TurtleFusion

My work computer is up and running although it is still shy of a few specific programs being loaded - Dreamweaver being one of them.  It did take most of the morning so I continued to work on my laptop and finished the section of code I'd been working on for the last couple of days.  I'm now on to a history section of the report that I will hopefully finish before the weekend so I can move on to some of the actual design elements at the weekend. After talking with my collegue I'm pretty clear what I've got to accomplish and how long I've got to do it.

To be honest I've not been that well or that motivated today and am pleased that I was able to get some productive code out this morning as I'm not doing well this evening and am about to call it a night after this entry.  I still have a website to work on and some Flex training to do as I'll be working on a Flex project once this series of reports is finished and I don't want to lose touch with the training I've just had.

Hopefully I'll feel a bit fresher tomorrow and get a little bit more done.  Maybe I'll start off with a run and see if that energizes me - although the thought of it at the moment is none to 'energizing' to say the least.

Today has been a kind of slow day.  First day back to work and my computer went out of action for a software upgrade push that should have been done the week I was gone.  I should be up by lunch time tomorrow but we'll see.  I did, of course have my laptop to work the code I started yesterday but it was still a bitg stifling not being able to have access to all my resources.

The meeting with my fellow coder went better than I expected and we seem to be on the same track - a good short term goal in mind with the agreement that we have common long term goals that we need to be aiming for that the code written now still needs to be written with those ideas in mind.  I've not quite finished the queries of my main report yet but am close enough to where I might finish tonight but we'll see.  I've been kind of off the boil this afternoon.

I have been to MSB Designs to download Gridbuilder to play around with - it might be a useful tool for the reports I'm writing now but we'll see.  Oh and a last Flex/CF note - the Adobe Flex/CF tutorial that I was talking about a couple of days ago that I was having problems with as far as the Flex integration goes - well I decided to do the unthinkable and actually search the Adobe forums last night on the matter and found that others had run into the same problem I did!  It was kind of satisfying to know that I wasn't totally alone in my frustrating - but frustrating that I hadn't searched for this answer before.  There seems to be a good solution on hand that I haven't tried yet but might have a go at tonight.  I'll be sure to let you know my results if I do get there.

Well as promised - to myself - today was a productive day as code goes.  Apart from a little dabble in my Flex/Coldfusion problem this morning over coffee, I faithfully worked on my work laptop on one of the reports I have on my list as needing to get done. I did actually want to make good progress on this particular report as, when I meet with my fellow coder at work tomorrow, it will help him out as my approach to this particular project is not going to affect some work he's just done as far as the database is concerned.  I'm sure that he'll still have some concerns and want it done differently - I can never please this guy really - and to be honest I don't try - but I always enjoy trying to guess his reaction to my coding approach.  I have my parts of the project - he has his - I think - and I have to work as I see will work best for the whole application.  Considering I've spent pretty much all my free time today doing this I hope he appreciates it.  Or maybe I hope he doesn't, depending if I'm in the mood for a fight.  Do you ever feel like that?  In a stressed out mood and just looking for an excuse to go off? I know I should be a better human being, but then again I should be twenty pounds lighter and be programming 3-D games for Sony as well but lifes life if you know what I mean.

Anyway I did enjoy my coding and as always found the O'Reilly Safari Books Online a great help in my moments of stupidy (I like to call them frustration but I know you guys know better).  It's worth the money I pay - so far.  I also suscribed to a good magazine over here in the UK called .NET which is a pretty cool magazine for developing and designing websites - in fact there logo is develop/discover/design and has some good reading for someone with interests such as mine.

Apart from that I've not done too bad - a bit of bad tv - although mostly with a laptop on my lap while it happened in the background - and a bit too much food.  Tommorrow is work, time to go running and time to get back on the project after my lovely week of training.

Well after getting Elcipse up and running yesterday I decided to move onto some Coldfusion/Flex integration tutorials on the Adobe website.  I decided to try creating the contact manager application which would have me use CFC's to pull my data and then have Flex interpretate the results into the Flex user interface.  Well, as yesterday, I had the battle of the application set ups go on for a while as I only had the CF 7.0 Developer edition on my machine and so downloaded the CF 7.02 version for the Flex capability.  Thinking it would update the installation I already had on my machine it took me a while to find out why my CF applications had a breakdown due to the two seperate applications running.  After a removal and clean install I did get the CFC's loaded correctly and tested my CF section of the application successfully.  However, I have run into problems with getting Flex part of the application running as I've obviously either not put the files in the right place according to the tutorial (in fact I've moved them so many times now I'm not sure where I am let alone where they are) or I haven't edited one of the XML files correctly.  I decided to take a break for my weekly enjoyment of Battlestar Galatica and also to relax a bit and take stock of the situation. 

Basically, as I said yesterday, I have a....snuff load shall we say for a better explitive....of code to do - so I'm actually going to break from my seeming obsession of Eclipse/Flex/CF integration battles and just get some actual productive code out of the way tomorrow before I alllow myself, well some more fun shall we say.  That means I'm on the work laptop - which means business for one project - and after some production on that project I will decide whether to just keep coding for the rest of the day or take my battles back to the frontline.

Apart from that I've bought a new coffee machine - ammunition for the battle ahead - bought a new Sponge Bob t-shirt, and watched too much TV. 

Thank God tommorrow's not Monday....

Well I made it home from training with a much better understanding of Flex and a new enthusiasm for getting more familar with the material I had to whiz through in the past three days.  Of course coming home also meant coming back to issues that I'm dealing with at work as far as the new development of our current CF project is going.  With a six month timeline ahead including an upgrade to CF7, intergration of a basic Flex interface for forms and report generation and some fairly major development as far as the actual code development goes - I have a lot to look foward to (or blind myself from) depending on how you look at it.  As if this isn't enough to get the stress level up I also have some conflicting views on how to get things done and what issues are important with my collegue who is also working the project.  To cap it off I'm way behind on a project I'm doing for a local organization since I've been bringing so much work home and I should have another project in the works soon as soon as the client can get the information to their old domain server so I can access their files.

So with all of that in front of me I decided it would be a good time to try to install Eclipse and get it up and running with CFEclipse and Flex integration - although I've just installed Flexbuilder - I want to be able to have the choice of Open Source if I wish.  Needless to say it wasn't easy - well for me anyway - as I had terrible trouble getting Eclipse to be updated to the point of being able to take the updates necessarry for the Flex integration.  Peter Martins Adobe Weblog was a great help in getting me through the long and tedious process after I downloaded the plugin from the Flex Exchange on Adobe.  Needless to say it took me most of last night and well into today to get it working to a practical state - and thank God it didn't crash as some people have reported.  Now I can have Flexbuilder and Eclipse run side by side doing pretty much the same thing as far as code goes - which I'm not sure is something that I wanted in the first place.  Well I wanted to move away from Dreamweaver and try Eclipse after enjoying Flexbuilder so much - and I did, darn it!  Now either way I work I'll be working in an Eclipse enviornment - for now.  I actually do plan to take on one of the ton of projects I mentioned at the beginning of this blog and start it as my first Eclipse venture.  Hopefully it will relieve some of the stress I've been suffering from since I got home.  Not stress from the Eclipse incident - just that post stress thing I suffer from when I get a really good injection of code or enthusiasm to do something and have not yet focused my codingturtle abilities to one outlet of the 'coding force'.  The only thing keeping me together has been, ironically the Eclipse incident, and listening to my new Bullet for my Valentine DVD I picked up in London and my new HIM album that I also got. Well that and my other half - bless him - if he ever takes up a blog it will be titled the story of the long suffering turtle lover......