Sorcerer's Isle

Proposed Q&A sites for Photographers and 3D Modellers

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:27:56 GMT

The team behind the StackOverflow Q&A programming site have created a place for people to propose new Q&A sites to be created - once enough people have voted in favour of a proposal, the site gets created.

Although it has plenty of flaws (which I'm happy to point out), the Stack Exchange platform is still a good way of getting quick and comprehensive answers to questions, and it's much better than many of the forums out there.

So, there are two of these proposals which I am following, and if you are into either photography or 3d graphics you should definitely consider checking out these links, and following the proposals too:

These sites will only be created when enough people have followed/committed to them, so please spread these links to anyone else who might be interested.

International Regular Expressions Day

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:20:26 GMT

It's 1st June 2010 today, and that means we're celebrating for the third time the annual International Regular Expressions Day.

Ben Nadel kicked off this event two years ago, in order to promote the use of Regex, especially amongst those who might consider them something scary and obscure.

As before, Ben is running a contest, this year's prizes being some O'Reily Regex books and IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro licenses.

Entry to the competition requires writing some code, and the deadline is today, so if you're interested then hurry up and read the blog entry to find out more.

Happy Regex Day!

Railo: Still Awesome!

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:42:41 GMT

It's nearly a year on from my last Railo blog post so it is well overdue that I write another - just in case there is anyone still sitting on the fence, unsure if they should use Railo - or indeed, anyone who might be unaware of Railo's very existance!

So to start with, a quick summary of what Railo is:

Railo, pronounced /ˈraɪ.ləʊ/, is super fast Enterprise-level sofware for RAD webapp and website creation.
Railo is LGPL-licensed Free Software, so anyone can use it how they like.
Railo runs on any Java EE server, (but doesn't require Java knowledge), and is a Jboss.org project.
Railo uses the CFML language, like Adobe ColdFusion (the primary CFML engine), OpenBlueDragon, and others.
Railo is really awesome.

Find out why Railo is the perfect choice for your next development project.

The Magnificent Art of ElDavo

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:53:36 GMT

I've recently been working on a gallery website for my brother, a brilliant artist and illustrator. The site is still under construction, but he's already got some great examples of his drawings and sculptures on there, and it is definitely worth checking out.

Head over to eldavo.co.uk to take a look, and if you like the work take a look at his blog where he has more of his art.

On the technical side, the main site is pretty simple, so far, with extra complexity coming later on. It runs on Railo and uses jQuery. The (private) admin part of the site was my first opportunity to use cfimage functionality, allowing thumbnails to be generated from uploaded images. I used jCrop for the client-side crop selection.

After the Storm

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:31:23 GMT

It's been far too long since I last posted anything, so I'll kick-off what I hope will be the start of more frequent posting with a couple of photos taken down on the UK's south east coast last month, immediately after some incredibly stormy weather.

The winds were still very strong and the evening sky nice and atmospheric, allowing me to create these two images:

The Stack Overflow League of Justice

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:16:46 GMT

In the comments for a recent Stack Overflow blog article, Chris asked:

Can somebody photoshop the top 7 SO users by reputation (Jon Skeet's face onto Superman) onto that comic, just to make me chuckle!

Which sounded like fun, so I went ahead and did it.

Was a fairly quick job, so there's some rough bits, but I hope you like it, Chris.

Craig's Race

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:32:59 GMT

As Craig's Race is one of very few games installed on my G1, and the only one I have a shortcut for, I figured I would give it a quick review.

Beehive Forum 0.9 has been released!

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:50:21 GMT

Version 0.9 of Beehive Forum, probably the greatest forum software there is, has recently been officially released.

Since the previous v0.8.4 there have been a variety of fixes and improvements, particularly to client-side caching and UTF-8. There is also now support for Google Analytics and for displaying optional Google Adsense adverts. For full information on what has changed, you can check the release notes.

Download Beehive Forum 0.9 from SourceForge

Also, Beehive is currently a Finalist in the SourceForge Community Choice Awards!

If you're a fan of Beehive and haven't yet voted, please vote for Beehive now:

There is a lot of competition, with many thousands of votes already having been cast, so please help spread the word to as many other Beehive users as you can, to help vote for Beehive to win, and gain the recognition it deserves!

Welcome to the Isle

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:50:47 GMT

This is my new and improved weblog, where I will be posting on a large assortment of topics which I hope you will find interesting. All of the old blog messages have been ported across, and re-catalogued into more useful groupings.

For anyone wishing to read posts only on particular areas, there are three sub-blogs available, which filter the messages from this main blog according to their respective focus. Combined with the ability to subscribe to feeds for individual or multiple tags, it should be easy to get at only the content you wish to read. And to follow all the messages, you can simply read just the main blog.

Currently, everything is still rather basic, but over the next few months I will be adding to, extending and improving the various features that are available, and I welcome any feedback you might have.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your stay, and please feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Java RegEx Utilities - v0.7 preview

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:47:00 GMT

Java RegEx Utilities, or jre-utils, is a CFC which provides a convenient way to access Java's regular expression functionality.

Whilst ColdFusion, Railo, and openBD are all built on Java, and CFML does have regular expression functions, they do not actually use the Java regular expression engine, which supports many useful regex constructs.

The purpose of jre-utils is to provide this extra power to CFML developers in a familiar and easy to use way.

I will shortly be releasing v0.7 of jre-utils, which adds a number of new functions, as well as making things more consistent, so I decided I would give this quick preview of what it contains.