As has been mentioned on the SOTR blog a few hours ago, you can now buy tickets for 2011, the earlier you get in the cheaper they'll be, 10am this morning they were £58, some lucky people got in early ;) .....

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When you hear of things like "800,000 developers use coldfusion" do you ever think something like "hmmmm, I think there is 7.8million!" or "really?.......".

I once worked out the average number of CF Devs I've come across per company during my career is 8 Devs per company, some companies had 2, some had 25, but when I worked out the average it was 8.

If this was the normal average then I'd say we would have 100,000 employers out there on average advertising a couple of jobs a year, so we'd see around 250,000 job ads a year for coldfusion.....

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Ever had trouble finding where a variable is set, displayed or manipulated throughout a large application?
I can remember often trying to find code before having any knowledge of regex. An example of a problem I used to face several years ago is the following.
I would inherit a large mess of an application and in the code I would find a variable #abc123#, not knowing where this is set I would do a

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[a-zA-Z0-9_]+[a-zA-Z0-9_./]+@[a-zA-Z0-9_]+\.[a-zA-Z]+\.?[a-zA-Z]+

This tutorial is aimed at people who'll see the above regex and think WTF is this? 
Regex is literally the easiest thing for a programmer to learn, far easier then CF and HTML, but if you're unfamiliar with regex, it looks.... weird....

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What a great time!

I met many new friends at SOTR, many developers, from government employees to dealers in dildos (literally).

Seen some great presentations also, from CSS 3 to Pomodoro.

I met some people whose blogs I’ve read for a long time like Ben Nadel and Ray Camden and also met some bloggers I didn't know of, it was really great catching up with old work colleagues, but most exciting of all had to be getting a photo taken that will appear on Ben Nadels blog.

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Almost 10 years ago, I first came across a very small Coldfusion IRC channel on Dalnet, I soon learnt the channel OP CJ was actually a comedian doing CF part time.

Over the years I've tended to come and go, some years more often than not, other years more not than often, online numbers always seem to grow  and the channel often has some big names as regulars.

Coldfusion on Dalnet usually experiences a brief mention in the blogosphere every year or so, for this reason I thought I'd invite everyone along who hasn't visited before, simply grab your favourite IRC client, connect to Dalnet and /j #coldfusion, if you're too lazy to install a program but happen to be a firefox user then checkout Chatzilla

I just found out I'm off to the Scotch on the Rocks CF conference in London next month.

http://www.scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk

If you go feel free to come up and say "Hi!", the back of my head looks just like the above image. So I should be easy to spot from behind however if you usually approach people from front on then go to my gallery page or home page and you should find a pic or two of the front of my head. :)

My mate Jim and I are hoping to be lucky enough to appear in one of the famous bennadel.com pics of "-------> Jim, that's me, Matt Bourke <--------.

I'm really looking forward to catching up with old friends, making new friends and enjoying the sessions.

See you there

My co-worker Mr Wu Wu Wu!!! the now most famous software developer in the world since..... Bill Gates?

Was recently on the BBC show Total Wipeout.

It has become a hit around the office.

Coldfusion has a song and dance

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Hello! and welcome to my blog. I'm currently upgrading my blog to Mango Blog, it's been fun implementing Mango Blog.

My site is currently going through a major redesign, I'm putting it live piece by piece rather then waiting till it's all complete, seeing as though its a living breathing personal website I'd be pretty confident in saying it'll never be complete.

Currently is some minor known issues to do with IE and even FF, I recommend Chrome for now :) besides, all the cool kids use it.

Come back soon for some technology related posts.

Happy Surfing!!

Matt