100% Geek The Adventures of Peter Boughton:
CFML; Web Development; Photography.

This weblog and its contents have moved to:

www.sorcerers-isle.net

Please update your links, bookmarks and feeds.

Today I launched my revamped weblog, Sorcerer's Isle.

The purpose of the new blog is two-fold: to ditch the terrible PHP-based blog software that runs this site, but also to expand and re-focus the things I will be writing about - and indeed, there will be a significantly greater frequency of posting too!

All the articles from here have been ported over, and in a few days I will be setting pages to automatically redirect to their new counterparts.

Please head-over to the Isle now, and be sure to update any bookmarks, links and/or feeds you might have.

Posted by Peter on 05-July-09 at 23:59 ~ ~ Category: misc

Java RegEx Utilities, or jre-utils, is a CFC which provides a convenient way to access Java's regular expression functionality.

Whilst ColdFusion, Railo, and openBD are all built on Java, and CFML does have regular expression functions, they do not actually use the Java regular expression engine, which supports many useful regex constructs.

The purpose of jre-utils is to provide this extra power to CFML developers in a familiar and easy to use way.

I will shortly be releasing v0.7 of jre-utils, which adds a number of new functions, as well as making things more consistent, so I decided I would give this quick preview of what it contains.

read more...

Posted by Peter on 09-April-09 at 21:47 ~ ~ Category: regex , cfml , java

Earlier today, the eagely awaited Railo 3.1 public beta was announced!

And the reason for much of this eagerness?
Railo is now Open Source and Free Software, released under the LGPL v2.

This license requires that any changes to Railo's sourcecode itself must also be released under LGPL v2 (or later version).
However, unlike the full GPL, it does not require that you release any packaged applications under a compatible license - so you can still use whatever license you like for your own CFML code, Open Source or otherwise.


Along with the announcement comes two new Railo websites: The commercial-oriented getrailo.com and the community-oriented getrailo.org, which also contains wiki-based documentation.

Details on updating this documentation, as well as information about the new features in Railo 3.1, will come later this week - stay tuned to the Railo blog for the latest details.

The next four months are going to be a very exciting time for Railo and CFML!

Posted by Peter on 31-March-09 at 21:03 ~ ~ Category: cfml , web-dev

The exhibition ended last night, and it was a good show this year, with a lot of excellent photos on display.

I did reasonably well - whilst I didn't win any of the trophies, two of my images received certificates of merit, plus I received a panel certificate for my "Elemental Views" panel.

This was a set of extra-wide landscapes with ratios between 4:1 and 8:1 - showing that it is not necessary to stick to the 4:3 or 3:2 standard that comes out of the camera, and photographers should instead consider what shape suits the image best.

Both my print panel and digital set of images are now available to view online:

Elemental Views

Stormy Weather

Please feel free to leave any comments you might have.

Posted by Peter on 15-March-09 at 23:43 ~ ~ Category: photo

This coming Monday 9th March, I will be exhibiting a panel of photographs at my Camera Club's annual exhibition, Photo 2009, to be held at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon.

In total there will be more than 150 mounted prints, plus over a hundred slides and digital projected images. These latter two will be displayed when the Exhibition is officially opened by Damian Demolder (Editor of Amateur Photographer), at 20:00 on Monday the 9th.

The prints will be available to look at all week long, at any time that Fairfield Hall is open - starting on the morning of Monday 9th and running until the evening of Saturday 14th.

The exhibition and opening event are both free to attend, and with Croydon Camera Club regarded as one of the best clubs in the region, there are sure to be some excellent pictures on display.

Anyone remotely interested is strongly encouraged to visit.

A taster of just two of my fifteen images is available if you follow the next link to view the full version of this blog entry... read more...

Posted by Peter on 05-March-09 at 21:50 ~ ~ Category: photo

It's been nearly half a year since Railo 3 was released, and with 3.1 just around the corner it is a good time to write a post about some of the features that continue to make Railo such an excellent CFML engine!

This blog entry gives ten reasons for using Railo 3...

read more...

Posted by Peter on 01-March-09 at 02:53 ~ ~ Category: cfml , web-dev

If the momentus event this post is celebrating wasn't obvious from the title, here is an even bigger clue:

echo "scale=33;4*a(1)" | bc -l | perl -e'$p=<STDIN>;$p=~s/^(\d)\.(\d)(\d)\2(\d)\d(\d)(\d)\d{3}(\d{2})(\d)\d\d{17}(\d)\d*$/\2\5\1\3\4\6\8\7\9/;print$p'

:)

Posted by Peter on 13-February-09 at 23:31 ~ ~ Category: misc

There's been a little bit of snow in England for the past few days, and whilst I haven't had a chance properly go out and take photos, I have grabbed a few random shots.

(each image links to a larger version)

Posted by Peter on 04-February-09 at 14:09 ~ ~ Category: photo

For anyone working with any other modern language, (such as CFML, C#, JavaScript, Ruby, and more), using a String within a switch-case statement is not an issue, and probably something you've done many times without thinking about.

However, when working in Java you cannot use strings in a switch statement.

Fortunately, despite what many sites suggest, there is a solution - read more...

Posted by Peter on 12-December-08 at 21:50 ~ ~ Category: java , cfml , web-dev

On Thursday, the G1 mobile phone was finally released in the UK, and — ignoring the sensible policy of not getting first-generation devices — I ordered mine as soon as the website was available.

I now have my G1 and have written up my first impressions.

As I become more familiar with the Android-based device, I will be updating this entry with more details and photos.


Updates
1-Nov-2008 14:09 first posted
1-Nov-2008 15:30 added photos
Last Updated: 16-Nov-2008 22:35 added more details


read more...

Posted by Peter on 16-November-08 at 22:35 ~ ~ Category: tech