I toyed with the idea of converting the blog from BlogCFC to Wordpress in 2007 but ended up sticking with BlogCFC. I’ve now decided to migrate over to Wordpress. It’s been an interesting exercise and overall, quite a simple one. I had all of my blog data imported into Wordpress via my BlogCFC to Wordpress conversion tool (which I’ve updated to fix a few small issues).

Recreating the look and feel was also pretty simple. Writing Wordpress themes isn’t as daunting as it first looks. So long as you have a clean XHTML & CSS layout, it’s a simple case of marking up the required header, footer & sidebar layout templates.

Any other BlogCFC specific functionality (like CF syntax highlighting) I managed to cover off by installing a few Wordpress plugins. Finally, I have Apache 301 redirecting any BlogCFC / CF URL’s, so hopefully my search rankings wont be affected too much!

This month marks the end of my four years of (almost) day to day ColdFusion programming. In the new year I’m moving on to pastures new and will be working exclusively with Java from then onwards.

So why the change? In the main, it’s due to wanting a new challange and something to rekindle my motivation for software development, which has been waning over the past year. I also wanted to get some solid experience of another programming language as a sort of career protection thing.

I’m not planning on giving up CF programming entirely, I’ll definately be checking out CF 9 but I’ll be trying to post more about Java related stuff in future.

Just one of many observations made on my commute to and from work……

Tis the current fashion in London to read a newspaper or book whilst walking along. While this does allow one to finish a chapter or complete the crossword whilst on the move, it does have the minor drawback of not being able to see where one is going.

This behaviour usually exhibits itself on crowded streets, busy tube platforms and station concourses. The effect of this is demonstrated thus…..

The unfashionable non reader walks by using the standard method of looking where he is going and thus avoids others:

The alternate method of reading whilst walking along produces the following effect:

So absorbing is the book that the reader weaves from side to side while others take avoiding action until the inevitable collision occurs.

Just married nearly three weeks ago in fact! Hence my lack of blogging or interest in anything computer related over the past month or so, since there has been so much to do and organise.

My wife Sophia and I had a fantastic day. We were married at Romsey Abbey in Hampshire which proved to be a spectacular setting for the marriage service and a great backdrop for our (many) photographs.

The reception was also really enjoyable and my speech seemed to go down well with everyone, which was a relief considering I wrote it on the morning of the wedding!

There were some slight hiccups. Closer inspection of my marriage certificate revealed some embarrassing spelling errors on my father’s, Sophia’s and my occupation description. Not sure who the illiterate person was who filled out the details but I’m trying to get it changed.

Then there was the debacle over our (rather expensive) wedding cake. The staff at the reception cut portions of the cake so everyone could have a piece. Overnight it transpired that the reception venue staff had dumped the remainder of the cake in the bin, without any consultation with our parents or Sophia and I! Even worse, I recently found out that some of the staff had been helping themselves to bits of the cake while the evening party was going on.

For honeymoon we decided to go to Paphos in Cyprus for two weeks. The first five days were quite relaxing and then Sophia fell ill with a nasty stomach virus. Things got so bad that she ended up in hospital for three days. When she was released there was a strict diet for her to follow, so we were pretty much confined to the hotel for the remainder of the holiday. I didn’t expect to be tested on the ’sickness and in health’ vow quite so soon!

Problems aside, we still had a great time together and there’s still a day or so for us to enjoy together before we head back to work.

I’ve finally got around to redesigning my bookshelf page. All of my latest purchases are on there and I’ve removed the old crappy books that I really need to take off my book shelf at home.

I got tired of the old design and it was a bit of a pain to maintain so I set about redesigning a new theme. Design isn’t really my thing but I’m pleased with the way that it has turned out.

I’ve tried to keep everything CSS and XHTML valid but the blog has issues with IE versions less than version 6. I will at some point address this.

I’ll be adding and tweaking various bits and pieces over the coming weeks. And if anyone knows why this happens:

on the last post in IE 6, please let me know.

I’ve made the jump from Linux to Windows hosting and in doing so have upgraded from CF7 to CF8. As ever, faultless service from hostmysite support had everything up and running very quickly.

I’ve noticed a few weird things happening, random null pointer exceptions and some other issues. It’s probably time I started using the latest and greatest version of BlogCFC, which I plan to do soon. More on that next month….

I’ve been using Microsoft Office 2007 for about four months now. I didn’t warm to it when I first started using it, but I positively loathe it now, especially Word 2007!

I’ve been having to write a fair amount of documentation of late so I’ve spent many hours hammering out line upon line of text in Word 2007.

Can anyone explain how the ribbon toolbar is UI improvement over previous versions of Word?

I find it baffling, where the hell has half of the stuff that used to be a couple of clicks away gone?

Amusing that there’s software out there to bring back the old Office 2003 look and feel!

I’ve given up with del.icio.us and am currently trialling Ma.gnolia as a means of storing all of my bookmarks.

The del.icio.us service seems to be regularly unavailable of late and it’s starting to get annoying when I want to tag stuff or hunt through my bookmarks.

Converting everything to Ma.gnolia is a piece of cake. I simply exported all of my del.icio.us bookmarks to XML and imported them into Ma.gnolia. The Ma.gnolia interface is going to take some getting used to, for instance, your tags aren’t listed down the right hand side which makes searching slightly trickier.

There’s a few other quirks that I need to work through, I’ll see how it goes, I may even switch back if del.icio.us becomes more reliable.

I added a few titles to my book collection today:

Domain Driven Design

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Refactoring to Patterns

Beautiful Code

Once I’ve finished with Fowler’s Refactoring, I’ll make a start

Dorothy Perkins have a nice viral campaign in order to help get 40,000 new trees planted within the UK. For every 100 virtual trees planted, they, in association with the Woodland Trust will plant one real tree. They’re also launching a clothing range where a percentage of the profits will go to the Woodland Trust.

It’s also a good use of Adobe Flash. Check it out here.

Yes for some stupid reason I picked up one of these whilst out shopping with my girlfriend a few weeks ago. Seeing as all the PCI slots on my PC are broken, I decided to purchase it as it was for USB and on offer for £25.

It’s now sitting mangled up in my bin after driving me insane:

- The configuration software is so good that it forgets all of your preferences when you exit the application.

- You cannot edit channel settings correctly in order to fine tune channels. There are fields marked as optional yet they are greyed out and impossible to activate – even though the information should be critical in configuring channels.

- The TV viewing application crashes randomly. Its good fun waiting and wondering just when I’ll get the Windows error popup.

- Teletext ‘feature’ crashes or just doesn’t work.

- Not only does the software crash randomly, it crashes leaving ugly .NET stack traces visible to me.

- The software website is also a shambles.

Oh but the radio channels worked perfectly.

I *think* the blog layout is fixed in IE 6. The widths I had set on the list elements for the items on the right hand sidebar seemed to be breaking the layout in IE 6.

I still need to sort out the scrollable DIV that contains and formats code blocks. I had to scale their widths back to stop the layout breaking. The downside is the content is compacted and isn’t very readable. I plan to write my own solution to output and format code blocks. Hopefully this will address the issue.

I’ve also tried to clean up the blog markup in general as loads of superfluous whitespace was being generated. I’ve made some improvements on this but it’s still not as good as I’d like it to be.

The calendar was one of the biggest whitespace culprits; it’s my own calendar custom tag and not Ray Camdens. I rewrote everything in CFSCRIPT and it’s cleaned up the output nicely.

I also removed the recent entries pod from the sidebar. It occurred to me that it was kind of a pointless thing, seeing as all the recent entries are on the blog homepage.

A post to remind me to get my arse in gear and fix the site layout in IE 6. I know the main body content appears waaaaay down the page. I changed something a while back and haven’t been able to pin down what is causing the problem.

Hopefully I’ll get it sorted soon, or get someone with better CSS skills than me to fix it!

Clapham Junction, one of Britain’s busiest, largest and most confusing stations.

Here’s a guide as to where each of the 17 platforms lead to:

Clapham Junction Platform Guide

This post is more for my reference where I end up lost when I’m coming back from visiting my girlfriend