As the byline of this blog can attest, I was once a ColdFusion developer. In fact, I wrote ColdFusion professionally for about seven years, which is long enough to learn all of its dirty secrets and come to appreciate its (few) strengths.

Here’s a controversial take: ColdFusion has the best SQL interface for developers, period.

Having used SQL interfaces in ColdFusion, PHP, Python, Ruby (Rails), and Java (8), I can say with some confidence that, at least to my taste, ColdFusion’s implementation of the modest SQL query is far and away the most elegant. Prove me wrong. Or, wait, read the rest of this thing first.

I’ve been using Windows full-time at home for about ten months following many, many years of exclusive macOS use. In this post, I will tell you all of the things I like and dislike about Windows as a full-time desktop operating system for both casual use and more serious photography and software work.

Within this post, you can expect to find:

• Unvarnished opinions of both Apple and Microsoft

• Light cursing

• Too many words

A forewarning: this post is really long, which is why I’ve provided a table of contents. Please feel free to read the part(s) that interest you, my feelings won’t be hurt, I just wanted to vent anyway.

Let us begin.

To start, let me warn you that this journey is somewhat circular, as I venture into the world of the Microsoft Surface Pro 6 only to ultimately arrive back where I started, except more disappointed and with less money.

But if an exploration into the pros and cons of the Surface Pro (the previous generation at the time of this writing, I grant you) interests you, then please, do read on.

So I’m sitting here on my computer—something I do quite often—and find myself staring at this Lilliput 7" USB display that I have here. I’ve had this thing for a while; I bought it to use for Slack at work originally, and it worked OK. 7" turns out to be just slightly too small for anything serious, but it worked alright for chat at least.

Anyway, I brought it home and hooked it up to my Windows PC and never found anything really great to use it for. Suddenly I had a brainstorm: what if it could work on a Raspberry Pi? Then I could put some useful home automation output on it and maybe position it somewhere else in the house.

I set about figuring out how to get the Raspberry Pi to send GUI output to this USB-powered DisplayLink monitor. I did, eventually, get it to work. But, I ran across so many conflicting, incorrect, and outdated articles that I am compelled to describe what I did to make it work.

I promised more posts, and more posts you shall have. Indeed I have been a busy little bee, and finally I have something to show for it.

When I was blogging frequently, using Octopress, one of the things I did straight away was to write a wrapper for Emacs called octopress.el (view on GitHub), which provides an interactive interface to its basic functions and a few ergonomic benefits like easy image and post URL insertion.

But, as I noted in my previous post, Octopress is effectively dead (and slow, and tricky to set up), so I moved onto Hugo. I immediately missed having an Emacs-based interface directly into Hugo’s essential functions (though eshell works surprisingly well)… So I wrote one. I call it hugo.el.