While practicing for this presentation, I noticed a few things.

Solving the same problem sparks creativity

After solving the problem for the 2nd time, I noticed my brain starting to tweak what I was doing. At first it was only a small change. Then as I took another go at the fizzbuzz problem, I tried something else. My only guess is that a few things are in place to allow my brain worry about the how and not the what.

The biggest thing seemed to be that I knew the answer to the problem before I started solving it. Just knowing that I had solved this problem but not 30 minutes earlier made it easier for my brain to think in another direction than "How am I going to solve this?".

The other large contributing factor is the use of TDD. As I wrote each test and made it pass, I then had the freedom to refactor until I was blue in the face. No matter the size of the change, I only had to do one thing to check on the build status, run my tests.

Katas make a killer brain warm up

Earlier this week, I preformed a few of these practice sessions before I started my normal work day. Once I started my regular work, I noticed an immediate difference in my level of clarity while reading and writing code.  The confidence given by solving a problem by 9:00am and knowing that it's 100% correct is unbelievable. Plus, doesn't this beat reading email?

Thanks to...

Ryan Anklam who had the original idea for this meetup. Ryan's coding portion can be seen here and the slides are here.

Charlie Arehart who puts on a meetup that is priceless to the ColdFusion community.

• International Freelancer's Day - Sept 24-25, 2010
  • A free online conference, the only requirement is a quick registration. The thought of listening to "social media experts" is much out weighed by hearing Mike McDerment (of FreshBooks) speak.
• EtherCodes - EtherPad for programming
  • Should be live at 2pm EST today.
• Fixing Common Browser Issues: Dealing With Key Events
  • I've had this nagging issue with a key event, this helped shed a lot of light on it.
• Css3 Generator
  • Even with all of the CSS3 resources available, I still found this to be to the point and helpful.
• Everynote Site Memory - Another sharing button
  • As an Evernote user, I like the way you can customize this. You, the site owner, may select which parts of your page are clipped. You can even suggest which tags the resulting note gets!

If it's hard to see the code in the video, I've pasted the relevant Javascript below.

I felt like the example I created for the original post wasn't very exciting, so I created one better. This demo shows how it could look if you used Taggable to save tags on the server as the users interacts with items.

Enjoy!

Summary for the busy

• Allows elements to become "tags" and "taggable"
• Easily customizable actions on tag / untag
• Download here (plugin only)
• Download here (with examples)
• Fork it here

Motivation

I've really enjoyed using jQuery over the last few years. It's been quite wonderful really. Outside of the core being easy to use and very solid, the plugins available really make jQuery sizzle.

So I thought I'd take a crack at writing my very own plugin. My main goal was to imitate the tagging interface you've seen in some desktop UIs, with Evernote being my main inspiration.

Lessons Learned

A few things I learned while writing the plugin:

1. Writing a jQuery plugin is not that hard
2. Developing jQuery plugins is  really really fun (no really, it is)

Details

The plugin requires jQuery and jQuery UI. Once you have the jQuery requirements and the plugin file, using the plugin is simple. Just call .taggable() on the element that you want to have tags attached to. There are various ways to customize it beyond this of course. For those details, check out the README.

Other Tag-ish Plugins Out There

I fought the urge to look at existing work, mainly so that I could learn as much from tripping over my own two feet as possible. Upon writing this post, I decided 'why not' and Googled around for "jquery plugins tag" and other permutations. I was thrilled to see that it doesn't look like there are any other plugins that do quite this. All of the other options turn input into tags or create tag clouds.

About WikiText

WikText is a structured language that is easily readable by humans and is pretty easy to parse. As an example this is how you write a h1:

h1. Main heading

Examples

It really couldn't be any more simple than that. Similar markup exists for a larger part of HTML as well. Here are a few more examples:

*this creates bold text*
__italic text__
#Numbered list item 1
#Numbered list item 2
*Bulleted list item
bc. Block Code in here

An easy to use markup language isn't that interesting on it's own IMO, but when it's natively supported by your tooling things get a lot more useful.

So typing something like this in Eclipse:

Generates something like this:

Eclipse is very happy to convert your WikiText to HTML, DocBook and Eclipse help files.

Even outside of Eclipse, I find this useful as many sites will parse your .textile files. Outside of wiki sites, I think the most notable would be git hub. If you have a README.textile they will parse it and generate the HTML for your project page based off of it.

The Eclipse documentation here talks more about the capabilities but I think the above are the most important (especially if your like me and didn't know about it).

If you answered yes to the first four questions, then I have a great opportunity for you! Interfolio is currently looking to hire an intermediate ColdFusion Developer in the downtown Washington DC area.

I've taken the requirements and qualifications out of the job description and pasted them below. If you'd like to read the full job description, see the link at the bottom of the page.

Responsibilities:

• Digest and understand user requirements/specifications
• Participate in maintenance, enhancements and new development
• Contribute to the testing and release of new software
• Work with other members of the technical team to plan software solutions
• Make recommendations to improve the products and software to increase revenue/profitability
• Keep track of multiple projects at once and adapt to shifting priorities
• Perform other related duties to support Interfolio's technology

Required Qualifications:

• ColdFusion MX and above (3+ years)
• SQL, preferable MySQL
• HTML
• JavaScript
• CSS
• AJAX
• Mach-II or similar Object-Oriented Framework
• Good written and verbal communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences

If you're interested send your cover letter and resume to recruiting@interfolio.com

Full job posting here.

Here is one of the Interfolio products ("Portfolio") in use to display the job description.

Here is Interfolio's website: http://www.interfolio.com.

* This posting makes no guarantees for lunch with President Obama, but Interfolio's office is within walking distance of the White House.

After finding about the Open Calais service from Thompson Reuters I was pretty excited. I've created a custom tag that sends data to the service which in turn returns the resulting semantic data.

The tag is pretty easy to use. Just surround the text you want to parse with the <cf_calais>  tags and off you go. The default variable returned is cfcalais. You can override this by setting the "name" attribute.

Download the tag and code here: http://github.com/jonDowdle/cfCalais

I hope you find this tag useful and let's make Coldfusion an integral part of building Web 3.0!

Good news, it's an easy fix. You'll soon have a nice high-resolution icon for both your dock icons and Eclipse.app.

1. Save the Coldfusion PNG from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ColdFusion_icon.png) to your hard drive
2. Convert the PNG from step 1 to an ICNS and save back to your hard drive. (I used iConvert http://iconverticons.com/)
3. Open /Applications/eclipse (or wherever you installed Eclipse)
4. Right click on Eclipse, select Show Package Contents
5. Go to Contents > Resources
6. [Optional] Rename Eclipse.icns to Eclipse_old.icns
7. Copy Eclipse.icns from step 1 into the Resources folder
8. Launch Eclipse
9. Enjoy.

You should then see something like this: