From the 26th May to 2nd June I'll be in Edinburgh, exploring the city and surrounding areas, and taking plenty of photographs. At the end of the week I'll be attending Scotch on the Rocks, an annual ColdFusion developer conference.
Each day I'll be updating this entry with what I've been doing, as well as including some of the photos I've taken.
I've finally arrived at the guest house I'll be staying in for the week, after a long forty five minute wander through the great city of Edinburgh from Waverley station.
The journey up was reasonable but not great. I was supposed to get free WiFi on the train, but that worked for maybe ten-fifteen minutes before screwing up, and I had to resort to my Vodafone 3G/GPRS connection.
Plans for today are just to relax for a bit, and then head out for a walk and to find somewhere to eat. I'll probably bring my camera just in case, but not sure if I'll take any photos.
...
Back from my walk, which turned out to be a fair bit longer than I'd planned. It started raining a little as I left, and I wandered towards the city centre, at which point is started raining a lot, and my trousers got soaked. I wandered around the main streets whilst drying off, before going in what I thought was the direction back to the guesthouse, and then realising I'd gone off somewhere else and having to wander back south-ish until I found somewhere I recognised. Found a takeaway and got some chips before going back, with my camera never having left my bag.
Today I decided to test the route I planned to use for getting to the conference centre. I had already marked it out on Google Maps before getting here, and I copied it across to GPS Utilities on my PDA this morning. After ten-fifteen minutes I found my route was trying to send me through a dead-end, and I ended up wandering off and down the Water of Leith, before circling back round and rejoining the other side of my route. It led me into a big fancy graveyard and again I found a dead-end, but this time the detour was reasonably minor. After stopping to take pictures of a sculpture at the National Gallery of Modern Art, I continued on for about ten minutes and found the very plain looking European in Scotland conference centre.
Next I decided to wander along another part of the Water of Leith, until I reached a heron which I'd spotted earlier. It was much closer this time and I got some reasonable shots of it. I then wandered along and headed into town, and got some food. I took some pictures of the Scott Monument, then headed towards the castle, and walked around its base. Saw some rabbits which were kind enough not to run away, then went up and had a look at the entrance to the castle before wandering around the streets for a while, then headed back with my feet aching from five hours walking. I fell asleep when I got back, so I didn't go out again.
Plan for tomorrow is to head over to Holyrood Park and up Arthur's Seat.
As planned, today I headed off south-east towards Holyrood Park, and after twenty-five minutes I realised my sense of direction was completely and utterly screwed, because I had somehow started heading north. Eventually I figured out where I should be going and made it to the Scottish Parliament building near the base of the hills. The building was interesting in parts, but I'm not sure how it has managed to win eight architecture awards. Anyway, I got some drinks, headed to the Park and set off. After having walked for over an hour (and a fair amount yesterday) it was relatively tough in some places, but I kept going up to Arthur's Seat at the top.
Going down I took the back route which was much less steep, and led to a lake with some ducks, seagulls, and a heron. I took a few shots here before heading up to the top of the next hill (the smallest of the three), then down into a park with a sculpture/climbing thing, and then back around until I reached the third and most gentle entrance, headed to the centre and then walked along the Salisbury Crags for a bit. I then headed back and came down the slope I'd first climbed up, after approximately four hours of walking/climbing and taking photos.
I then wandered across to the Royal Mile, then down to Princes Street, and started looking for a Pizza Express to have some food in. After Google Local sent me three times to the wrong place, I went to the Pizza Express website itself and managed to find a place without much hassle. After eating I headed back to the guesthouse, and sorted through my photos whilst watching Paul Merton and Prison Break, then started falling asleep before managing to write more than a couple of sentences of this entry.
Tuesday was going to be a wet day according to MetCheck, and it was. Nevertheless, I decided to head out along the Water of Leith, to the town of Leith, and see what it was like. The walk started off reasonably nice, but after a while it started getting boring, and when I arrived at Leith, there wasn't a huge amount to hold my interest; the place appeared to be really dull. So, I decided to head back and write up these entries, and then maybe head into the centre of Edinburgh and maybe visit a museum or something.
...
Well I went into town and got some food, then wandered about a bit. After a while I decided to do some shots of a nice big gothic building, which (probably due to the rain) had far fewer people around it compared to the other day when I was there. There was a tour thing happening nearby which sounded interesting, so I might investigate that further tomorrow. Other than that, I didn't do a great deal.
During the earlier half of the day, I decided to play with long exposures, and also did some reflection stuff. The rain & cloud-filtered light also made for some interesting flower shots, although I did have trouble getting many of them sharp.
Overall, not a great day, but I'm not too disappointed either.
The rain of Tuesday seemed to continue all night and Wednesday started out fairly wet. With a better idea of where things are, I wanted to test a new route to the conference centre, and it worked quite well, taking only seventeen minutes. After that I wandered through the Haymarket area for a short while, before coming across the Water of Leith and deciding to follow it back towards Dean Village. After a while I came across a back entrance to the Modern Art gallery, and figured why not have a look. There were some interesting pictures and sculptures inside, but a lot of junk too. I then wandered across and found myself near the base of the castle, and walked through Princes Street gardens before getting some food.
After eating I went back to the big gothic building (which is St Giles Cathedral) and tried to get some more shots out of it, but not sure I took anything interesting.
I was deliberating about going on one of the tours, but the people that turned up to run them didn't appear interesting, so I gave that a miss, and wandered around to the parliament building, taking a few shots. I considered going inside, but they had the whole x-ray/searching bags stuff, so I couldn't be arsed and started slowly wandering back towards the guesthouse for a short rest before I head out to maybe meet up with some of the people from the conference tomorrow.
Today was the first day of Scotch on the Rocks 2007, and it was a good day.
The conference opened with Tim Buntel giving an overview of some of the 'fluffy' features in ColdFusion 8, codename Scorpio. (I'll be going into more details about CF8 later.)
Next up, Mark Drew talked to us about CFEclipse, giving an overview of what it was, then going into detail about some new features. The unit testing facility looked like a nice way of doing things. The Framework Explorer tool seems to be very powerful and well worth investigating. Finally, he unveiled Project X, named SnipEx, which will allow people to share snippets, both in a global/central repository, but also for using a local/internal repository. All very cool.
The third talk I attended was about Virtualisation and Software as a Service by David Pratt of FirstServ. Ultimately, this was a sales pitch for some software called Virtuosso, which apparently allows for virtual servers at a level above the OS, and is thus much more lightweight than VMware/etc, whilst still being entirely encapsulated. This isn't an area I know much about yet, but it appears this is an impressive feat, if it works as claimed.
After lunch was Peter Bell talking about Practical Code Generation. Like many people, I often read Peter's blog and go "huh?", but his talk was very interesting and made complete sense. By Monday he has promised to release a couple of projects on RIAforge to help with code generation, and I'll definitely be having a look at these.
The next session was Mark Drew again, this time talking about the new Ajax controls in Scorpio. I have mixed opinions on these - on one hand there's some cool functionality there, but on the other hand I didn't like the syntax, and (like the existing cfform tags) the code produced is not accessible.
The first day's sessions finished with Gert Franz discussing the various features of Railo in general and the next release. (I'll go into more detail later, and will also be writing a full entry on the new things in Railo 2.0)
The day ended with a prize draw, which was quite entertaining, and I also won �25 for being the 44th person through the door.
It was a great day with a good atmosphere. The bag we got was superb, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow.
Today started with Adam Lehman going into details about the more developer-focused updates in Scorpio. Many of these things should be familiar to anyone who has used Railo and BlueDragon, but their inclusion in CF8 will obviously help to make things easier for developers.
Next up was Gert again, re-covering the Railo features he explained yesterday, and then going on to the things he didn't have time for yesterday, and mentioning some of the cool stuff that they've got planned for the future.
(Again, I'll be covering specifics in a dedicated weblog entry, either later today or within the next few days.)
Friday's third session was Duncan Jack, discussing Client Led Development and his experiences with ColdFusion. Essentially, his methodology seems to be about keeping the code very simple - nothing but HTML and CSS. I don't necessary disagree with him, but I do feel that JavaScript is too useful (for the majority that can use it) to neglect it completely.
After lunch was Mark Drew again, giving an introduction to ColdSpring. I have given a little attention to CS before, but until now I've only partially grasped the idea. I think I do understand it now, but I'm still not entirely convinced - especially with the very verbose XML and unnecessary use of different terminology.
The final session of the day was a Q&A session, which was followed by another prize draw (including several pineapples as prizes), and then things were wrapped up. Some of us then invaded a local pub for a few hours, where we discussed everything from ColdFusion to twenty-foot sharks and spiders able to kill a horse.
All in all, I had a fantastic time at the conference, and I'll be booking my tickets for the next SotR the instant they go on sale.
Well my adventure is now ending, as I zoom south at nearly 200km/h. I had a great week, and I hope this entry was interesting to read. I have plenty more photographs which I'll be processing and putting online at some point (hopefully within a week or two), and I will be writing a couple of entries in the next few days discussing the new features in Railo 2 and the updates that will come with ColdFusion 8.
Please feel free to comment about anything below.
I've put a selection of photos into an online gallery, available at photos.bpsite.net/edinburgh
There have been 4 comments.