Sunday, May 25, 2008

FlexManiacs 2008

Just returned from the Flexmaniacs 2008 show put on by Figleaf. I would classify this as mixed bag show. It is an impressive array of presentations, presenters and topics that were being covered. To me though this all seemed still a little rough around the edges; it is the second year so a little slack can be given.
Half the presentations I attended ended up having a low value for me whether it was content, presenters struggling with presentations or topics, etc. Overall it was still a valuable conference to attend but the main part requiring improvement is to separate the bad presenters from the good and get to more consistent polished presentations. I have never seen a conference where half the audience would leave within 10 min of a start of a presentation; I can imagine this to be a good blow to many a soul attempting to present.

In brief:
the good: The conference is pretty long enough and provides good coverage of topics to sniff into into get an idea. The weather was nice ;o)
the bad: Need better individual presentations and presenters. Would like to see options to rate individual presenters (online or after each show) . Topics should be better described ahead of time (I sat through an hour of a Flash presentation when topic was Flex). An individualized schedule should be printable from the website. More networking forums needed.

Would attend again but pick only the day I think has the biggest bang.

Cheers.

Friday, May 23, 2008

CF: cfhttp and The column name "" is invalid.

The other day we were looking at cfhttp to parse out a CSV (comma seperated values) file. It worked beautifully on the test systems but would not run when transferred to staging site.
We would get this error consistently.

The column name "" is invalid.

None of the internet resources regarding this was very helpful. So after many trial and errors we discovered that the webserver we posted this to had basic user authentication switched on, thus we needed to provide username and password attributes of the cfhttp tag for this to work.
Another perfectly good example of how the simple things get you. Would have been helpful too if the cfhttp tag could throw a more meaningful error.