Just a quick note that this blog has moved over here: aDeepBlue.com. I have not ported the existing entries over yet, so until I do this blog will still be live. But go on over and check us out.

Man, I almost look forward to Canon announcements as much as Apple's. This new 50D looks mighty nice. From DPReview:

Almost exactly a year after the arrival of the EOS 40D, Canon has announced the 50D, which we're assured will be a sister-model, rather than a replacement. Recent history has seen Canon release new models every 18 months-or-so but it's been a busy year with newcomers such as the Nikon D300 getting a lot of attention in the 40D's keen amateur/professional segment. The 50D puts essentially a 40D body wrapped around a newly-developed 15 megapixel sensor that finally rectifies the situation in which Canon's x0D range trailed the company's entry-level line, in pixel terms. Canon is claiming that the new sensor's design (new manufacturing processes, redesigned photo diodes and micro lenses) mean that despite the higher resolution the noise is actually lower than the 40D, something we'll obviously be putting to the test when we get our hands on a production model.

The other big change is the inclusion of a new, high-resolution LCD screen. 920,000 dots mean that it can convey 640 x 480 RGB pixels, making it effectively a VGA standard monitor.

$1,200 is a lot of money, but for the top of the "prosumer" line, it really isn't all that bad...

So Kodak has released their Flip video killer, the Zi6. Scott Stevenson with the review:

The Zi6 is clearly inspired by the Flip Video, and has a form factor similar to that family of devices. The main advantages of the Zi6 are that it can record at 720p HD resolution at up to 60fps, has a bigger screen, and the native video file format is H.264, so it's Mac compatible out of the box. The Zi6 also has a fixed macro mode, which it appears the Flip does not.

720p HD at up to 60fps! That is really quite something for such a small form factor.

I have a flip video ultra and love it for what it is. The zoom is basically worthless, but for recording some small video clip it is worth every penny. I basically use the flip video camera like a point-and-shoot camera the way I would compare my canon hv20 HD camcorder to my canon DSLR's. Quick and dirty verses slow but better.

Amazon has the Kodak Zi6 for $180 and you can compare that to the Flip Ultra for $120.

I have to say even though I have never maxed out my flip yet, I would think the ability to use the expandable SD memory card in the Kodak alone is worth the extra 60 bucks. Anyone out there tried one of these Zi6's yet? What did you think?

So let me set the scene. I have been trying to push adb.com to production for a few weeks now, but something was always coming up so I didn't have the time to get it finished. I had the source code in subversion at one point, but during a backup and reinstall of my development system somewhere along the way, I had unhooked it. But I still had all of the .svn folders in my code. That's where the fun starts. continue reading...

I am really glad you could join me for taking my new website for a spin. I am going to break it in slowly, but kick the tires for me and let me know if you see anything out of place, mis-spelt or just plain broken. But overall just let me know what you think!

Sorry to everyone who has been trying to access my website lately. I have had a little bit of downtime while switching servers and getting things kosher once more. Email is still on the fritz so comments and other code that relies on email may not work for a little while but we should be back to business as usual very soon. Stay tuned...

Ever since Apple announced they were going intel, i've wanted to try it. I have used mac osx breifly at another job for a few tasks but never really worked on one. But I have seen several other developers lately that use osx and it just seems like it is a much more conducive environment for development. Especially at cf.objective() I saw many developers in a flow I could only dream about with my pc. When the macbooks first came out, I put it off. Mainly because my dell laptop I currently have has a great big screen and an enormous resolution that I just can't see losing yet (1920x1200). Once you get used to a resolution like this, you just can't go back to smaller. 1920 widescreen is awesome for coding, especially in eclipse with no word wrap. So I decided to wait for the 17 inch laptop that I knew would eventually be coming. So then they released the macbook pro, 17 inch, but the resolution still wasnt quite what I wanted. 1680 x 1050 is nice, but those 36000 pixels would definatley be missed. I could get a cinema display, but if I got one, I would need two, one for work and one for home, and that starts getting a little out of budget. But I still considered it, until I started realizing that I was still dependant on a lot of software that had not gone intel or ub yet. Coldfusion, flex builder 2, photoshop, and flash player 9 (although they just now released it). Plus, we are a windows server shop (both personally and at work) so I spend a lot of time in remote desktop. Now, I know you *can* get coldfusion running on an intel mac, but I would hate the work getting it there, and would always have doubts about small things that could differ from the platforms, being that its not officially supported. And sure, you can use the flex sdk to develop on a mac, but flex builder is just too nice. photoshop through rosetta, sure, I don't use it that much and probably wouldnt notice the speed issues, but still. The RDS is a bit of an issue though. Now I've been hearing more and more about parallels and it really starts to seem like it may be the answer. Realizing that memory management in osx is *so* much better than in windows, plus the os actually gets to use the hardware in virtualization instead of emulation, maybe it wouldn't be too bad. So those of you using parallels, and doing cf development on a mac, what are your pains? Is it worth waiting a little while longer? Heat issues im not to worried about, I dont generally put my laptop actually in my lap. Are there other choices for RDS to a windows machine in osx besides parallels? Has anyone gone through the pain of changing code to work in osx that was built for windows, with the case sensativity of filenames and such? Is 2 gigs of ram enough for all that I need to do? Is paralles really fast enough to run windows, running firefox, ie, and flexbuilder at the same time? I really want to make the switch, I know its going to be at least a little painful but I really believe that it will be worth it in the long run... am I wrong?

Everyone else seems to be doing it, and everyone keeps telling me I need to update my blog more, so heres a win-win... Four jobs I have had in my life (the most recent four-ish): 1. Cook - Whaler's Catch (Cajun / Seafood) 2. Web Developer - Schroeder Publishing Company 3. Private Consultant 4. Consultant - TruGreen Chemlawn / Servicemaster Four movies I watch over and over: 1. Blade (I, II or III) 2. Rounders 3. Godfather (Any of them) 4. Office Space Four places I have lived (really only three, although I have lived in several houses in most of these places): 1. Paducah, KY 2. Reidland, KY 3. Collierville (Memphis), TN Four TV shows I love to watch: 1. Grey's Anatomy 2. American Idol 3. House 4. West-Wing!!! Four places I have been on vacation: 1. Destin, FL 2. Washington DC 3. Biloxi, MS 4. Heber Springs AR Four websites I visit daily 1. MXNA 2. Google Homepage 3. Flickr 4. Kottke.org Four of my favorite foods: 1. Spaghetti (sketti), (anything italian for that matter) 2. Steaks/Chops (I love to grill) 3. Tater-tot Casserole 4. Chili Four foods I dislike: 1. Coconut 2. Pineapple 3. Lima Beans 4. Kraut

I just realized that I haven't posted yet about speaking at cf.Objective()! I will be teaching a class which is labeled as "Component APIs" but it will be more like "Designing Coldfusion Components with an API in Mind". As of right now, my class is on Saturday at 3:30 in the beginners track. If you haven't heard of cf.Objective() or looked at it yet, you really need to. There is a ton of great speakers that will be there and is should be a great, yet inexpensive conference! Early bird Pricing ends the 26th though so you need to hurry! This will be my first class besides small classes for single companies. Im a little nervous, but more excited. It should be a lot of fun. This is also my first Coldfusion conference to ever attend, so I am definately looking forward to finally meeting all of you guys that I talk to all the time. I should be getting in town around noon on friday (I took an earlier but cheaper flight) so if anyone else is going to be there friday afternoon or evening and you want to meet up, let me know!

If anyone has posted a comment to my blog in the past couple weeks and I haven't replied, please Let me know. The email address I have in my code for my subscriptions stopped working apparently and I cant change it at the moment. Also, if anyone knows of a free webmail that offers easy pop and smtp access that I can call from inside coldfusion please please please let me know of that too. (or, if any of you have a 1and1.com server and have gotten their email server working with coldfusion, that could help as well....)

Well, im back from the Gulf Coast, and I must say its sort of nice being back. It was a great trip, although a little hectic at times. We were in Destin, FL for the majority of the trip. We arrived to beautiful water and great beaches. Even with the recent news of shark attacks in the area, we weren't scared and had a great time. Then cindy came through and made her presence felt. At one time our entire beach, that raised up about 5 feet at the house and about 100 feet out was completely under water with some pretty high waves. The next day our beach had changed significantly but we still made the best of it. We ate around 20 pounds of shrimp in one sitting and at one time we had around 18 people in the house. Of course all of our attention was turned towards denis as it started to come closer. Me and two other guys left for biloxi, MS to go fishing on friday. We left out about 4:30 on saturday morning for the bay of Biloxi. The water was as smooth as glass. Toby said that on a saturday it was nothing to usually see 200-300 boats in a small area where we put in at. We saw two. I remember thinking that we were either the smartest or the dumbest people at the time. Turned out we were pretty smart, we caught all kinds of fish. I probably caught about 15 fish all told, and had a lot of fun doing it. Later that day we started to get ready to leave Biloxi and come back to memphis and the weather took a sharp turn for the worst as the first of the feeder bands of the storm started to come through. It was amazing really. The storm was still hundreds of miles off shore and we were already starting to feel the effects of it. We helped the family board up their house and drove through some of the hardest rain I have ever seen for about an hour. At one time I couldn't even see the nose of the car I was driving, much less the road. But we were going north and finally drove out of it. Now its raining here in memphis as denis roars past us and continues north. This storm has definately been awe inspiring for me. I want to go down to the coast sometime though and ride out a hurricane, just for the experience. It also looks like I was left out of the loop on a lot of news while I was gone. The london bombings, the satalitte hitting a comet, and lots more. Im still playing catch up, so if there was any other significant news of the week that I may have missed, please let me know. A week without any internet access at all will definately help it dawn on you just how dependant on it you are... Also, dont forget, in two days I will be presenting on COAL for the cf meetup.com group. Hope to see you there!

Congratulations Nathan and Aretta Terry! Once again, I consider myself very blessed to call you guys my best friends, and was very honored to serve as your best man. This will be an everlasting love!

This is sort of a test, I just want to see if it works. If so, you will be hearing a great song by Grand Funk Railroad, Some Kind of Wonderful.

get ready, im getting ready to start dumping out my "to blog" folder on everyone, so make sure you scroll down till you see something you've already seen.

Two news stories both from mtv: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1497529/02282005/korn.jhtml and http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1497484/02252005/korn.jhtml This is awesome, I definately commend this guy and will be praying for him. I hope that he can make a profound inpact in the world.

Ive been meaning to post this for a while now, but just now getting around to it. The other day I was getting some bad errors in DWMX 2004. Every time I tried to open a file or save a file I would get these alert errors that pretty much hindered my abiltiy to get anything done, at least not quickly anyway. Things still *worked*, files were saved and opened, but not without these mutlitple errors. Well I called macromedia support, and finally got through to a guy who sounded like he could help. He told me that he would send me an email with instructions on how to rebuild the configuration files (which he said had obviously become corrupted). So great, I should be back in business before the end of the day. Nope. No email ever came. So I went to google and finally found this page: http://www.forum4designers.com/archive12-2004-6-59172.html which told me how to recreate the configuration without having to reinstall the program. Either way, now its working fine, but im looking more and more at cfeclipse...

I consider myself very lucky to have found this little jewel of software called slide show pro. Its a flash component for a slide show that is just amazing. And a steal at only $20 bucks. I spent yesterday making a backend for it on my website, and now you can see the finished effects here at www.ryanguill.com/slideshow/. Its awesome, I love it, thank you slide show pro. I know I will have many many clients that are going to love it. I've got some nature photos and some pictures I took in Washington D.C. up so far, I'll add more as time goes on and try to keep you updated here.

Well Sean Cornfield thought blue was boring all of the sudden this morning and well, that got me to thinking. I've been wanting to update my blog for a while now so I thought this was as good of a time as any. I've got a couple more tweaks to do but for the most part, welcome to my new blog design. Hope you like it. If you don't, feel free to not drop me a line and tell me about it ;)

Ever heard of one? I had a long time ago and I forgot about it. But then reading this blog today i was quickly reminded. You can check them out on their website although you wont find a price there. (at least from what I can see). These are supposed to be some of the best chairs available, with ergonomic support, natural tilt and the whole nine yards. They have even done case studies about this chair. Supposed to be the creme' de la creme'. Can anyone find a price for me? I've emailed a dealer here in Memphis, but haven't heard anything back yet. UPDATE: The guy who blogged about the chair (mentioned above) told me that he bought his chair here: the ultimate backstore. price? just a measly 750$!!! and thats for the floor model!! But remember that still comes with a 12 year warranty with in home support. But dang.

I coined this phrase in the past few weeks (it may have already been used somewhere for something completely different, but I think you'll see where I got the name in a minute). I think it adequately describes a situate that comes up oftentimes in the web development community, especially in the intranet business. When I design and develop an intranet application for a company, it is often an alternative to another type of application that the businesses could go with. They could easily use a custom made app from another company built in java or c# or something of the like. But building an intranet website has many advantages over the competition for many reasons. Some of those being the ease of updates, the ability to work from a single datastore, the lack of need to install anything on a workstation, and the list goes on and on. But most of my clients up until this point have been clients that have no software like this. They are often novice computer users and do not understand what it is like to work with a software development company, or to work with custom made software. When they see any kind of bump in the road, or something they see doesn't work exactly as they expected, it reflects on the company. What they don't realize is that any software they were to receive would not be without bugs. And oftentimes if something they see doesn't work exactly right, it is because they didn't adequately explain their needs. But this would happen with any software, and usually even more so with standard software that wasn't web-based. My average time to fix any problem no matter how serious is less than a day. While this may seem like a long time to people who have no perspective of software development, I know that a compiled application like one made in java for example would take much more effort to change even the slightest problem. Then there is also the perspective of novice computer users. Many times I find that these users expect the software to behave in a certain way. Why they think this is somewhat up for debate, since most of the time they have no experience with any other software the does this action. Of course they don't understand databases or records or anything like this, and they shouldn't need to, but as developers know these are things we have to be concerned with, and so may not be able to develop an app that does something specifically. It may take two steps to do something they would love to see in one. But we know this isn't possible. What the real problem most of the time is that these people don't try something different. They hit a bump, slam the brakes and say its broke. Or sometimes they even hit a wall, an actual problem even receiving an error message, and they keep on going like nothing happened, only to break things further. In the end, because they have no experiences to compare these things to, they have no perspective of what they are working with. We must, as developers teach them how to use the software, but we will never be able to tell them how good they have it, until they use something that is undeniably worse than what they have.

I guess I could also explain a little bit of what got me on the topic of yesterdays post. I meant to do this in the post, but it turned out to be longer than I had intended. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6823880/ Well, we landed a probe on Titan, saturns largest moon, and the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere as far as we know. Its so substantial in fact that we haven't ever actually seen the surface untill now. The scientists say that the composition of Titan may be what earth was like millions and billions of years ago and what lead to it spawning "life". This of course is a crock, but still. Its interesting. Then there is the other article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6826412/ This talks about whether science leaves room for E.T. Its an interesting read, although very high level in some places. But you can pretty much get the drift. Ill probably post more about this later on.

I can remember a long long time ago I climbed up on a roof with a friend of mine with the help of a radio antenna. We sat there under a clear sky in the middle of the night pondering all kinds of questions. We were nerds as it were, there was no mistake about that. And of course, we were discussing things that most people would consider nerd talk. But as someone once put it, "first it will be the nerds that inherit the earth". Just look at bill gates. Well one of our discussions that night came upon extraterrestrial life, if we thought it existed. And I can remember clearly thinking, "that would be an awful waste of space if it was just us". continue reading...

wow, 2004 has been a crazy year. Its been a year of firsts for sure, and I must say it has been awesome. If 2005 goes half as well I will be happy. There are several things I want to be thankful for, these are just a few.

• First and foremost, my God. He has been there for me through some tough times and carried me the whole way.
• My family, including but not limited to: my immediate family including my parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters; my extended family, my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and my other extended family, my girlfriend and her family. They have opened their home to me in Memphis, and I will always be grateful.
• My friends. I have some amazing chums, and I couldn't have done it without you guys!
• My job. I started my own design and development company this year, and have managed to do well with it so far. I started turning a profit in only three months, where the average is three years. I can only hope that I continue to do this well in 2005.
• My laptop. I always said back in high school (hard to believe that has almost been 4 years ago) that if I had a computer of my own to work from that I could get a lot done, and I have proven that.
• Macromedia. They make some of the best products on the planet, and I must attribute some of my success to them. I wouldn't be where I am if I had to use php and notepad!
• My health. I have been very fortunate to have my health in these past 12 months. When you work for yourself, you can't call in sick!

These are just a few. I may update the list as I'm sure I will think of more. I will be posting my new years resolutions tomorrow. Thank you all that have helped me along the way, and I can't wait to see what 2005 will bring!

Well im safely back in collierville tn and I must say its nice to be home. We left for biloxi on the 23rd despite warnings that the roads were in a bit of a mess. Everyone left it up to me to drive on the inch thick sheet of ice. we finally got out of it about 5 hours later (a trip that normally would have taken around an hour and a half). But we had a great christmas (i got a new ps2 that is the size of a dvd case and san andreas!) and we are now back safely. I hope you all had a merry christmas, and a have a great new year!

In just a few hours we will be on the road from Memphis TN to Biloxi MS for christmas. Im not sure if I will have internet access down there (somehow I doubt it), so this may be the last post for a little bit. When I do get back though I hope to enlighten you guys on some of my new years resolutions and goals, and also to start showing off BLAIR a little bit. Until then, happy hollidays!

Lets try this again. Welcome to my new blog! I am now using the blog.cfc by Ray Camden. I hope to use this blog to feature more work related content, and to hopefully introduce some of my work into the coldfusion community. continue reading...