I must say that I, as many I'm sure, was surprised when I heard the news that Michael Jackson had been rushed to a hospital for cardiac arrest....

I was working... actually, I believe I was taking a lunch break when the news broke on CNN.

As time went on they got more updates.... to where he was in a coma... and then that he had passed away.

Wow.

He was in fact trying to make a bit of a come back to sold out shows this summer.

Very hard to believe that he had passed quite suddenly.

But, as a couple of days passed, I started thinking a little more about him.... as I had before. About how he grew up, what he had possibly gone through being an international star... what people had accused him of.... and the constant bashing of him in certain media outlets for quite some time.

The fact of his passing became less surprising... really. I don't know (or didn't) know the guy. But I do know that being through what he had been through would have been rough.

I try to let the kids be kids. Really. I love seeing my daughter learn and discover.... and play. She's 5 years old. She has talents.... I know that... she even has musical and dancing talents. But I would never imagine of getting her to work at performing. No way. She's got to be a child while she is in fact a child. I can't imagine attempting to force her to be at a stage where she is not.

Mr Jackson had quirks.... for sure. In fact, I'm sure we've all had things in our closet (to varying degrees)... and many still do.

But I can't imagine the kind of pressures that were put on this guy... from childhood... and though he was loved and adored by many... seemed totally reclusive and lonely.

One interview I saw of him... he talks about being about 10 years old and being in the recording studio for hours... and at times watching kids playing in a park across the street and crying because he would have loved so much to be a part of that.

How far would you be willing to push your child for your own wants/needs/desires??

Mr Jackson obviously wanted to be a child while he was a child. He needed to be a child while he was a child.

Kids need to be loved. And they need to be kids.

Mr Jackson had great musical talent... a gift everyone saw early on.... but the focus many had on that gift for their own gain robbed him of his childhood..... and in part having a whole life. The focus was on developping the gift and delivering the gift instead of developping the person... the child in this case.

That is my opinion.

Your kids need love. And they need to be kids.

I read this article and thought wow.... when you add up these numbers it's amazing how much money was potentially lost.... because of a small glitch... which was practically neglected.

And I'll bet there are other stories like this out there....

Read this article on how the Pentagon lost oodles of $$ over the years.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30456930/ 

Been quite busy lately.

Workin' on a few projects. Writting lot's of ColdFusion which I love.

Even the getting up at 4 or 5 am to start work resulting in some fairly long workdays isn't so bad. But when I string several days like that together... a cranky man I may be. And did I mention tired?

Being a one man show, self-employed... being a one income home with family.... packs on some pressure.

I've been working on a project to build some residual income... but until that gets rolling it doesn't pay my groceries. I really like the potential this project brings and others have also thought that it's a great idea. But how to get "at it"??

That's part of the challenge.

Ah well.... coming into the summer months... I'm hopin' for some relaxing soon.

Peace!

Just read this great article on Iron Maiden's new film by Sam Dunn and Scott McFadyen.

I really want to check out this film.... hoping it comes out on DVD!!!

You can view videos here:
http://www.youtube.com/flight666movie

Check it out here:
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=1562433

For anyone who uses CFML OpenBD 1.1 was released.

I've used both ColdFusion (Adobe) and BlueDragon (NewAtlanta) in my years of using CFML... for those who don't know, OpenBD in an open sourced release of BlueDragon.

Interesting times if you're using CFML (or thinking of it) because the old argument about cost has been thrown out the door with the open source releases of Railo and OpenBD.

New functionality of note (for me) in this OpenBD 1.1 release is cfvideoplayer, although the recent "tweaking" of OpenBD by Vince Bonfanti to run on Google's cloud is pretty darn neat.

On a fairly recent project I'd been working on a webstore using Magento.

Magento is an open source system using PHP and the Zend Framework.

One thing that we needed in this project was automatic shipping calculation with Canada Post... we found a module that gave that functionality and purchased it.

The installation process seemed pretty straight forward, went through the process and the module was then listed in Magento's configuration.

But the module wasn't working. The author of the module had written a test script which I began using to test with.

This module needed to use port 30000 to connect with the canada post system.. I contacted my technical support with the hosting provider and concluded that the port was open. I then used telnet and got a valid response (from the server).

I had also used another PHP script to connect with the canada post successfully which used stream_socket_client() and had programmed (for my own fun) a small test script in ColdFusion which had successfully connected....

After lot's of lookin' around, reading forum posts on Magento's forums, help from a twitter contact and trying a couple of PHP lists I had nothing. I was suspecting that somehow it was the PHP config or the curl command ... so I spent time looking that up.

After a bit, I was in contact with the module's author who suggested a couple of things. One of these things I had sworn I had tried... but must not of... or made the change in code and hadn't uploaded the file to the server in a tired state of mind....

It was to do with options for the curl command. The original code used was something like this:

 So the suggestion was to add the port directly to the url... and get rid of the curlopt_port... which looked something like this:

By not using curlopt_port and adding the port to the URL.... it worked beautifully.

I should mention that this was being hosted on CentOS. Not exactly sure why it is that it wouldn't work... but it worked with the little fix.... and since this little fix there has been NO glitch.

Works perfectly!

Thanks to the module's author!

 Just found this post on removing the conficker worm that is supposed to hit today.

Check it out here:
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/4095/how-to-remove-the-conficker-c-worm/

I haven't seen any computers affected yet.... but the day is still young.

Peace!

Some great news in the CFML world.

Railo has officially released their CFML server as OpenSource.

I've used Railo a bit... mostly to develop. I'm strongly considering switching this server to Railo...

Like their site says, Railo is fast, feature-rich and syntax compliant.

I loved their "express version" as it allowed me to very quickly download a zip file, extract it and fire up the server... no install, no configurations... other then setting up a datasource... perfect for development. The express version made it very easy for me to want to get my hands dirty with Railo.

Railo runs very well with the more popular ColdFusion frameworks.. also runs the Sava CMS.

And now, like I said, I'm thinking it's time to start using it. Full time.

 Found this and it coincides with my late purchase of Death Magnetic on iTunes.

Metallica's music had a great impact on me growing up... I consider a few albums classics.

So here it is: