Wake-on-LAN

I recently moved some stuff around in my office and stuck my workstation under my desk. It's out of the way but to power it on I needed to crawl under my desk and hit the power button.

In the past I've used the power on settings in the BIOS …

Wraith - Visual Regression Testing

At Red Hat we have a static copy of our site which is configured as a failover in case our main site goes kaboom.

One issue we've had is how to verify the failover content is up to date with the live site.

I recently setup Wraith to automate these …

Mapping Your Mouse Buttons in Linux

At my new gig at Red Hat I've been trying to use the mouse less and less but still find myself using it occasionally so why not tweak it and use it efficiently?

Digging around I found xbindkeys.

Xbindkeys is a program that enables us to bind commands to certain …

Red Hat (then and now)

In the late 90's I was in a bit of flux in my career making the change from a network administrator role to my start in web development and ColdFusion.

During this time I can also remember attending the Linux Expo at Duke. I didn't attend the actual conference but …

Mechanical Keyboard Follow-up

After my previous post about mechanical keyboards I ended up going with the Code Keyboard.

At the time they only offered them in clear or green switches but now they also offer brown. What's the difference you ask?

The Cherry MX Clear switches are a slightly enhanced version of the …

Gitlab Jenkins Property Generator

We use Gitlab at work and I've recently been working on improving our deployments. We have several old monolithic applications which are a challenge to deploy for QA especially as we are getting into the habit of using feature branches to manage our code.

What happens is Joe will deploy …

Poor Man's T-SQL Formatter

I'm a bit OCD about my SQL code.

Frequently I'll see something like

select firstname, lastname, address1, address2, city, state, zip, homephone, cellphone, business-address1, business-address2, business-city, business-state, business-zip, business-phone, business-fax, etc.

You get the idea.

This drives me nuts.

I'd much rather see …

CFSSH (Secure FTP) In Lucee

We have been migrating a lot of scheduled tasks from an old ColdFusion server to Lucee. A coworker recently asked me for help because they noticed that one particular task which used CFFTP was failing. Apparently Lucee doesn't natively support the 'secure' attribute of CFFTP.

My co-worked had done some …

Mechanical Keyboards

Lately I've been in the mood for a change in my keyboard situation. When I first started coding I had one of the original mechanical keyboards from one of my family's first computer, an old Leading Edge. At some point I switched to the original Microsoft Natural keyboard and have …

Running ColdFusion/Railo On The Command Line with ConEmu

Everytime I talk to Dan Wilson (who is quite smart) he mentions I should run my ColdFusion servers on the command line so I can see what's going on behind the curtain.

I've always been too lazy to actually do this but while troubleshooting a recent problem I finally broke …

EMCopy - A Robocopy Replacement

We have a mix of Git, Ant and Robocopy scripts for deployments at work.

I've been working on moving everything into Jenkins.

We have a few projects that have a LOT of files. And I quickly ran into an issue using Robocopy to move them to the server took forever …

Jenkins Master / Slave Setup

We've been using a mix of Ant and Robocopy scripts to deploy our apps. While it works it requires some technical skills, and in some instances logging into remote servers.

I wanted to develop a process where our QA person (who is non-technical) could easily deploy and move code around …

New Clipboard Favorite - Clipboard Help and Spell

I like Clipboard utilities. If you've seen any of my Toolbox talks this is always the tool I get the most feedback about. People always tell me how much more productive they became when they started using a clipboard manager.

I've used many over the years:

• CLCL
• Ditto
• ArsClip
• EthervaneEcho …

dbForge Studio for SQL Server - Intro

HeidiSQL is my go to tool for working with MySQL and lately I've been swapping between it and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for MSSQL work.

But it frequently crashes and I still get frustrated with SSMS. It 'works' but usually not like I expect it to.

Within SSMS I've …

Using Grunt For Live Reload Revisited

In my last Grunt post Dan left a comment:

You might also want to check out Yeoman. Once it is installed you install the generator with npm install -g generator-webapp Then in your new folder just type yo webapp and it sets all that stuff up for you. From there …

Using Grunt For Live Reload

Recently I was working on a JavaScript project that required a lot of trial and error coding which resulted in me hitting the F5 key repeatedly to see if things were working.

Grunt has been on my radar for awhile and I knew it could 'watch' things so I figured …

Quick Git SSH Windows Password Tip

Using Git Bash on Windows I'm always prompted for my SSH password when I interact with Github. I don't get this on Ubuntu as it manages my password for me in it's keyring (I assume Mac has something similar).

I dug around and you can apparently hack up Putty/Plink …

You Got Your Mouse In My Virtual Desktop

I usually work at home and have my dual monitors setup for writing code but a few days ago I was stuck just using my laptop and I was struggling a bit working with just one screen.

Then I got lazy.

I have a Logitech M510 mouse and it comes …

MailCatcher - Local SMTP Server

Recently I've been developing a lot of JIRA workflows and I wanted to be able to test the email delivery as well but didn't want to reconfigure our existing notifications to send to different people.

I considered setting up my own mail server but that seemed a bit heavy for …

cf.Objective 2014 - Digging Into The Developer Toolbox

I've been invited back to speak at cf.Objective in May!

cf.Objective() bills itself as "The World's Only Enterprise ColdFusion Conference" but much like NCDevCon they have expanded beyond ColdFusion and cover a wide range of topics. Checkout the sessions and you'll see things like AngularJS, BDD, Node.js …