The Shad Show

Recently the project manager and a fellow programmer where I work have begun a podcast, old-skool style. No video, just audio. But none the less, they're doing it. So far there's been two episodes which you can download from the is that what you think website. Over there they describe the show as a place where "you will find topics ranging from Web Development, Video Games, TV, Movies and all kinds of geeky stuff." So if you're a hankering to get your geek on and have an hour a week to spare, check it out.

I haven't yet made it through the first episode, as it's 80mb and over an hour long, but the word around the office is that it has its moments. This weeks, episode 2 from season 1, was a bit better with respect to time and file size. Dropped down to under and hour and less than 30mb! I just might have some time to check out this week's before next weeks comes out. Yet I don't suppose that the Is That What You Think? podcast is a must-see-each-week show such as Lost, which means I could probably just pick it up whenever i feel like it.

One of the main things this podcast was created for is the spreading of everyday cheer for the web-programming language Adobe Coldfusion. My first experience with this language came from the first job I had out of college. Now even though that experience was less than stellar, I still wonder about the reliability and performance of the language. Is That What You Think is trying to persuade the rest of the world about the benefits of Coldfusion. A recent post of theirs starts by destroying the "myths" that the media has been spreading about coldfusion. Their article brings up a few good points, but they all come back to the same issue: if you build shit applications, they're not going to run well. The fact of the matter is that Coldfusion allows it more than other web languages. Mainly it can be traced to Coldfusion's ease of learning, meaning that any dumb schmuck with a hint of programming knowledge can quickly pick up Coldfusion. So that would make you think there's a lot of coldfusion programmers out there since it's such an easy language to pick up, right? That would be the case if you didn't have to give up your car in order to afford one license of Coldfusion. And not just that, Coldfusion is only officially supported on a few operating systems -- some of which are old linux distros that aren't supported by that distro anymore! I mean, even Coldfusion 8 beta 2 (codenamed scorpio) won't automatically install in windows Vista. In fact, it completely breaks Vista's IIS 7's isapi modules. You won't find that problem with PHP, ASP.NET, or any of the the other more-popular web languages.

So with the invention of the Is That What You Think podcast, my attention will be on how they're going to keep coldfusion at the top of the list of cool. And I do hope they guys over there can turn someone onto Coldfusion -- it just won't be me.