I went into seeing Into the Wild convinced that the main character was a total idiot. The movie is based on the real life (and death) of Christopher McCandless.

McCandless graduated from Emory in 1990 and traded in his life savings for a life wandering around the country on foot. He stopped along the way and made friends with all kinds of folks. It’s the classic On-the-Road story. That can’t be idiotic. Except eventually he decided to find truth by hiking on foot into the wilderness of Alaska with little more than a bag of rice, a rifle, and a book about edible plants. Ah, there’s the idiocy I’m talking about.

The story immediately made me think of Grizzly Man, the real life documentary about a guy with no special animal knowledge who decided it was his calling to commune with grizzly bears. It worked out for a little while. Actually it worked out for years. He captured his yearly adventures on video. And then he was torn to strips by a grizzly bear, and that too was captured on video. This is the truth that I expected McCandless to find in the wild.

What Sean Penn’s movie does though is present the McCandless’s story without taking sides. There’s a palpable struggle for the character against the confines of society, against the expectations of his family, against expectations. Where Grizzly Man was clearly some kind of insane, McCandless was lashing out against the constraints in his life. Sure, his way of dealing was idiotic. And he paid for it when he found out that the truth of the wilderness is kill or be killed. But the story is complex and the movie does a surprisingly great job of telling it.

A guy that I went to college with set out on a mission at the beginning of this year. He launched a blog tracking his attempts to get Kevin Costner to photograph of himself reading said blog.

He wrote post after post after post for months covering all things Costner. And in just about every one, he poked, prodded, and taunted Kevin Costner to take a simple picture. If this sounds insane, that’s because it is.

But somehow last week his plan worked. He got his picture of Costner.

I have no idea what this proves. But I’m sure that Evan Kessler is a very happy man.

There is an open web developer position on my team at the Wharton School in Philadelphia, PA.

We’re a ColdFusion/Flex shop with an emphasis on rapid development. But experience working with other web platforms such as PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby, etc. will apply. It’s a junior level position. If you are strong on the concepts of web development, we are willing to help you learn a new language. I would also consider somebody who has mostly front-end experience that wants to dig a little deeper into the programming side of things.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, drop an email to dkonopka@wharton.upenn.edu and I can give you more details.

It’s been a wild summer so far. Here are just a few of the changes that have unfolded.

I wrote a book… It’s a tech book about creating desktop gadgets for Windows Vista aimed at power users who want to wade into creating their own gadgets. It’s due for release on October 29th. The next great American novel it is not. But it is a book and it has my name on it. So that’s a little bit exciting. The folks at Wiley (the publisher) helped guide me along throughout the process. And although I enjoyed the process, I am also really glad to be done and have some free time back in my life again.

I changed jobs… But I’m still at Wharton. At the beginning of the summer, my boss Terry Ryan moved on to another position within the school. I moved into his position managing the school’s ColdFusion environment. I still get to do a mix of application development, some light server administration, and hopefully more community development amongst the distributed developers scattered throughout the school.

I merged blogs… The whole tech/personal division on this site was not working. So I merged the two streams back into one site. That’s one less WordPress install to worry about.

ColdFusion makes developing web applications insanely quick and easy. I don’t need to worry about the nuts and bolts of how to connect to a database, or how to invoke a web service, or how to read and write files on the server. I just write straightforward tags in my favorite text editor — and I’m done, web application launched for all the world to use.

But there are some things that web applications can’t do. They can’t really read and write files on the client machine. They can’t interact much with the client operating system. Drag and drop, PDF manipulation, copy and paste… the list goes on. And all that aside, an Internet application will never work without an Internet connection.

So how do you go about creating something that can do those things? A couple years ago, you were stuck building complex and clunky binary applications. So you have to dig into lower level languages like Java, C++, or any of the .Net languages.

Suddenly you’re working with compilers and writing 300 commands to do what one tag does in ColdFusion. Sure, you’re scoring points with the Java and .Net purists. But all that doesn’t leave a ton of time for the trivial things like the interface or user experience.

Enter the Adobe Integrated Runtime — AIR. You can use AIR to write a desktop application in Flex XML and ActionScript, or HTML and JavaScript. AIR exposes hooks in to the client system to handle a local database connection, catch drag and drop events, open up local files, and even render PDF documents.

So instead of writing complex machine code, you’re back to writing tags to define the interface. And you’re calling a simplified scripting API to do heavy lifting under the covers. And the API runs on both Windows and Mac, so your pool of potential users is not limited to one operating system.

Have you already written a full web application in Flex or AJAX? You’re only a few steps away from adapting the same code to run either online, or on the desktop. Maybe it’s a little of both.

Flickr has offered a pretty slick upload tool for a few years now. It’s an executable that you can install on your desktop to do drag and drop file uploads. Somebody at Flickr had to develop separate binary Windows and Mac executables.

With AIR, that’s something you could in one shot. Don’t believe me? Check out Matt Chotin’s MediaWiki uploader AIR app. They’re different underlying services, but it’s a great example of how a web app can be extended to the desktop.

AIR does a lot to bridge the gap between web and desktop apps. But just like ColdFusion did for web scripting, it makes building all the parts easy. And you get to use tools that you already know exactly how to use.

Now you can get back to focusing on what’s really important: building better software.

I’m having some trouble with a Macbook that I use as my primary computer. I also have a Windows XP machine that I use to share my gigs of music, photos, and other files.

I use iTunes to listen to music on the server over a Windows file share. When I’m using an ethernet connection to the network, I can listen to the music for hours without a problem.

But whenever I’m using a wireless connection, the share drops out after about two minutes on the Mac. I can manually click a song to reestablish the connection, and it works for another two or three minutes before crapping out again.

Is there any way to force OSX to keep a share open permanently when connected to a wireless network?

I’m about 75% through writing the manuscript for a Sidebar gadget development book. The pre-order page made it to Amazon, so I need to finish it, right?

I’m into some of the more advanced AJAX topics. Since these gadgets are exclusive to Vista, I have to assume that a good chunk of developers interested in them are also using .Net backend web servers. So I’m including a bit about the ASP.NET AJAX framework to save people the trouble of manually writing JavaScript code to build SOAP messages.

At first glance, I was impressed both by the framework and by the extensive effort from Microsoft to make it easy to use. There’s helpful how-to videos on the site that really make it easy to understand. There’s information for adapting the framework for use with other non-MS server-side technologies.

And to top it all off — there’s a full set of pre-built, AJAX-ian web controls called the Control Toolkit that snaps on top of the framework. After seeing the ease of adapting the framework for gadgets, I assumed the controls relied on JS libraries that could be copied out and used inside a Sidebar gadget.

In the end, I discovered that the controls are actually compiled… into a DLL. For a second there, I really thought I had landed into a whole new world of .Net development. A land where community replaced proprietary. A place where building a simple web site didn’t require a 2 gigabyte development suite.

But it’s still the same as it ever was. I can’t easily recommend Microsoft’s AJAX control toolkit for use in their own gadget platform. Somehow the simplicity of plain text HTML and JavaScript code needed to get wrapped up into DLL hell.

I just posted the code for a dual select box ColdFusion custom tag called cf_SelectSwap.

It takes a query of items and produces two DHTML list boxes. Users can pick items from the available list and move them to the selected list. The selections are stored to two form variables. The first is a list of selected values, the other a list of selected display text values.

If a user has JavaScript disabled, it degrades down to a single list box with items selected. It can be used multiple times within the same cfm template.

Nothing earth shattering, but I put it together in the middle of a project I am working on. Maybe someone else can get some mileage out of it.

There’s an interesting discussion about programming frameworks going on over at the Wharton Computing developer blog: Why Not Frameworks?

Wharton Computing is where I work as a ColdFusion developer/administrator. There’s fifteen or so full time ColdFusion and Flex developers, and ten or fifteen more part-time developers scattered throughout the school.

It’s great to read what people think about the place of programming frameworks inside a school where the focus is on rapid and flexible development.

Earl Pickens - Can I Turn on the Radio