DougHughes.net

Hanging Chads – or – Who Won The Reactor Logo Contest?

Last Monday I announced the Reactor Design Contest. There were actually two contests, one to design a logo for Reactor and one to create a new skin for the Reactor Blog sample application.
The Blog design contest is still running and I will be clarifying it a bit shortly.
On Monday I closed the Reactor Logo contest and posted the various logos for voting. As of 4:30 today I’ve stopped counting votes and I’ve determined the winner!
Before I tell you who won, I thought it would be nice to tell you what they won and who made it possible.
The winner of the Reactor Logo contest will get all the following stuff:

1. Licenses for the Alagad Image, Captcha, and Zip Components
2. 6 Months of hosting for ReactorBlog with Sasquatch.com. This is a $120 value. For details see http://www.sasquatch.com/Pages/Internet/HostingPlans_ColdFusion.cfm
3. $125 in free stuff at Amazon.com (donated by myself and the contest sponsors)

That’s roughly $400 worth of stuff!
The Reactor Design Contest was supported by the following companies and people:
Alagad – Alagad is my own company. Through Alagad I sell the various ColdFusion components and contract and consult clients in ColdFusion (and other) development.
SystemsForge – Generating custom web applications. With the SystemsForge active application generator you can generate close to 100% of web applications including persistence, business logic, facades and UI. Easy re-use of metadata across n-projects, and the ability to change anything in the application. Product launch September 1st, 2006. Best of all, we’re going to tell you how we do it, so you can build your own generators for free! Sign up at SystemsForge (www.systemsforge.com) to keep up with the latest ideas – for free.
Jabico Enterprises, LLC – Jabico is a well rounded company, offering highly maintainable web-site and web-application development, search engine optimization and marketing, and information security consulting services. In addition, Jabico provides developer-centric web hosting solutions inlcuding Cold Fusion, PHP, ASP.Net, ASP, MySQL, MSSQL, etc… through it’s subsidery Sasquatch.com. Sasquatch also provides DSL and Dial-up services throughout the western United States
Chris Blackwell
And another person who wishes to remain anonymous
There were seven people who submitted designs for the contest:

• Josh Tynjala
• Brad Sorensen
• Barry Whitley
• Rachel Maxim
• Trond Ulseth
• Christopher Smith
• Laura Arguello

I want to say thank you to all of them! I really appreciate that they took the time to contribute to this framework. I think all the entries are fantastic!
I also received some late entries from a few other people. I’d thank them publicly too, but like a bonehead I lost (deleted – oops) their emails. Thanks to them too!
Judging the contest turned out to be a bit of a challenge. There were three competitors who quite clearly were the most popular. A lot of people, it seemed, wanted to express first and second (and sometimes third) opinions. Others wanted to create a mashup of two of the logos.
There was also a touch of drama added to the contest. There was speculation of ballot stuffing, email campaigns requesting votes for one of the contestants, and more. Heck, there were even some harassing comments added that I had to delete. Eek!
Initially I figured everyone would line up and orderly say which one they liked. Nope! That was a little short sited on my part. People are people. Most people voted for one logo only, but a lot of people were a little ambiguous in who they were voting for (or if they were voting at all).
In the end I made two tallies. The first tally is for clear and obvious votes. I counted a vote where someone clearly stated, "I vote for X". In the case that someone had a first and second choice I counted their first choice only. So in the case where someone said something like, "My first choice goes to X and my second to Y" or, "X is best, but Y is a clear second" I counted only X.
The second tally was for secondary choices or ambiguous choices. For example, one person voted like this:

1) Brad Sorensen
2) Barry Whitley

Yes. Clearly Brad is the winner of this person’s vote. However, they’re also saying that they like Barry. Shouldn’t that be considered at least a little too?
Or here’s another good example of an ambigious vote:

actually rachel is a friend, and i dig her logo idea.
im not sure i dig the top half of her logo as much as i like the lettering of the bottom of it.
so, id say that i like josh’s idea of colors/layout, brad’s radioactive symbol, and rachels lettering. replacing rachels symbol with brad’s

Who did this person vote for? I don’t know! Furthermore, later on it turns out that he was confused and didn’t mean Rachel, but Barry.

In cases like this I counted them as what I’ll call "votes of confidence", but not actual votes.
I’m not sure that if I counted the votes again that I’d end up with the same numbers, so forgive me (please!). In my estimation, this is how the votes broke down:

Based on Votes only, Brad and Rachel are tied and Josh is a close second. However, if you read the comments you’ll notice that there are lot of comments that really favored a coupling of Josh’s and Brad’s logos.
All in all, Josh and Brad had quite a few more votes of confidence than Rachels. If each vote of confidence counts as half a vote (for the sake of argument) then the numbers would break down like this:

This put’s brad out in the lead. Now, I voted for Josh. Maybe I’m biased, but his logo looked quite a bit like a logo I designed for my wife’s photography studio before I married her. Brad’s was my second favorite. I said that if there was ambiguity that I would make the final decision.
With all that in mind, I believe that Brad Sorensen has won this contest. This is Brad’s logo:
To say thank you to the other six who participated, I will also be giving each of them a license to all of the Alagad Components!

Got an Active Secret Security Clearance? Want to Work In Arlington?

I was contacted today by a previous client. Theyre trying to find someone who can fill as position in Arlington, VA. From the sounds of it, they need to find the right person right away.

Heres the description she sent me.

I am looking for a ColdFuson developer with an active secret clearance to fill a full time employee position with full benefits available. The employee will be working on a long term government contract that has already been won and awarded. The position is at government site in Arlington VA and is accessible by Metro. The developer will be responsible for converting legacy systems to ColdFusion. The position requires analytical skills and the developer must be database oriented, not user interface oriented.

By Database Oriented, I presume she means that the developer will be working on the model, data and service portions of an application, not the presentation tier. I dont know that for a fact, but it seems logical.

Send resumes to me at doug@doughughes.net. Ill forward them on to her for you and she will contact you back at her own discretion.

Just a note: Im not involved with this position at all. Im not making the hiring decisions and Im not going to filter the resumes I send on to her. If you dont hear back from her, please dont email me about it. Its not that Im trying to be rude, but I wont reply back to you.

UPDATE: This position has been filled.

Reactor Logo Design Contest – Who will win $400? You decide!

Reactor Logo Design Contest – Who will win $400? You decide!

One week later, the entries are in for the Reactor Logo Design Contest! To refresh your memory, last Monday I announced a contest where participants could submit a design for either a Reactor Logo or a design for the Reactor Blog sample application. Winners will get all the following stuff:

1. Licenses for the Alagad Image, Captcha, and Zip Components
2. 6 Months of hosting for ReactorBlog with Sasquatch.com. This is a $120 value. For details see http://www.sasquatch.com/Pages/Internet/HostingPlans_ColdFusion.cfm
3. $125 in free stuff at Amazon.com (donated by myself and the contest sponsors)

That’s roughly $400 worth of stuff! One person might actually win twice!

The Reactor Design Contest was supported by the following companies and people:

Alagad – Alagad is my own company. Through Alagad I sell the various ColdFusion components and contract and consult clients in ColdFusion (and other) development.

SystemsForge – Generating custom web applications. With the SystemsForge active application generator you can generate close to 100% of web applications including persistence, business logic, facades and UI. Easy re-use of metadata across n-projects, and the ability to change anything in the application. Product launch September 1st, 2006. Best of all, we’re going to tell you how we do it, so you can build your own generators for free! Sign up at SystemsForge (www.systemsforge.com) to keep up with the latest ideas – for free.

Jabico Enterprises, LLC – Jabico is a well rounded company, offering highly maintainable web-site and web-application development, search engine optimization and marketing, and information security consulting services. In addition, Jabico provides developer-centric web hosting solutions inlcuding Cold Fusion, PHP, ASP.Net, ASP, MySQL, MSSQL, etc… through it’s subsidery Sasquatch.com. Sasquatch also provides DSL and Dial-up services throughout the western United States

Chris Blackwell

And another person who wishes to remain anonymous

The Blog

The blog contest has not closed yet. I will be extending this by one week (or more) and clarifying the instructions within the next few days.

Sorry!

The Logo

To vote for a logo leave a comment on this entry. Please state the name of the designer that you’re voting for. Please vote for only one person. If there’s ambiguity I’ll make the final decision.

Some people submitted variations on the same logo. In these cases I’ve just done my best to pick which one I think was the best to show below of the ones they provided.

Without further ado, the entries!

From Josh Tynjala:

From Brad Sorensen:

From Barry Whitley:

From Rachel Maxim:

From Trond Ulseth:

From Christopher Smith:

From Laura Arguello:

Which one’s your favorite?

Announcing the Reactor Design Contest – Win $400 in free stuff

Are you a creative person who wants to support Reactor (an open source ORM framework for ColdFusion) and who also wants to get about $400 in free stuff? If so, read on to learn about the Reactor design contest…

There are two separate contests. You can enter either one or both.

Reactor Logo Design Contest

The goal of this contest is to design a logo for Reactor. The logo will be distributed with Reactor, will be displayed on the yet-to-be-created Reactor project page, and wherever else needed. The Reactor project page will be a new section added to DougHughes.net and will have the same design, colors, and general layout. Ideally the logo wouldn’t look out of place on such a page.

You have full creative license when designing the logo.

Reactor Blog Design Contest

Reactor comes with a blog sample application. Currently the default installation uses the same styles and images as my blog. The goal of this contest is to modify the stylesheet and provide images to make a nice default design for Reactor Blog.

You can edit any file in ReactorBlog you want to accomplish your goals, but I would prefer that nothing functional change. (That’s up to you.)

Judging

I will create a blog entry for both contests to display the various submissions I receive. I will open up the comments where people will be able to vote for one of the designs. After 48 hours I’ll total up the votes to see who wins and make an announcement on my blog.

If, for whatever reason, there’s no votes or a tie I’ll be the ultimate judge making the decision.

The Loot

If you win one of the contests you could win all this stuff:

1. Licenses for the Alagad Image, Captcha, and Zip Components
2. 6 Months of hosting for ReactorBlog with Sasquatch.com.  This is a $120 value.  For details see http://www.sasquatch.com/Pages/Internet/HostingPlans_ColdFusion.cfm
3. $125 in free stuff at Amazon.com (donated by myself and the contest sponsors)

That’s roughly $400 worth of stuff! And, if you enter both contests you could win twice!

The Deadline

Submissions will be accepted until Monday, March 27th 2006 in the morning. On Monday I will create two blog entries which highlight the entries I receive and voting will commence for 2 days.

The Sponsors

The Reactor Design Contest was supported by the following companies and people:

Alagad – Alagad is my own company. Through Alagad I sell the various Alagad components and contract and consult clients in ColdFusion (and other) development.

SystemsForge – Generating custom web applications. With the SystemsForge active application generator you can generate close to 100% of web applications including persistence, business logic, facades and UI. Easy re-use of metadata across n-projects, and the ability to change anything in the application. Product launch September 1st, 2006. Best of all, we’re going to tell you how we do it, so you can build your own generators for free! Sign up at SystemsForge (www.systemsforge.com) to keep up with the latest ideas – for free.

Jabico Enterprises, LLC – Jabico is a well rounded company, offering highly maintainable web-site and web-application development, search engine optimization and marketing, and information security consulting services. In addition, Jabico provides developer-centric web hosting solutions inlcuding Cold Fusion, PHP, ASP.Net, ASP, MySQL, MSSQL, etc… through it’s subsidery Sasquatch.com. Sasquatch also provides DSL and Dial-up services throughout the western United States

Chris Blackwell

And another person who wishes to remain anonymous

I look forward to seeing all the terrific entries.

More Reactor Quickies

Some very generous people have been putting a lot of time into Reactor, ColdSpring and Model-Glue recently. There have been quite a lot of exciting advances recently. Heres a quick rundown of them:

Sean Corfield has spent quite a bit of time adding <cftimer> tags and running tests to identify bottlenecks in Reactor. Hes already found and fixed a few critical speed issues. According to him, hell be spending a lot of time this week working on this. More on this as it develops. The current enhancements are in Subversion.

Clayton Partridge donated support for PosgreSQL. In addition to that he also updated the Contact Manager and Reactor Blog sample applications to work on Posgres! (Note: I had to edit the Blog app and didnt test it. If you have problems its my fault not his!)

Beth Bowden has been diligently working on adding support for Oracle. There were some hold-ups related to some needed changes to the framework and my inattentiveness to email. However, I hope to see this by early next week.

I started work on DB2 support a few weeks ago. With luck Ill find time to finish this up. Anyone interested in taking over? Its not that hard!

The ColdSpring guys added support to allow factory-bean and factory-method attributes in a bean definition. This means that you can specify beans that are actually created by external factories such as Reactor.

Sean submitted an update to Model-Glue (which has been committed) which allows you to autowire Model-Glue via ColdSpring with objects created from external factories. This means you could, for example, autowire your controller with a specific reactor-generated gateway. More (informed) information is available on Seans blog.

Sean Baracus Corfield has also been working with the ColdSpring guys to add support for adding AOP to Reactor Generated objects. That would be amazing. I sure hope this comes to be!

The bottom line of this is that Reactor is heating up. The alpha almost over. Reactor is maturing and is becoming a big hit! What exciting times for ColdFusion!