CFUG NL sign up now!

Finally! with the help of Maurice Crama and Erik-Jan Jaquet, CFUG NL Meeting #1 is planned and confirmed!

Meeting #1 will be all about Coldfusion 9 a.k.a. Centaur and the new Coldfusion IDE names Bolt.
Make sure to register today as seating is limited and the meeting is already in 2 weeks!

Thanks to everyone who helped to help start the CFUG NL!

Sign up here: http://coldfusionusergroup.nl

 

BSO Event 12 $500 Heads up

Cool so I arrived yesterday without too many issues. Got all my stuff, so that's a good thing. Relaxed a bit, played some blackjack, registered for today's event and had some room service before going to bed.

Today started really great. No jetlag, W00T! Went to the seatdrawing which took forever! And had my first match.

Key Hands Level 1

The guy was realy passive and took about 25% of his stack by min raising him every time preflop and when I had the feeling I could take it down, did so. No surprises there. At the end of level 2, the guy was kinda cripple and switched to a aggressive style, by reraising big preflop and moving all-in a few times. And that was the time I was card dead. So around halve way level 3 I picked up some hands, but the stacks were about 13.500 for me and 6.500 for him.

One key hand which I won was the following:

Me: 7 9 hearts, in the big blind
Preflop raise 3x BB (600) from me and a call from him

board: 6c 8c Js
I check and he makes a bet of 1200, I call
turn: Qs
I should have raised him on the flop, but I didn't just to keep pot control for any flush draw. But now there is a second flush draw and the guy was giving me all kinds of tells he was going to call any bet here. As I didn't want him to hit his draw on the river, I moved all in... Dumb move as I could have made more their, but I had the feeling he had a nut flush draw there...

He folds after taking a real long time to do so. He was thinking of calling me there with a A8 of diamonds and thought I was drawing... DAMN! So after that I was all set and done. About 3 hands later I had AQ off and he raised 3x BB and I 4 betted him.. He went all-in and a snap call from brought us to a showdown. JJ vs my AQ Coinflip!

Nothing on the flop, nothing on the river and luckely a Q on the river did the trick. End of Level 1.

Going to play again at 5pm for my level 2 match. And if the field is playing like the guy did for level 1, I could end realy deep!
 

Atlantic City here I come!

I can't wait!!! I'm leaving home in 3 hours from now and I still need to pack. Yes I'm a last moment kind of guy.

Besides the CFUG NL announcements, the only thing you'll see here the coming 2 weeks will be poker, poker, strategy, poker, bad beat stories and uhmmm poker.

Everything is set... Cash CHECK, Tickets CHECK, Hotel CHECK... My brain with all percentage calculations, position strategy and more poker madness CHECK!

I feel so much better then last year WSOP. My main goal is to get to 1 final table and hopefully a deep run in one of the 2 Heads up tournaments. So let me know if you're from the Atlantic City area or going to be at Atlantic City between the 16th of June and 3rd of July, more then happy to have a drink somewhere and compare Vegas to AC :-)

Later all!

CFUG NL Upcoming meetings

It's not the official first meeting of the CFUG NL, but this Friday there is a presentation at Rhinofly about Railo. This is an ideal afternoon to get to know people from the Coldfusion Community in The Netherlands and learn about Railo too!

Make sure to check out this link to sign up for this afternoon full of Railo goodness!

About the meeting #1

The first meeting will be held on the 17th of July. We still need to confirm the speaker and location, but write the date down.
As things look now, we'll be starting at 14:00 till the drinks are all gone. The exact schedule and location will be posted as soon as the CFUG NL site is live, that also counts for the registration form (somewhere this week, so keep this blog in your daily to read list!).

Meetings after meeting #1

We will hold a meeting every month on the 3rd Friday of the month. The first meeting will be a live meeting and meeting 2 will be a online event. The idea is to have a live event every other month. If you want to speak at one of the meetings, make sure to let me know!

So that's it for now. I'll post the link later on here for registration and meeting details!

Special thanks to Erik-Jan Jacquet from Toomba and Maurice Crama from People XS for helping me setting up the CFUG NL!

Borgata Summer Poker Open

So I had the choice to go and plat the WSOP this year or play something else. I found out about the Borgata Summer Poker Open. I asked some other players about the Borgata and after some more research I made up my mind. I'M PLAYING THE BSPO!

I'll be playing these events for sure:

  • Event 12: Heads up Single Elimination (16/6 day 1 or 17/6 day 2)
  • Event 14: No Limit Hold'Em $200K Guaranteed (19/6 day 1 20/6 day 2)
  • Event 17: No Limit Hold'Em 6-HANDED (23/6)
  • Event 20: HEADS UP - Double Elimination (25/6 day 1, 26/6 day 2, 27/6 day 3)
  • Event 21: No Limit Hold’Em $200K Guaranteed (if I don't make it to day 2 of event 20)
  • Event 22: CHAMPIONSHIP EVENT - $1 Million Guaranteed (28/6 day 1, 29/6 day 2, 30/6 day 3)

Other events are also looking nice, but it depends how I'm doing during the other events. If I'm out early, I'll play some others, but lets hope that will not be the case! I really like the 2 heads up events that are planned and the 6 handed event! Those are my specialties and would like to see more tournaments bring in heads up events and especially 6 handed events.

I'm really looking forward to this trip as I think my chances on a deep run are much more likely then during the minefield of 3 WSOP events!

So I'm sorry if you're not interested in poker, but the next 2 1/2 weeks starting next week Tuesday will be all about poker.

 

CFUG Update 2

I had to cancel my meeting with Adobe Benelux for the CFUG NL because of the madhouse here at the office. Meanwhile my application was approved for the CFUG NL on Adobe Groups. So make sure to sign up there until the CFUG NL site is live.

This Friday I have a meeting with Erik-Jan from Toomba to discuss how to set this CFUG up and running and see what they can help with.

Also I registered coldfusionusergroup.nl, but I haven't finished the site yet as I have little to no time to do my own personal stuff right now. But For the time being, make sure to register with the Adobe Groups online.

The first meeting will be scheduled somewhere mid July (really fast!) and will be about Centaur & Bolt. Centaur will be presented by Claude Englebert and the Bolt will be presented by me or somebody else if they can present about Bolt.

So good stuff is coming up! So make sure to sign up with the Adobe Groups site and we'll announce on there when and where the first meeting will be held!

To Vegas or not to Vegas

A little personal post about one of my big hobbies, poker. So if you're not into poker, just never mind this post and come back later.

[More]

CFUG Update

First of all, thanks to everybody who is interested! I've had a lot of emails beside the comments and the current count right now is somewhere between 30 and 40 interested Dutch CF'ers. It's nowhere near the 2000 Adobe Usergroup members, but that is something we'll never reach in a few years (which is more then fine by me!).

I'm in contact with a few of you out there about the setup of the CFUG NL, but if you want to help as a one of the managers (or sponsors) and you didn't emailed me directly, make sure to email me (my firstname AT thisdomain or use the contact form on my blog).

Most of you said that you want technical meetings and not just marketing meetings like in the past. That's something I want to make clear, all meetings will be organised for the members, BY THE MEMBERS. So if you have a subject you would like to see during one of the first meetings, let me know. A few of the subjects I'm thinking of are:

  • Coldfusion Gateways: Creating custom gateways (I'm planning on building my own Wowza Gateway)
  • CF9 Centaur: The Next CF Release
  • Bolt: All the new stuff in the new CF IDE
  • CF & jQuery (or other JS frameworks)
  • CF_Help! An evening about your development problems
  • Code4Charity (More on that later)
  • And lots of other good stuff...

These are just a few ideas and not a fixed list. So all ideas are welcome. If you have any good ideas or you can present about a specific topic, let me know!

Also keep posting those comments that you want to join! Don't do it here, but place those over HERE!

CFUG Netherlands

Since the start of my Coldfusion career, I've always wanted to have some sort of Coldfusion Usergroup in The Netherlands. Coldfusion is very underrated over here and it's hard to find people who have Coldfusion experience.

I remember the sneak peek session Ben Forta gave at the Macromedia Usergroup during the CF 7 beta's. It was packed! 80+ developers in the room and all interested in the new CF 7 capabilities. So by now the group should be bigger and I know for a fact that a few of the CF houses have grown during the past years.

So why not start a Coldfusion Usergroup? I have no idea why not! I was contacted today by someone from PeopleXS about starting the CFUG. But before we're going to spend a lot of time and energy in this, I would like to know if you (the Dutch CF developer) wants to join/attend any CF usergroup meetings.

Leave a comment to let me know if you want to be a member of the usergroup and if you can help in any way or only want to attend. Any wishes, ideas are more then welcome!

Feedburner/RSS mistake

Sorry to everyone who is following my FeedBurner/RSS feed! I accidentally enabled the link splicer in my feed for an old delicious.com account I had. So you might see some weird and unrelated posts in my feed.

It's turned off now and hopefully the unrelated links in my feed are gone!

Now Playing Flex Pod

I had to do something "fun and simple" with Flex besides the current project I'm working on. So after downloading the "Now Playing" plugin for iTunes from Brandon Fuller, I wanted to create a now playing Flex pod for BlogCFC. Instead of using the xml directly, I use Flash Remoting instead so I can do stuff with the data later on (look at the points listed below).

The little app is far from finished. A few points I like to add/modify in the future:

  • Running text if the text is too long for the label
  • Update the data every x minutes/seconds or add some LCDS/BlazeDS magic to it.
  • History management (save all played songs in a db for history)
  • Buy now links (search for the song on multiple online stores and show their buy now links)
  • Star rating (let people rate a song in conjunction with the history db)
  • Link to the artist website or other sites like Last.fm

The pod is on the bottom of all the pods on the left. Let me know what you think and if anyone might want it released for their own use.

 

Coldfusion Standard on 64-bit?

We were busy doing a system upgrade for our auctions. Adding new servers (Linux 64 bit) and because of the new setup we have, CF standard was enough for us to run on these boxes. As I know CF runs on 64 bit, I just went along and ordered 2 new CF 8 standard licenses. Meanwhile I configured all settings, added the applications, tested the apps and everything was set to go as soon as I had the licenses.

Today I received my 2 licenses (thanks again JEA for the quick help!) and added them to the servers. WTF Developer Edition??? That are some expensive developer licenses. After a quick google search, I found out that Adobe had put in a restriction for CF Standard to run on 64 bit OS with a standard license. That just sucked BIG TIME! We had to reinstall CF as a 32 bit installation and make all configurations again...

I understand Adobe needs to make money, but this restriction is a really bad one if you'd ask me. There are always discussions about why to choose CF over PHP or .NET or Ruby or whatever. This restriction doesn't help developers defend the position of CF in their organization. I know I just could try Railo, but I haven't worked with it yet, so to do all the tests for our system, that would even delay me more.

Hopefully Adobe will remove this very wrong restriction in the future!

Twitter test

Sorry... I need to test my twitter mod. Nothing to see here... Move along people!

G2HFC: PositionedTabNavigator

A new item like to do every week, Got 2 Have Flex Component (G2HFC).

Starting off this week with a very simple, but effective component from Tink. The PositionedTabNavigator.

Sometimes you need to place the tabnavigator on the right side or bottom of the viewstack. With this component you can even say how to align the tabs, like left top or right middle.

Simple, but very effective component!

Blog post: http://www.tink.ws/blog/positionedtabnavigator/
Example: http://www.tink.ws/blog/files/flex/PositionedTabNavigatorExample.html
Download: http://www.tink.ws/blog/files/flex/positionedTabNavigatorExample/PositionedTabNavigatorExample.zip

Remote Shared Objects, which server to use?

So we're running a real-time auction on Goudkoorts Veiling (Goldrush Auction). The current setup is done with Coldfusion 8 Enterprise, ripped out the LifeCycle DS part and added BlazeDS in each CF instance.

This worked great, but on our WIndows 2008 Web Edition 64 bit, we've had some problems with performance and stability with the CF/Blaze integration. We've had weird issues that the JVM can grow up to 6 GB! So that's been weird and it has to do with the garbage collector somewhere... Don't ask me how or what, but it has to do with the BlazeDS stuff in CF that isn't collected as it should.

So we needed a new setup for our "Real time" connections. A few of the options:

  • Use VM's to host multiple standalone BlazeDS instance and cluster them to have 500+ users use long-polling-amf
  • Use a Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5
  • Use Wowza Media Server
  • Use Red5
  • Use Apache ActiveMQ

Well after testing all of the options, we're going with WOWZA. Let me try to explain my choice a little more in-depth:

Multiple BlazeDS on VM

Although BlazeDS is a great open source product, I'm not that happy with the "Long-polling-AMF" after all. For our app, we have a few visitors during non auction hours and we have a big mass during auction hours which gives us hard to manage peaks. As I'm not happy with the non NIO options because they have a 500 max user limit, we would have to use tens of servers to get the mass connected during auction hours. Which would be harder to manage.

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5

I love the FMS! It's the cool kid of the class and has everything I want and need. Although this is the ideal choice, the price tag is a huge factor. As we're a European company we need to buy it in Euro's, which is around 5000 euro's per server license. As we want to use multiple servers to be able to scale up the available connection slots for our users, we might end up in big license costs as we grow. Also I find it a bit too much money for only the data push (RSO) option.

RED5

Red 5. Great open source project to create the free and open version of the FMS. But as it still hasn't reached the 1.0 status, I find it a bit difficult to use right now. I'm not a media/network pro, so that brings some limitations for me. As I'm the one that needs to be able to set everything up and manage stuff, this will hold me back on other stuff as I need to learn the in's and out's of the server.

Apache ActiveMQ

Apache ActiveMQ is also a great open-source package for messaging. I've seen a lot of articles on blogs, but most of them we're using BlazeDS to talk to the Flex clients. As ActiveMQ doesn't have any AMF channels, we needed to use STOMP. I played a bit around with the STOMP AS3 classes that are available on Google Code, but no luck. On the Coldfusion side, I had it working within 10 minutes, but now the flex part was the factor that was holding me back.

WOWZA MEDIA SERVER

This was one of my first options I looked into, but the FMS gateway of Coldfusion 8 didn't connect with the Wowza server, which would cost me a lot of time to get it to work in some other way. Later during the test process I found out that the Wowza servers couldn't cluster Remote Shared Objects. Although the performance numbers of Wowza with RSO's are great, it would mean that I needed to control each wowza server from CF or some mediator.

After looking into the options I went with Wowza. I want to build my own Wowza Coldfusion Gateway, but as my Java skills are probably not enough, I'm building a Adobe AIR app that gets the list of servers from CF through Remoting, and then connects with those Wowza servers to feed them the information for the auction application.

Although it might seems to be a extra layer which can cause delays, all the interactions are on a internal network. The first tests gave me  great performance numbers. Within 50ms I have the data from MySQL through CF to my Wowza Controller to my Wowza servers, to my clients connected to the RSO's that I update every second.

If anyone knows of a Wowza Media Server Gateway for CF, please let me know as I'm very interested in controlling wowza from CF instead of an AIR app. I might try to make a start with the Wowza Gateway as soon as I have this BIG application/network update behind me.

More Entries

BlogCFC Powered | Hosted by InfuseWeb | Penny Auction Network Software

MLT™ (My Last Tweet) and MNP™ (Mike Now Playing) are unregistered trademarks of Michael van Leest