (including all the useful Anacron features).

Here are a few of the features of nnCron LITE:

• it can be started as a system service or as a regular standalone application
• it understands cron table format (Unix) and is managed with easy-to-edit text crontab files that are fully compatible with Unix crontabs
• it can set and use environment variables
• it can run applications authorized as currently logged user

So far I’ve been using it to schedule a backup task I have for our JIRA and Confluence installs using SyncBack.  And I have a few system utilities setup (defrag, etc) that run occasionally.  Unlike Scheduled Task I’ve never had an issue with the nnCron service failing.

Me and Ben Nadel - Check out my cool CF t-shirt!

1. Get my picture taken with Ben Nadel
2. Filling my brain with CF goodness
3. Drinking with Mark Drew (he owes me a beer!)
4. Meeting (insert name here) from the online community
5. Meeting everyone I forgot to mention in #4
6. Acquiring my first conference t-shirt
7. Coming out of this conference tattoo free (see #3)
8. Thanking the Stellr crew for all hard work – planning conferences is hard!! Speaking of conferences…
9. Pimping our own conference: CFinNC
10. Being humbled by all the knowledgable people I finally get to meet!

Late last night Liz sent out an email with all the current topic picks for CFUnited 2009, unfortunately I wasn’t on the list.

The list is now posted on the CFUnited blog – there are some great topics for those planning to attend.

Thanks to everyone who did vote for me – next year I’ll be better prepared when I make my submission!

LOTS of really neat looking topics on there… Good luck to everyone on the list!