I’m always looking for faster, easier to use reference materials, so I was pretty stoked to hear about Tour de ColdFusion via Raymond Camden.

Tour de ColdFusion is an AIR application that incorporates the CF documentation with examples and results. It’s only in beta but from the brief click around I had it looks very cool indeed.

It’s free to download, so check it out!

Caffeine is important to the productivity of geeks. Well, of anyone, I suppose. I had a wicked caffeine addiction that I managed to kick by travelling in Europe for 3 weeks in 2008. The combination of not being able to get good coffee, hanging out with people who didn’t have an urgent need to caffeinate in the first two hours after waking, having my sleeping patterns destroyed by jet lag and keeping odd hours meant that the need to fix was gone when I got back into my normal surroundings.

Then, we got an espresso machine in the house/office. Welcome back, caffeine addiction my old friend.

So each person knows how much coffee they need to function… but how much does it take to kill you?

Fortunately, someone took the time to do the math and made a handy tool for the rest of us to use. Simply choose your region, enter your weight, select your caffeine source of choice and click to find out what it will take to put you down.

Death by Caffeine

Circulating the nerd-o-sphere at the moment: A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. This stuff is pure gold. Some examples:

1940s – Various "computers" are "programmed" using direct wiring and switches. Engineers do this in order to avoid the tabs vs spaces debate.

…

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

…

1995 – At a neighborhood Italian restaurant Rasmus Lerdorf realizes that his plate of spaghetti is an excellent model for understanding both the World Wide Web and that web applications should mimic their medium. On the back of his napkin he designs Programmable Hyperlinked Pasta (PHP). PHP documentation remains on that napkin to this day.

It’s great, however the languages we love and hate (CFML and ASP, in case you weren’t paying attention) are not included. I think we should come up with something in that style. Can someone think up some entries for these two? Leave a comment!

Sometimes, web sites reach the end of their lives, and continuing to host them for archival purposes is not a responsibility or expense that anyone wants to go to. Personally I hate the idea – after all, the W3C’s commandment that “cool URIs don’t change” has been stamped into me over the years – but sometimes it’s inevitable.

Take the Yes Daylight Savings campaign, for example. This was a campaign web site that we built for a group of business people promoting the “Yes” campaign for Western Australia’s Daylight Sayings referendum in 2009. Sadly, despite a sincere, sensible and great-looking campaign, the ”No” vote won out and we are still missing out on that gorgeous hour of extra sunshine every day in summer.

Regardless of the campaign outcome, maintaining the WordPress-driven site, keeping it up to date with security fixes and ensuring spammers didn’t take it over was not an option.

That’s where site archivers can come in handy. On the couple of occasions where I’ve had to lay a site to rest, I’ve used HTTrack, an “offline browser”, to spider a working offline version of the site and package it up on CD for prosperity. Then when the plug is pulled, you’ve still got a working copy.

HTTrack is free, active and regularly updated, available for Windows and various flavours of Linux, and does an awesome job.

Photo: Black kangaroo paws in the dying sunlight

I have not been, traditionally, much of a gardener. In fact, we built and moved into our house over 6 years ago and up until last month we have not had any kind of garden at all. The reasons for this are multiple:

1. I don’t like the traditional “lawn with flowerbeds” that everyone in our suburb has – not only is it boring and ugly, but it’s a massive waste of water, looks unnatural and is totally unsuitable for our drought-crippled West Australian climate
2. Neither Dave nor myself are gardeners, and we really had no idea how to approach creating a native, water-wise garden, and
3. Establishing a garden has really not been a priority for us, at all.

That all came to an end a few weeks ago with the help of a friend of mine, Mrs A, who is a gardening nut and has been suffering separation anxiety from her own garden after the sale of her house. I gave Mrs A free rein and a couple of hundred bucks and she chose, sourced and planted around 90 trees, shrubs and groundcovers native to our general area as well as instructing us in their care.

The garden is still quite sparse now (during winter) but next spring we’re expecting the groundcovers to start growing spreading, the bushes to start filling out and the trees to start stretching. In a couple of years, we’re hoping it will become a pocket of riotous wild natural bushland that uses a minimal amount of our state’s precious water, doesn’t require much in the way of maintenance, provides some screening for the house, and looks bloody fantastic.

If you’re wondering where problem-solving fits into all this, hold on, I’m getting to it…

For now, each plant is quite small and they are spaced apart. Around each plant we put a small circle of mulch to help retain water. After the first rain shower we had, the weeds starting shooting up all over the garden, and I started the battle to keep them down. I started by going after the biggest ones, but it seemed that every day there were more and more and I really wasn’t getting anywhere.

Then one morning, squatting in the front garden with a pair of gloves and a weed bucket, I had an epiphany. I’m a geek and a programmer. I am fully aware of my anal-retentive tendencies and in my daily work as well as my personal life, I quite often harness these tendencies in order to get things done efficiently. In essence, the garden shouldn’t be any different.

How do we accomplish a task or project? By breaking it down into it’s smallest components and then working on them one by one until they are finished. I break a new site into sections and complete them one at a time. To borrow David Allen’s example from the excellent book/productivity bible Getting Things Done, there’s no point putting “Climb Mt Everest” onto your todo list – but if you put down “buy protective clothing”, “book ticket to Nepal” and “research sherpas”, you’re on your way to accomplishing the larger goal.

The geek factor comes into this as well: make it a game or competition, and the race becomes more important than the end result. The compulsion to keep going, to beat whatever the criteria for success is (shortest time, or longest time, or whatever it may be) will drive the geek to keep going.

So, back to my garden. What is the purpose of weeding? I don’t care about the weeds themselves, but I don’t want them stealing water and nutrients and choking out my plants before they have a chance to establish themselves. So I set the goal: make the immediate 30cm area around each plant weed-free. This roughly equates to the mulched area around each one. Then I defined the process: I would go around the garden clockwise and remove all weeds from each mulched area, plant by plant. Once that was done, maintaining that weed-free zone would be a much simpler undertaking. The weeds outside the mulch zones I’m not particularly bothered about, but if their removal becomes a necessity I will formulate a new methodology to attack them.

After one full week, approximately 70% of my plants have a completely weed-free zone. On the first day, I cleared around about three plants. The second day, I doubled the number of cleared plants. On Friday, I popped out at lunchtime just to do a spot of weeding. That’s my anal-retentive impulses taking over. For now, I’m happy to let them.

In essence, my epiphany is not really news to anyone except me – every “problem” in life can (and should!) be attacked with the same philosophy. Embrace your inner anal-retentive geek! It really works.