If you want your Flex skills to be up-to-date then you need the Flex Authority. The current issue is all about Components: The Building Blocks of Your Applications.
Order now
If you want your ColdFusion skills to be up-to-date then you need the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. The current issue is all about Data and how to make it work for you. Just what we all need.
Order now
Has anyone ran into endless loop problems whilst trying to invoke a web service on windows 2008 server? I was barking up the wrong tree at first, I'd wrongly assumed that it was the recently upgraded cf9.0.1 that was causing the problems but ran the same [more]
Check out the new MAX Unawards, a new way to reward yourself for all your hard work (or for the lack thereof, or whatever else tickles your fancy). Fun stuff!
Use the DayOfWeek(now) to get the day number, find out the difference to
Tuesday and to a dateAdd for day to either go back in time. Then use the
DateAdd of 3 weeks to get your result.
I'd be happy to test it out.
We currently use MyLittleAdmin, which is the only other web based MSSQL
management tool and is very good , so you should use this for reference.
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 9:16 PM, Justin Scott
<jscott-lists@gravityfree.com> [more]
> I have been working on a web-based SQL Server database
> management utility written in jQuery/ColdFusion in my
> spare time over the past few weeks. Anyone who is
> interested, please check it out at:
I have been working on a web-based SQL Server database management utility written in jQuery/ColdFusion in my spare time over the past few weeks. Anyone who is interested, please check it out at:
make sure you are using Isapi rewrite 3 and not 2 as only 3 works with
apache rules
make sure wordpress is giving you the Apache rules and not the IIS rules.
If it is causing you that much grief, it probably will just be easier to
give Apache a try. [more]
Did you get my previous email about doing it with JavaScript?
andy
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Harrison [mailto:robert@austin-williams.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 1:50 PM
To: cf-talk
Subject: Is there [more]
We tried ISAPI_WRITE_LITE from Helicon Tech. We couldn't get the Rewrite
Rules to work. We also tried WordPress_URL Rewrite and that crashed the
system. We just figured the only way around was to switch to Apache.
Ugh sorry - for some reason GMail put this msg above the earlier thread.
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 2:03 PM, Raymond Camden <rcamden@gmail.com> wrote:
> As far as I know, no. You would need to do it client side.
>
> On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 1:50 PM, [more]
As far as I know, no. You would need to do it client side.
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Robert Harrison
<robert@austin-williams.com> wrote:
>
> I need to know if there is an anchor in a URL string (e.g.,
> http://mylink.cfm#thisanchor).
>
> [more]
I have wordpress 3 running on IIS7 with no problems at all, it was the
easiest setup I have ever done and works perfectly.
However I note you said you are running windows 2003 which is IIS6, which
may be the issue as I believe wordpress requires URL [more]
I didn't really want to switch, but we couldn't get WordPress 3 to work
on IIS. We have to migrate our faculty website off of our UNIX box an
onto the web server. Up until now faculty or someone had to know HTML in
order to create web pages for them. [more]
>Eric,
>
>You can do this via a java object.
>Try this code to get the local server host name:
>
><cfset inet = CreateObject("java", "java.net.InetAddress")>
><cfset inet = inet.getLocalHost()>
>
>--
>Peter Amiri
>Founder | [more]
Ok, so this probably falls into the realm of "Obvious", but both myself and a reader were surprised by this. Credit for it goes to John Pansewicz. He pinged me earlier this week saying that ColdFusion 9's multi file uploader failed to work for him. No matter what he uploaded he got a bad result. I tried the same code on my machine and saw nothing wrong. Then John figured out that it was ColdFusion debugging breaking the response. Again - obvious - but I tend to only worry about debugging when running against CFCs and Ajax applications. The multi file uploader is a Flash application and it just didn't occur to me that I had to be concerned about it. However - if you look at the docs for the feature (see here) you can see that JSON must be output to the control for it to know how the files were processed. Anything that breaks that JSON (including ColdFusion debugging) will make the control think the files had an error during the upload.
Finally - don't forget that you can turn off debugging on a request by request basis. Don't think you must completely turn off the feature if you have one bit of JSON in your local project. Just make use of the cfsetting tag to disable it for that particular request.
Computerworld is running a story by JR Raphael entitled Why the Apple crowd's completely wrong about Flash about his experience with Android and Flash Player 10.1. I love this quote:
After installing Adobe's Flash Player onto my Android phone, the first thing I noticed was that I could suddenly access the entire Web.
Enough said!
The title pretty much says it all. You can get a new hotfix for ColdFusion 901 here: Cumulative Hotfix 1 (CHF1) for ColdFusion 9.0.1
Note that this addresses the JSON issues folks were having issue with!
Brian Rinaldi has updated the schedule for this years RIAUnleashed conference. The line up looks incredible. You've got a great list of speakers along with a great list of sessions. My topic is on ColdFusion and Solr integration, with the catchy title of ColdFusion, Solr, and Killer Robots. After my impromptu session on Solr at this year's CFUNITED, I thought it would be nice to do something a bit more formal. I'm also going to be creating a real (if small) application to demonstrate how effective Solr can be for your web site. I highly encourage folks to register today for the early bird price. Last year's conference was great and I think this one will be even better.
SapphireSteel has announced the release of Amethyst, their Flex, Flash and ActionScript IDE for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Check out the features and the introductory video. If you are a Visual Studio user, Amethyst may be exactly what you need to bridge the worlds of Flash and .NET.
On a personal note, I've been in regular contact with the SapphireSteel folks as Amethyst has evolved. This project, especially the Amethyst Designer, was an enormous undertaking on their part. And so to Huw Collingbourne and the crew at SapphireSteel, congratulations on reaching this milestone, and thank you for this important contribution to the Flash and Flex world.
The site is in Chinese, I know. But, in summary, the Adobe Flash Platform App Contest is a way for developers in China to build cool Flash and AIR apps and win prizes. ;-)
Hero is the codename for the next version of the Flex SDK. Deepa Subramaniam is the Flex SDK Product Manager, and she just announced that the first of what is planned to be semi-regular Hero builds has been posted.
Using the new mail.cfc to send emails in ColdFusion 9? You may notice an odd formatting issue. Check out this screen shot:
I thought this was whitespace in my code, but turns out it is the code that implements mail in script. Find base.cfc in your cf install\customtags\com\adobe\coldfusion folder. Open it and go to line 417. (Note - the tags as script stuff changed in 901. So if you are still on 900, your line number may be different.) On line 417 you will see #mailbody# as a variable, tabbed over. Simply remove the tabs. Here is a slice of the file:
Quick note - the white space did not render perfectly on my blog - so you will just have to imagine that mailbody is the online code all the way to the left.
#mailbody#
#trim(mailpartbody)#
This fixes it up. You still get some whitespace after the message, but that should be pretty much invisible to the end user. You could remove all the white space if you wanted to, but I thought that was overkill.
Earlier this week a user asked me to look into something odd with CF901's new multirowselect feature for cfgrid. If you haven't played with this yet, it is a way to enable multiple row selections in a grid. Unfortunately it doesn't quite work as advertised, but in this blog entry I'll tell you how to make it work.
[More]
So this was actually announced quite a bit earlier on Twitter, but as I've been bug hunting all day I didn't get a chance to blog about it till now. You can now find the official list of sessions and speakers for the ColdFusion Unconference here:
ColdFusion Unconference
I've actually purchased a nicer domain name but haven't yet hooked it up. Ignoring that though - check out the list of speakers and sessions. This is a fracking rock star set of content if I may be so bold. (Yes, I will be.)
I will also remind people that you can attend MAX for the low cost of 200 dollars. Yes, 200 bucks. That gives you that "Exhibits-only" pass which allows you access to all 4 Unconferences. (Yes, there are 3 other ones as well. But all the cool kids will be at the ColdFusion one.) I think it's worthwhile to go for the full MAX experience but if you are on a limited budget, this is definitely a great option.
I've only one thing left to say:
Big thanks to all the speakers who agreed to participate as well as Ezra Parker and Charlie Griefer for once again being co-managers of this event.
That title probably doesn't do a great job of introducing the topic, but hopefully it will make more sense by the time the entry is done. A reader wrote me this week asking how to create select boxes that all share the same options. However, as soon as you pick an option in one, that option would then be removed from the other ones. A good example of this would be sorting data. Imagine you had N products. For each product you want to assign a ranking to it. Only one product can be 1, only one can be 2, and so on. Imagine that as you selected a particular rank, that rank was then removed from the others. Here's how I solved the problem using a little bit of ColdFusion and jQuery, my peanut butter and chocolate.
[More]
You schooled me on using vars in my cfc to help ratchet up the security. If I used the following code in my cfc that processes my contact form, do you feel like the data would be cleansed and relatively benign? I'm also using cfparams in the page with the form and validating it with jQuery and/or CF server side code (for non Java visitors) as well.
Plants vs Zombies is one of my favorite casual games (my kids agree with me on this one). The original game was written in C++, and PopCap recently rewrote it in Flash. PopCap's Max Anderson will be attending MAX 2010 and will be talking about the port, and will be providing Flash performance optimization tips and tricks. This promises to be a fun and entertaining session.
Now, if they had an Android version ...
Adobe Flash Summit Bangalore is about to begin. My fellow presenters Mark Doherty, Harish Sivaramakrishnan, and Anne Kathrine Petterøe are tweaking decks and testing demos. The crowds are starting to pour in ... here goes!
Follow us on Twitter.
Watch out for this one - I almost didn't notice it. Today I went to add a new mapping. It just so happened that the mapping I added was one that already existed. The administrator correctly noticed this and gave me an error:
No big deal, right? I'll just rename mine to /org2 and hit submit.
Ouch. It actually replaced my org mapping. Not the end of the world, but if you had a lot of mappings it could easily be missed. Note - I recommend - almost always - that you use Application specific mappings. In my case though it is a code base I can't modify just yet.
I have filed a bug report for this, but unfortunately the public bug base still hides 901 bugs.
This was a great question that came in via a reader last week. Because of the nature of his business I have to be a bit vague. Basically he wanted to know if there was some way where a click on a web page could have some type of response within an AIR application. As with most things there are a few ways this could be handled. Here is what I came up with (and consider this a call out for more ideas and suggestions please!).
[More]
Just a quick note to point out Russ Johnson's blog post on a fund raising drive he is doing for MS: Win a copy of CFBuilder. The basic gist is - you make a small donation to sponsor his bike ride and you are entered into a chance to win a copy of CFBuilder (graciously provided by Adobe). This is a great cause and I hope more than a few of my readers out there participate (I just donated a bit myself).
Did you know that you can "leave" a cfinclude and return to a calling template? This may be useful in cases where you realize you no longer need to run the rest of the cfinclude and simply with ColdFusion to carry on back in the calling document. Consider the following simple example:
[More]
Sorry - just kidding. So I've been playing a lot lately with HTML-based Adobe AIR apps (see my PS at the bottom) and one thing I noticed was a dramatic lack of docs concerning video. Everything else seems covered (file reading and writing, database, audio even), but video was conspicuously absent. I discussed this with other guys in our community (my go to guys for HTML/Adobe AIR stuff, Jason Dean and Andy Matthews, although Simeon Bateman recently told me also has done a lot in the HTML side too) and collectively we figured it just didn't work. My rough idea was that it was an HTML issue. By that I mean, there is no tag that says, embed a video and point it so some binary data in a JavaScript variable - and constantly update it as new data streams in.
Do you use Galleon? If so - would you be interested if added localization support like BlogCFC? Secondly - I'd also just love to hear about where/how you use Galleon - so consider this a request for two things: 1) Where you use Galleon and 2) would localization be something you would like.
I'll point out - BlogCFC only supports English directly. If you want to localize to your language you have to edit the resource bundle file. So it still involves translation work for you - but it's not coding.
As per Gartner research reported in this InfoWorld story, Android is now the number one smartphone OS in North America (taking the top spot from RIM), and is third in the world.
Recently, Christophe Coenraets posted a great example of using the microphone API introduced in the latest builds of Adobe AIR for Android. And now Michaël Chaize has taken it a step further by posting an example of recording audio, and then manipulating WAV and MP3 files.
Ok, so I hate to say that any part of ColdFusion is less than perfect. I will not deny being an unabashed, Kool-aid drinking ColdFusion Fan Boy of the Nth level. That being said - there is one feature that - while I used to like it - I strongly recommend against: Flash Forms. I was a big fan of it, in fact, my Harlan open source ad server makes use of it. But as a feature - it is a dead end. Flash Forms have not been updated in quite some time, and since you can now develop Flex applications for free (remember it's just the IDE you pay for, if you want it), it is really a mistake to do any new development with it.
Want Flash-based forms? Use Flex. Don't use Flash Forms. Just. Don't.
When a new version of a software is released, the old version lives for a while and its creators usually care about supporting it. Yesterday, after reading about the release of Cairngorm 3, it’s clear that Adobe Consulting ignores this rule. Why did they quietly burried Cairngorm 2?
Does it seem like everyone is ganging up on Adobe these days? Apple and Microsoft have made some bold moves lately in an attempt to prevent Adobe’s Flash technology from transferring the same dominance it has on the PC onto mobile devices.
At the recent Mobile World Congress exhibition Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer announced that the new Windows Phone operating system would not support Flash “out of the gate” and gave no indication on when Flash support might be available.
Apple took the battle further when they nestled a controversial passage into their new iPhone SDK that effectively bans any Adobe Flash application from the company’s flagship device. This move certainly caught Adobe by surprise and has angered millions of Flash developers throughout the world. To add fuel to the fire, Steve Jobs, when asked why the new iPad doesn’t support Flash, said “We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology” and reportedly told Wall Street Journal staff that Flash was a "CPU hog" and a source of "security holes."
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the immediate
availability of Adobe®
Flash® Builder™ 4 and ColdFusion®
Builder™ software, next generation Flash Platform tooling for
building multi-platform rich Internet applications (RIAs). In addition,
Adobe added a new Socialservice to the recently introduced Adobe® Flash® Platform Services.
The Social service streamlines integration between Web
applications and 14 leading social networksusing Facebook
Connect, Sign-in with Twitter, MySpaceID and LinkedIn.
“They pulled me back in.” – The God Father.
I’ve received some interest/emails about TwitURL – our Map/Reduce as it applies to CEP (cloud event processing) project. Seems that people would like to see the results of these processes visually. Who can blame them, right? So, I was thinking, how can I add a little sizzle More >
IBM in Monday announced the technology and business expansion of its LotusLive cloud collaboration platform through a new R&D pipeline from IBM Research and plans to open the LotusLive suite to new partners. LotusLive cloud services provide integrated email, Web conferencing, social networking and collaboration with IBM's focus on security, and reliability. IBM Research and Lotus are joining forces to deliver new innovation on the Web through the creation of LotusLive Labs -- a proving ground for advances in business-driven collaboration in the cloud. Known for pushing the boundaries of science, technology and business to build a smarter planet, IBM researchers have been recognized with five Nobel prizes.
This time of year is a favorite for children of all ages – I happen to be one of these kids – in part because of the television programs that are shown around Christmas. A Charlie Brown Christmas, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, have been favorites of mine since TV went from exclusively black and white to poor quality color. This is no coincidence as these programs were made in the mid 1960’s.
As I was watching this year, it occurred to me that if at this time in history Christmas had not yet been established, if somehow Christmas needed to be “started” in 2009, it wouldn’t stand a chance. Christmas would be doomed before it every got started.
First of all, the only time you can say Jesus Christ anymore is when you hit your thumb with a hammer. You can’t mention Him at City Hall, you can’t display a crèche at the Court House, it’s at least passé, and at most completely offensive, to pray in Jesus’ name except at a Nascar race south of the Mason Dixon line, and the President would incur enormous wrath from the press if he dared mention the Savior’s name in anyway other than passing or pandering for political gain – not that we have to worry about the current president properly and appropriately speaking the name of Jesus. You can say “what the hell” on TV and if there is a “goddammit” in the movie it isn’t bleeped out. Interestingly enough you can also say the word “shit” without consequence. However, Jesus Christ, the standard for when time crosses from BC to AD is spoken of as a myth, as a constant source of ridicule, or feared so greatly that His name is not permitted to be spoken if it crosses the non-existent, yet simultaneously ambiguous, standard/line of “separation of church and state”. Apparently the goal is to take Jesus Christ completely out of Christmas. It seems pretty clear that removing Christ from Christmas leaves only a word that Roberto Duran understands. Remember when he quit in his fight against Sugar Ray Leonard by repeating, “No mas, No mas”? Maybe Roberto’s cry is really the goal – the complete elimination of Christmas, period.
Secondly, the baby Claus wouldn’t be born today. He would have been aborted by the mother who would see him as a choice and not a life. Maybe she would have gone for “tax free family planning” services as soon as she learned she was pregnant, or perhaps she would have been immediately uncertain about what to do, and waited to have a late term abortion without her parents consent. It is clear that she would have never left the red-headed Claus on the doorstep of the Kringle’s to be found, reared, and trained to make an enormous difference in so many children’s lives.
Since the baby who became Kris Kringle never would have been born, it really makes no difference, but the elf family the Kringle’s, never would have had a toy factory either. If these less than perfect children avoided the abortion doctor’s “treatment” and actually grew to be adults, the system would have cast them as victims due to their “disability” and they would have been “counseled” to be self indulgent louts living off the legal settlement that a “highly respected” trial lawyer was able to extract from the physician who made a tragic mistake during the their delivery that caused them to be, not elves, but “little people”. Forget moving to the North Pole and setting out to build toys for children who would watch out, choose to be good, and nice, instead of crying, pouting and being bad. Of course, you can’t speak about a child as being bad, or even as misbehaving anymore – that would “ruin his self esteem”.
Not that any of that matters, because you sure can’t build a toy factor at the North Pole. For one, it’s allegedly no longer frozen there because of man-made Global Warming. If by chance (certainly not an act of God though) or by species crossing evolution, the water were to refreeze, extremist environmentalists would protest placing a factory there by stealing the building materials, sabotaging the construction equipment, and if that didn’t work, flat out burning the place down. All that breathing, oh the carbon dioxide and other lethal green house gases that would be released! Of course the fact that when water does freeze, it is the only substance that floats so as to avoid crushing all marine life, gives a clear indication of evolution, the big bang, and random spontaneous appearance of matter – it couldn’t possibly be evidence of divine design and/or intelligent creation. Yet, how man can simultaneously be “basically good” while intentionally and irresponsibly destroying his environment is a contradiction that draws no conversation or question.
No doubt the Grinch would be alive and well, surviving quite nicely, even thriving, in the current environment. He probably would have invented the internet or something like it. One thing is certain - no one in the current government or in the mainstream press would accuse him of “stealing” Christmas. He might be lauded for giving us an unconstitutional “experiment which may ultimately reduce health care costs ” called health care reform. He might be considered a genius for designing a system that causes profitable, jobs providing, businesses to move to countries that have no pollution standards of any kind, by creating something called “cap and trade”. He might be an “enlightened” congressman from a blue state or an unelected, constitutionally questionable, militant, practicing homosexual, czar in charge of educating the country’s children. But he won’t, under any circumstances, be called to task for stealing.
Charlie Brown doesn’t fare quite as well, but he does live a “dignified” life. Shortly after his diagnosis, he is allowed to miss work indefinitely, with government mandated pay of course, because of his mental “disease”. His company pays for his “treatment” (just like any other illness) for twelve years but “falsely” and unfairly accuses him goldbricking and stops paying. Health care reform kicks in and at age 50 he enters Medicare and government support, never working again. Having seen all the episodes of Married with Children, he is asked by Lucy to be the director of the holiday play, but declines when he learns that a “holiday play” has absolutely no point (except to avoid “offending” anyone with any mention of Jesus Christ). He never buys a “nice little tree”, and never sees it decorated - all on account of rainforest concerns about cutting down trees grown specifically for decoration. Charlie remains a blockhead until a government death “counselor” suggests that his constant back pain, as a result of kicking footballs, and the costs of treating his condition, could end. Charlie takes his own life after outliving his usefulness and his government capped health insurance cost threshold, at age 79.
Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer is the one character who is thriving in this environment. He is responsible for coining the phrase redproboscisphobic and in the process eliminating any and all intelligent discussion on the topic. After getting all the other reindeer permanently expelled from school for “bullying” as a result of their refusal to let him play in reindeer games, Rudolph successfully sues the American Psychiatric Association, requiring them to declare red noses as completely normal. In “careful” consideration the APA decides that any attempt to address or “treat” the malady is completely cruel and destructive to the self esteem of the “afflicted”. Rudolph is praised as the first elected, openly red nosed congressman from Massachusetts, sits on powerful house committees, but is never seriously investigated or called to task for his role in the AIG, derivatives, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and/or banking meltdowns.
Well, there you have it. Be thankful for Christmas. Be grateful that the meaning of Christmas began 2000 years ago, and that the celebration of Christmas started shortly thereafter. If Christmas needed to be started today, in this cultural, legal, and government environment, there’d be no reason to hope or for hope, because you couldn’t get Christmas started today.
Adobe LCDS 3 really shines with its newly introduced model-driven development workflow. This article is not a review of its features, but rather an early feedback and some suggestions for future releases. Fire that guy who already reached his level of incompetency and said, “If one salesman can sell LCDS licenses for $20K a CPU, everyone can do it”. This guy is simply killing the product by making it unreachable for lots and lots of corporate clients. Change your state of mind from “these filthy rich Wall Street client should pay” to “each RIA project manager has limited budget”. BTW, have you heard of recession that we are still in? Remember, when Adobe purchased Macromedia and changed the Flex pricing policy from $15K per server to $700 per IDE people actually started using the product? Why not to try the old trick again?
Do you know, is there a better way for businesses to meet online, present projects, and share calendars and ideas anytime, from anywhere? Are you ready to share your experience?
Small- and medium-sized business owners can compete for a chance to win up to $2,000 in a reward card and a free consultation with marketing expert Guy Kawasaki -- by entering The Better Way Challenge.
The challenge, a video contest presented by Verizon and Cisco, is designed to encourage businesses to use new collaborative tools to maintain their competitive edge in a fast-changing environment.
"Innovation and technology will power us out of this recession," said Kawasaki. "The Better Way Challenge enables entrepreneurs to share their victories and defeats, tips and tricks, joys and pains of running a business. Online collaboration and social media can generate business, and these videos will accelerate the learning process for entrepreneurs and business owners."
Entering the Contest is Easy Just submit a video of less than three minutes that describes "the most challenging part of getting your whole team on the same page."
Contest participants must either be subscribers to the Verizon Collaboration Center, located at the Verizon Small Business Center, or they may sign up for a free 30-day trial. Entrants whose videos are accepted for judging in the contest will also receive additional free six-month subscriptions.
In addition, any business that signs up for the free 30-day trial subscription will automatically be entered into a monthly drawing for a chance to win a Flip Mino HD Camcorder. As many as 90 camcorders will be given away during the six-month promotion.
Profiling Advanced Collaboration in Action A panel of judges will select three contest finalists, based on the originality and relevance of their videos. The grand-prize winner will receive their free consultation with Kawasaki via Cisco TelePresence.
The second-and third-prize winners will each receive a reward card for $1,000 and one-on-one consultations with industry experts from the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group -- which designs innovative processes and strategic plans for businesses.
All three consultations will be tailored to the specific business needs of the winners and focus on ways in which collaboration and online resources can make their businesses more efficient and competitive.
Monte Beck, Verizon's vice president for small-business product strategy, said, "Small businesses need a lot more than e-mail and Internet access to stay competitive. They need to move fast and utilize tools like the Verizon Collaboration Center that can help them grow their businesses, run them more efficiently and, reduce the cost of doing business."
The Verizon Collaboration Center, powered by Cisco WebEx, offers voice and Web conferencing. It enables users to instantly and effectively collaborate with colleagues, clients and vendors in a virtual environment that is accessible from any web browser.
When I was selling software, one of things that came up and that I was coached to use as a selling tool was the whole issue around what is OK and not OK about using Adobe Flash.
There were a few schools of thought or lines of attack, depending on how you looked at the world.
1 - the Flash End User License Agreement (EULA) expressly forbade the use of the Flash player for digital signage, and software companies needed to buy/license the developer libraries to be legit
2 - the EULA did not apply to PCs and therefore it didn't matter
3 - it was unclear, and Adobe wasn't helping add any clarity
4 - Flash for digital signage sucks, and is such a buggy, memory-leaking, CPU-intensive pig you'd be crazy to use it anyway
I hovered somewhere between 1 and 2, knew 3 was true, and figured 4 was pretty much true, but there were too many good capabilities in Flash and too much of it out there to just go away. Flash is installed on 98 per cent of PCs, after all.
I wrote a piece on this years ago and the post still comes up high in searches when I look up digital signage and Flash, but I am not, at all, certain, my assertions in that post still hold. I have been revisiting the question recently with industry contacts, and been dismayed to learn the whole issue remains clear as mud.
One contact told me the new Adobe media player, not the Flash player, makes the issue go away. Another said the Open Screen Project removed any restrictions. Another said the EULA does not apply with the latest version of the Flash player. Another said nothing has changed. Sheesh. These are all smart people and they are all operating on different points of view.
Here's what it says:
3.1 Adobe Runtime Restrictions. You may not Use any Adobe Runtime on any non-PC device or with any embedded or device version of any operating system. For the avoidance of doubt, and by example only, you may not use a Adobe Runtime on any (a) mobile devices, set top boxes (STB), handhelds, phones, web pad, tablets and Tablet PC (other than with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and its successors), game console, TV, DVD player, media center (other than with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and its successors), electronic billboard or other digital signage, Internet appliance or other internet-connected device, PDA, medical device, ATM, telematic device, gaming machine, home automation system, kiosk, remote control device, or any other consumer electronics device, (b) operator-based mobile, cable, satellite, or television systems or (c) other closed system devices.
That suggests OK for Windows-based PCs, but maybe not Linux. Who knows on Apple OS. Or does it??? Does it mean you may not use it on any digital signage device???
Oh, bother.
So I sent a note and left messages at Adobe. And got no love back.
Digital signage is all-encompassing when you live this stuff, but to Adobe, I assume it remains a little side project they keep hearing will be big, but doesn't merit much attention yet.
The Open Screen Project, which is intended to make Flash available with a consistent runtime across multiple platforms, SEEMS to suggest licensing issues will disappear:
From the FAQ: What motivated Adobe to remove the licensing restrictions from the specifications?
The SWF specification has been published since 1998. Until now, the specification had a license agreement associated with it, which said that developers could write software to output SWF but could not make software that would "play" SWF files. These license terms were initially included to prevent fragmentation, which most client technologies have experienced. These terms have worked well for Flash Player over the past decade as it now reaches over 98% of personal computers on the web with a consistent runtime, enabling things such as the video revolution we see today across the web. With this announcement, Adobe is removing this restriction from the SWF specification, as we have established a consistent runtime and we want to ensure the industry can confidently continue to support the SWF format. This will permit the development of applications that play SWF files. Adobe will, of course, remain focused on making the best, most reliable, and most consistently distributed implementation across desktops and devices.
SO ... I am doing a little manual crowd-sourcing here. I want to develop and release V1 of the definitive point of view on working with the Adobe Flash/Media Player. I want to be able to knock something out that puts to rest all the head-scratching and "I'm not sure" stuff, and clearly tells industry people, these are the rules ... if there are indeed rules.
A side project would be best practices (or is it practises? ... never nailed that one) on working with Flash and how to stop the leaks and keep systems happy.
I am hoping people will:
a - comment, usefully, below ...
b - send me their thoughts or insights ...
c - or point me to the person at Adobe, or the definitive letter or document, that says what's OK and what's off-base.
d - or Adobe sends a note that we can all use, so we can move on ... please.
In the story, I also noticed that Amazon also put out a new software development kit for .NET and support for private content in Amazon CloudFront – the company’s content delivery service. This is the kind of support that enables, say, a website that sells digital products, to restrict downloadable merchandise to paying customers.
I like to hear about the development of support services that make companies feel more secure about doing business on the cloud. We have enough examples of security breaches, outages and other cloud snags that make consumers and businesses jittery. And, of course, I think supplemental services for website owners, such as website transaction monitoring and incidence notifications, go a long way to increasing a sense of security.
As virtualization entered the data center it became an accidental standard bearer for network automation. The power of virtualization helped to drive a cultural (including x as a service) shift in expectations, just as Nicholas Carr was declaring war on traditional “old world” IT with the help of Google, Amazon and a host of other cloud (and not so cloud) players.
A new search site is in beta called DeepDyve that has some promise. First, they claim that they index millions of medical papers from paid journals and free sites. The problem in the past is that this content wasn’t too readily available. Yes, there is Medline, but not a very user-friendly tool. Second, getting copies of the papers to read has never been easy, particularly for those of us in the lay community that don’t have medical center accounts or access to medical libraries.
Moore's Law states that computer system performance/price ratio will double every two years. And that was very much my expectation when Good Data started using Amazon Web Services almost 2 years ago. But I had to wait until today to see Moore’s Law at work: Amazon announced 15% drop of EC2 prices. The price of [...]
Adobe is nosing its flagship ColdFusion rapid web site and Internet application development platform onto multiple clouds. Turns out it's been quietly collaborating with Alagad, a North Carolina web development services provider, on a cloud implementation of ColdFusion 9. Adobe just released ColdFusion 9 on Monday. The cloud version of the stuff is still in private beta.
Three years ago, I was calculating the cost of attending JavaOne conference. Thanks to the crisis, the conferences got cheaper, but arestill not affordable for many software developers. I’d like to offer you a legal way to get more than 80% off the registration price at Adobe MAX that will take place next week in Los Angeles. But you have to move fast! It’s easy:
1. Today: enroll into a cheapest class in your local community college to get a student ID.
2. Tomorrow: register for Adobe Max for $199 at the following Web page: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/edu/max2009/.
3. Sunday: arrive to LA.
The other day Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi, one of the brighter bulbs on Wall Street, toyed with the idea of Oracle walking away from the Sun deal.
He figures it’s unlikely but he wondered if Oracle’s conviction level would waiver at all on its earnings call Wednesday. After all Sun’s recent pathetic financials – it reported a 31% drop in year-over-year revenue in the June quarter, including a 38% drop in product revenues – are going to make it nigh on to impossible for Oracle to wring its promised $1.5 billion in year-one accretion profits from the acquisition, he said, unless it cuts Sun’s workforce by over 50% or 15,000 souls.
Most companies pay a lot of attention to their homepage. But, with search results driving a majority of click through, what happens when your website visitors come in through the back door via an internal page? All of your web pages must establish context to keep your visitors from bouncing away in search of what they need.
With the release of Acrobat 6 (PDF 1.5), Adobe introduced the concept of the layered PDF. A layered PDF contains optional content that can be displayed or hidden by its reader. A layered PDF is a document that was originally generated by software with layer-generating capabilities. For example, AutoCAD, CorelDraw, Adobe’s In Design, Photoshop, and Microsoft’s Visio are all capable of producing layered documents or files.
The growth of Web 2.0 has lead to far greater opportunities for such retail giants outside to the obvious sales growth. With more of us sharing personal information online through sites like Facebook, Linkedin, MeettheBoss and Xing, companies can monetize online investment through analyzing consumption patterns, behavioral targeting, cost effective online product testing and having direct contact with the consumer.
To most who practice it, technology is a religion. So it will come as no surprise that one amongst us now claims to have discovered the “true Cloud,” the Cloud beyond simple development, the Cloud that brings us to the nirvana of serious application deployment and production via the cloud.
OpSource, our modern day St. Helena, says the true Cloud, which it’s unveiling as we speak, combines the availability, flexibility and community of the consumer cloud with the more ineffable security, performance and control that the Fortune 1000 demand. Like any viable religion, it has a little something for everybody.
Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in ColdFusion v8.0.1 and earlier versions, and JRun 4.0. Adobe has now patched them with a Security Update released on August 17, 2009. Here are the details...
When a couple of months back I told a fellow Flex developer that I’ll be speaking at CFUnited, conference he shrugged, “Why ColdFusion?” Little did he know that CFUnited is branded as a ColdFusion, Flex and AIR conference. And this was true – there were lots of quality presentations on Flex and AIR here...
Flex framework includes a pretty useful object that deserves more attention: mx.util.ObjectProxy. You can wrap your object (i.e. Person) into this proxy which will obediently report on all changes that are happening to this instance of a person. If you subclass ObjectProxy, you can even add a new behavior to the wrapped object without touching a single line of its code.
VMware picked up a nail in its sneakers in Q1 and was still limping in Q2 but now thinks things might get a bit better the rest of the year. It said Wednesday that its earnings in Q2 came to $33 million, or eight cents a share, down 36.5% year-over-year, on flat revenues of $456 million.
On3 has some excellent ColdFusion Classes scheduled during the next few months to celebrate the grand opening of our new headquarters and training center location on the 16th Street mall in Denver. The new address starting on August 1st will be: Denver Petroleum Building, 110 16th St, Ste 604, Denver, CO 80202. Please drop by [...]
Apple is a “change” company. Look at their track record: Mac II, iMac, iPod and now the iPhone. What has not changed, however, is the view of Apple a company that delivers only consumer based products. Apple simply is not perceived as an Enterprise company. Apple is working to change this perception. It is a slow process but something came along to change the pace: the iPhone.
Adobe announced the public betas of Adobe ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder software. ColdFusion 9, a powerful development technology for building dynamic Web sites and Internet applications, increases developer productivity, integrates with complex enterprise environments and delivers rich and interactive experiences for users. ColdFusion Builder is a new Eclipse based integrated development environment (IDE) used for rapidly developing ColdFusion applications.
You want to establish a new business on the Internet because of all the advantages you know exist with doing business exclusively on the Internet. This article starts with the concepts of the Internet black holes vs. conservative new Internet business creation and construction.
The organisers of Scotch on the Rocks are taking the annual conference on tour next week, setting up in London on Monday (1st), Manchester on Wednesday (3rd) and ending up in Edinburgh on Friday (5th). There is lots happening in relation to the Flash Platform this year - new releases of the Flex framework, Flash Builder...
"Mass psychology" scientists study this kind of phenomena and the "mass psychology of fascism" is of course the most famous lab case. The extraordinary experience SYS-CON Media lived through became part of a Forbes Magazine investigative cover story called "Attack of the Blogs" that found that "Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo." The lies, libel and invective we are living through today is another such episode. Our partners, readers and the industry in general know the facts and what's going on but in a rare example like the email below, we can't be sure if everyone is on the same page as the rest of us.
Earlier this month I attended the IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas. The core theme of Impact was "Smart SOA" and how cloud computing comes together in the enterprise, with the emphasis on private clouds. The core notion of private clouds for IBM is really about extending their experience in virtualization, which is vast, into the more modern world of cloud computing. They hope to sell some hardware and software in the process.
Ben Forta, Director of Evangelism at Adobe, will be presenting at the UK ColdFusion User Group meeting to be held on the 21st April at Adobe’s central London office.
Learning Tree International has added a new course to its Adobe products-related curriculum entitled Adobe Flash: Developing Interactive Web Content. Over four days, an expert instructor will lead attendees through extensive hands-on exercises designed to provide in-depth experience creating and delivering Flash applications.
Ulitzer to launch ColdFusion Developer's Journal 2.0. ColdFusion Developer's Journal was first launched 12 years ago. Ulitzer will bring more than 7,000 original CFDJ articles and ColdFusion authors from the archives to ColdFusion Developer's Journal 2.0 (http://coldfusion.ulitzer.com/).
Since its emergence, Web Service technology has gone a long way towards perfecting itself and finding its right application in the real world. With the maturity of the specifications, Web Service technology, with its power of interoperability, is now the major enabling technology of SOA, which is being adopted by more and more enterprises to build their application integration infrastructure.
RSS is a form of syndication in use by almost all blogs and many other types of web sites. It is a simple way to list, via XML, the latest content that has been updated on a web site. While parsing XML isn't difficult in ColdFusion, to work with RSS you have to have a good understanding of both the multiple "flavors" or RSS in use today as well a deep understanding of how the content is encoded within the XML. Luckily ColdFusion makes this relatively easy with the <CFFEED> tag.
As a si...
The <cffeed> tag can be used to both read and create RSS feeds. To create an RSS feed, you need two things. First you need the data that will provide the content for RSS feed. Next you need a set of properties that define the RSS feed. Let's begin by getting the data for the feed. <cffeed> supports generating a feed from a query or structure. Most people will want to use a query, so let's begin with that:
select ...
Reading conference speaker's agreements may reveal some interesting gems. Since I don't have a PR agent, I have to make the following public statement by myself: "I'm not going to damage anyone's reputation (including developers of PureMVC framework) for abuse of design patterns. I'm ready to buy a beer to any Adobe Flex team member who can convince me that LCDS is that much better than BlazeDS."
Most (but not all) ColdFusion queries come straight from the database, but there are times when you need to work with a query without using a database. Whether for debugging or other purposes, it is sometimes useful to be able to create a query manually. To create a query, you use the queryNew() function. This takes two arguments. The first argument is required and is a list of column names. The second argument is option and is a corresponding list of data types for the columns. If you use this ...
SQL Injection attacks are one of the easiest ways to hack into a website. One recent hack, using a script from verynx.cn, involves injecting sql into a web form that then appends some JavaScript code into fields in a database that then gets executed on the client side when a user views a database-driven page.
CF does not offer an easy way to compare two single dimension arrays. The most common solution involving looping through one array and comparing each item to the second array. It is a complicated and messy solution.
Actually there's a very simple way of comparing two arrays using CF's underlying java. According to a recent blog by Rupesh Kumar of Adobe (http://coldfused.blogspot.com/), ColdFusion arrays are an implementation of java lists (java.util.List). So all the Java list methods are ava...
Event Gateways: Directory Watcher
Open the ColdFusion Administrator and go to "EVENT GATEWAYS/Gateway Types". ColdFusion comes with a few predefined Gateway Types one of them being "DirectoryWatcher".
Now select "Gateway Instances" under the "EVENT GATEWAYS" heading in the left-hand menu. Create a new directory somewhere on your server to host the CFC and Configuration files that will handle your new Gateway operation.
For example: C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\com\company\services\dw
1. Inside...
Use the getFileInfo() function.
GetFileInfo returns a structure with the following information: filename, path, parent directory, type, size, when the file was most recently modified, whether the file has read permission, write permission, and is hidden.
Use <cfpop> with the action attribute set to 'getall' and the attachmentpath attribute set to the directory on your server that you want to save any attachments.
You can then loop over the resulting query object to perform any other required logic such as logging the attachment information
...
Use <cfpop> with the action attribute set to 'delete' and the messagenumber attribute or uuid attribute set to the message you wish to delete.
This entry was based on a suggestion by Stefan Leroux
What does the AJAX community want from future browsers? How are these different requests prioritized? Web developers have done amazing things with AJAX for both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications, but what barriers need to be removed to enable the next generation of browser-based innovations? The future of AJAX runtime environments matters more than ever today.
Many people use database tables with autonumber primary keys. These are columns (typically named "id") that the database will provide a value for by simply adding one to the last highest value. So if the last record inserted had an ID value of 5, the next will be 6. (Note that this isn't always true. You can't assume the next value will be one over the last highest value.) If you need to find out what value was used for the primary key, ColdFusion provides a simple way to do that.
To use thi...
AJAX is about a rich user interface that is not just reactive but also pro-active; it's about content, perhaps socialized (user-generated) content; and it's about pain-free deployment, with loosely coupled services.
Food Dial is not just a book of recipes. Here's the big idea - you came back home, tired and hungry. Start the Food Dial application and open the fridge. Here's the red pepper. Turn the dial with food categories...
On Tuesday TechCrunch and CNet, based on the usual 'sources,' reported that talks between Yahoo and Microsoft were back on, stories that prevented Yahoo's desperate, bewildered, shuttlecock stock from dropping below the 20-dollar barrier and landing in the high teens where it was when Microsoft entered the picture on February 1. It was certainly headed in that direction.
Red Hat saw earnings rise 6.6% to $17.3 million, or eight cents a share in its first fiscal quarter ended May 31 on revenue up 32% year-over-year and 11% sequentially to $156.6 million. EPS was dead flat year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $130.7 million, up 27% year-over-year and up 7% sequentially. Training and services were up 64% to $25.9 million.
Novell announced it is collaborating with VMware to improve Linux performance in VMware environments by incorporating support for the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) into the SUSE Linux Enterprise kernel. Demonstrating their commitment to provide open interoperability and optimization for virtualized environments, the companies have worked together to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for the VMware platform.
A panel of experts and executives from organizations that are leading providers and consumers of technology will discuss trends and important technologies for enterprise and Internet computing. The experts will discuss the role of databases and database technology trends that enhance SOA and Web development. The session will also focus on preferred solutions for architecture and middleware to enable applications and services to access data from SQL and other data sources.
VirtenSys has developed a PCI Express based I/O technology that virtualizes and shares off-the-shelf I/O adapters among multiple physical servers without the need for adapter, device driver, or server modifications. This technology is a critical capability that will accelerate adoption of the VirtenSys PCI Express I/O virtualization products. The cost effective VirtenSys products improve I/O utilization to greater than 80 percent; enhance throughput, and reduce I/O cost and power consumption by as much as 50 percent. The products also simplify data center management by dynamically allocating, sharing, and migrating I/O resources among servers without physical re-configuration, resulting in reduced Operational Expenses (OpEx).
Data center architects naturally seek to employ server virtualization to maximize the use of their hardware systems. An often overlooked factor that can undermine this goal is data connectivity. 75 to 95 percent of the response time now associated with database access can often be attributed to the data connectivity layer - and that's using traditional, non-virtualized servers. Running multiple virtual servers on a single machine can introduce additional complications involving data access. This presentation will examine the importance of data connectivity in a virtualized environment, and the need to take an intelligent approach to data access in order to truly reap the benefit of a virtualization strategy.
rPath announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have been using rBuilder to deliver virtual appliances to both scientists' desktops and computational clouds. The use of rBuilder in these environments reduces the effort required to support users and allows researchers to take advantage of underutilized computational resources.
While SOA can deliver dramatic cost reduction of an organization's business operations, it is a complex, multidisciplinary undertaking, and therefore introduces significant risk. This session presents a list of the most important risk factors and ways to mitigate them BEFORE it is too late. The session will be of interest to anyone planning an SOA initiative, primarily CIOs, Technical Managers, Project Directors and Technical Architects.
SOA is mostly associated with technologies such as BPEL, SCA and Web Services. But does SOA really imply these technologies? In this session we will show how you can use the service oriented approach while staying inside the Java world. jBPM is a powerful lightweight framework that can be used to orchestrate services in the broadest sense. It is highly extendable, very versatile and can be easily embedded in client and/or server applications. Attendees will learn how jBPM can be used in a pure workflow scenario as well as in a situation involving automated business steps.
Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) can deliver tremendous value in flexibility, adaptability and cost savings. But SOA environments are complex by definition, with lots of loosely coupled components and a potentially vast combination of platforms, software, databases, applications and networks. One of the biggest challenges inherent in realizing the benefits of SOA is effectively managing all of these diverse components to ensure the high availability and performance of the applications running in them to meet crucial Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This session will explore Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines and offer practical insights into how CEP can be leveraged to enable rapid real-time problem correction and predictive problem prevention that is vital to successful SOA implementations.
A reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20:
Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying,
"Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny
bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the
lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and
breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the
Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of
the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt
thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then
proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being
the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand
Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight,
shall snuff it."
-- Monty Python, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"
Brian Rinaldi has updated the schedule for this years 
Big thanks to all the speakers who agreed to participate as well as Ezra Parker and Charlie Griefer for once again being co-managers of this event.
No big deal, right? I'll just rename mine to /org2 and hit submit.
Ouch. It actually replaced my org mapping. Not the end of the world, but if you had a lot of mappings it could easily be missed. Note - I recommend - almost always - that you use Application specific mappings. In my case though it is a code base I can't modify just yet.
I have filed a bug report for this, but unfortunately the 
