devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

A few of us here have been boarded-up in a “programming cave” here for a month working a lot of crazy hours trying to get a new product out the door. Every now and then you need a bit of humor to break-up the cycle of code monkeying, and being a mischievous CF geek, I had just the fix.

Today we were starting to put some of our components together to see how they interacted with each other, and I decided I should put a little sprinkle of fun into the testing, so I added a line of code into one of my components:


<cfthrow message="An ID-10T error has occurred when processing this directive. JRun has halted." />


Of course the first response when we came across it was along the lines of “Oh great, a new JRun error!” After I had them read it out loud a couple of times, finally someone picked-up on it and almost cried from laughing so hard. It was good times, and a welcome break from the fun of spending way too much time at work.

This is obviously nothing of technical merit, and definitely a “you had to be there” moment, but perhaps somewhere out there in CF Land someone could use this line of code for a bit of fun as well?

For those times when you get tired of telling someone to look things up on Google before asking you questions… fucking Google it before you bother me!

Being that I am a bit OCD about categorizing and organizing data, I ‘ve noticed that quite a few posts on the various RSS feeds for ColdFusion contain a lot of /really/ off-topic posts. Given the “large” audience which these feeds reach, and thinking about how most mailing lists are ran (and have been ran for a very long time), it seems to me that these sort of posts should not be aggregated.

I’m not trying to be the skunk at a picnic or start a flame war, but it seems like it would be easy for the various CF bloggers to only RSS ColdFusion content to the Macromedia XML News Aggregator and FullAsAGoog to keep from polluting the CF Feeds with topics not at least somewhat related to CF. It’s not to say I don’t mind reading the non-CF stuff, I just don’t think it belongs in RSS feeds which are supposed to be ColdFusion content. I feel that it takes away from the spirit and intent of the news aggregators in general, not to mention some of the posts lately are starting to really get off-topic. Perhaps they could go into a different category such as “Misc” or something of the sort?

I don’t feel that I need to cite any individual posts as it’s not my intention to call people out or upset anyone, but I think posts relating to technology which can be used with ColdFusion are okay, but posts which are about topics which do not have a direct link to ColdFusion in some way are best left off of an ColdFusion RSS feed. I think a good start would be to think about whether or not a given blog entry would be appropirate for a ColdFusion mailing list/newsgroup. If not, perhaps it should not be posted.

I think in general, the problem is that RSS feeds from a good percentage of the various CF blogs are not being published into categories. Instead, each time someone’s blog is updated, no matter what topic, it’s what is published to the only default RSS feed which the aforementioned sites use. I setup a ColdFusion only RSS feed just for this very purpose as I post all kinds of varying content on my blog which is probably not of interest to someone wanting to learn about the latest and greatest in ColdFusion.

Anyhow, it’s just my opinion. Maybe I’m the only person who has noticed this, but I thought I would rationally point it out and see what others thought. Comments?