I use Gmail a lot on my iPhone and one of my clients has standardized on Google Mail/Docs for their communications so I'm constantly reading mail and documents on my iPhone. Gmail was OK on the iPhone and Google Docs was bearable but Google Reader was a nightmare. At the weekend, I noticed Gmail suddenly got a lot nicer with a very iPhone-style UI, sliding panels between labels and mail. Great... now what about the other apps?

Tuesday night, I got home from said client's site and eagerly updated my iPhone firmware. The new "location" feature in the Maps application is very sweet (and seems sufficiently accurate for my needs). Then I started reorganizing my home screen. Screens. That's when I noticed that Google had updated most of its apps to be iPhone-friendly. Google Docs makes a great reader now, even for fairly large spreadsheets. Google Reader is a huge improvement!

So now my iPhone has:

• 43actions - a great little GTD (Getting Things Done) task manager
• Calculator
• Calendar
• Clock - with 10 cities
• Maps
• Notes
• Stocks
• Weather

• Google Docs
• Google Mail
• Google Reader
• Belfry Scientific Calculator
• My client's Google Docs
• My client's Google Mail
• ColdFusion 8 QuickDocs
• IMDB - I'm always looking up movies and actors so I need that accessible!

• Mail
• Phone
• Safari
• Settings

• Bejeweled
• Code Breader - a simple take on "Mastermind", a childhood favorite
• InARow touch - aka "Connect 4", another childhood favorite
• Mahjong

• Camera
• iTunes
• iPod
• Photos
• Text
• YouTube

Anyway, a big thank you to Apple and Google (and those games companies) for making my iPhone an even more lovable and addictive little toy!

As I did in 2006, here's my review of 2007. For some strange reason, I decided to make some New Year Resolutions in 2006. How did I do? I said I'd do more unit testing - and I did, but there's always room for more unit testing. I said I'd do more open source. Well, I released Fusebox 5.1 and Fusebox 5.5 as well as my Scripting project and a cfcUnit facade for CFEclipse so I think I did alright there. I also said I'd do more Flex and write some Apollo (now AIR) applications. I didn't do so well on those two! I think I'll revert to my usual practice of not making resolutions this year...

[More]

Whilst not a resolution, I will be embarking on a series of blog postings in the new year that are longer and more in-depth than my regular posts. They will cover a lot of the architectural advice that I find myself giving many of my clients and I will also be covering frameworks in more detail based on requests I've been getting via email over the last year.

I'll also be looking at some anti-patterns that I've been seeing in code that I've reviewed over the last eight months (without identifying anyone, of course!). I hope it will help other avoid these problems in their own code.

I hope folks will find it interesting reading!

Apparently the shared server was being brought to its knees by unusual traffic to my site (it wasn't clear exactly what - only that my site was bringing the server down again every time they tried to restart it). I'm fairly certain it was a spambot attack, possibly combined with one or more search engines trying to index my site.

They wanted to move me to a better plan where I'd be more isolated from other users - understandable - and, to be honest, both Lou Honick and Neil Heuer at HostMySite have been trying to get me to move to a VPS for a while, partly because they want me to see how it performs and write about my experience I suspect.

I said I was happy on shared hosting but the tech on the phone said they really wanted to move me so I told them to do whatever they felt was necessary. They said it would take several hours - to build out a new VPS and copy everything from my old site. Sure enough, throughout the afternoon, I received a steady stream of emails as parts of the infrastructure were brought up.

Once I noticed the site was actually working again, I started to explore the new site admin console and see exactly what they were offering.

The VPS uses the Virtuozzo Power Panel which allows you to SSH into the server (via a Java applet in a browser window) and also has a lot of system monitoring and management features. My initial impression is that it's very good. I'll write up more detailed notes in the next few days I expect.

There were a couple of lingering glitches that I noticed and when I pinged support again, they called me - on my home phone - and walked me through everything I needed to know about the new setup and resolved the issues I had.

I've always had very good experiences with HostMySite but today's experience was above and beyond the call of duty.

Thank you to all the other folks who entered - I had about dozen entries in total, with half of those being within a very narrow window, around quarter past midnight!

The counter, as of this posting, is at 999,409. The person who takes a screenshot of the counter when it is closest to 1,000,000 visitors and sends it to me will win the "Flex 2 Essential Training" videos from Lynda.com.

But wait, you Photoshoppers... Sure, anyone can cheat. So to help prevent PhotoshopFraud, you must also send me the time you took the screenshot. This is something I can easily double check (because only I will know the timestamps on all the other screen shots submitted!).

The winner will be announced a few days after the counter reaches 1,000,000 visitors (to allow for folks to get their screenshots in).

The videos are being donated by Dan Wilson who is very keen for this contest to happen and, for some strange reason, really likes my blog!

Many thanx to Dan.

Get screen grabbing!

It doesn't show a lot of jobs right now so I've decided that to promote it as a "go to" resource for CFers, I'm going to stop posting job openings on my blog and suggest that folks click on the widget to post job openings on Developer Circuit.

See? There's the widget... on the left hand side of my blog, just below the categories and calendar!

In theory I could have migrated it to a personal plan and I wanted to migrate it onto my wife's existing plan. However, after spending three hours on the phone, between myself, my wife and the company that manages Adobe's cell phones, we were unable to persuade Cingular to migrate the number to any acceptable combination of plans. Cell phone companies really don't seemed to have learned about customer service yet, it seems.

Also, remember that my adobe.com email address will be switched off after Thursday and you'll need to reach me via this domain (there's a "Contact me!" link in the right hand column on my blog).

(Posting to coldfusion category only because I know a lot of CFers don't read the non-CF categories on my blog but might still want to know how to contact me!)

HostMySite are taking steps to remedy the problem:

The problem that you have been experiencing is ColdFusion related. As you know in a shared ColdFusion environment poor code by even a single site can cause issues server wide. This has been happening over the last few days on your server. We have informed the operators of the offending site and are currently working on either getting them to fix their code or migrate to a VPS.

There are a few "dead" blogs that I've stayed subscribed to in the hope that the authors will come back from hibernation. I'd be interested to hear if you have any blogs in that category...

Any comments on the blog will have to wait for approval until I get back.

Happy Thanksgiving (in advance!).

As a general principle, I'm tagging this 'adobemax06' which is the 'official' preferred tag for everything related to MAX this year.

• Vista RC1
• Mock Objects
• Test Driven
• A Better Outlook
• Dynamic vs Compiled Languages
• Open Source Options
• Reflection

Any comments you add need to be approved before they post but I have removed all restrictions on validation of the actual comment so you can now, once again, comment on old entries (a common sp@mm$r trick, it seems) and you can put full URLs in your comments again (although I don't currently auto-format them to actual links).

I've also set it up so the moderation email has quick links to approve / delete, for my convenience.

A big thank you to all my readers - and commenters!

In about a month I should hit three quarters of a million visitors which is another big milestone.

If you're a human sp*mm*r, then you can just FOAD because I'll delete all your comments and add all sorts of traps to my sp*m blockers. You're pathetic and annoying and we will eventually obliterate you.

If you're a machine... well... we'll just continue the dance I guess.

Has anyone else noticed anything unusual in browser statistics recently?

A few hours later, my blog was hit by a very badly behaved b*t that attempted to spider my site but kept submitting bad links. Called heritrix, it has caused a lot of other people grief apparently. It should now receive 404 errors from any page on my site. It joins the ranks of the other spiders I've "banned" because of bad behavior.

What's really annoying about these unsavory people / programs is that they suck time out of our lives, trying to counter them. They're are vampires, preying on us well-behaved netizens. They disgust me.

I really don't want to have to add a captcha here or moderate comments but I'm getting awful close to that now...

HostMySite sent me a notice saying my site was causing performance problems and attached the logs. Two things seem to have contributed to the problem...

A large number of requests in quick succession asking for invalid entries on the blog (I've now added some debugging code to see if I can determine where these are coming from - I suspect a badly behaved spider).

The MXNA web service becoming unavailable. I used to show the top ten most clicked news stories from MXNA using a web service call. It seems that MXNA's web service went offline or was very slow to respond and so my site was also slow to respond, which then resulted in timeout errors and requests piling up. I've removed the top ten pod.

The vacation? A cat show in Oklahoma City. That makes 58% of the USA visited in terms of states!

It's been an insanely busy few weeks and it looks like the next few weeks will also be insanely busy. I can't really go into much detail because most of what I'm working on right now is all about future product and service offerings but we're going through a lot of the "necessary evils" that startup-style projects have to go through: technology stack decisions, budget estimates, schedule planning and so on.

Adobe handles some of its innovation by incubating startup-style projects within the larger organization. It's kind of the best of both worlds: the freedom of a startup with the support of a large corporation.

Right now I'm developing a lot of architectural concept diagrams as well as estimating hardware requirements and trying to create blocking schedules for things we think we have to deliver. It's an exciting time and I think we'll be creating services that will appeal to a large audience.

Bear in mind that I'm part of the Knowledge Workers Business Unit. That means that you, dear reader, as a software developer are not exactly part of my target demographic for now. However, as we start to build out our systems and solutions, I hope to be able to share some of what makes everything tick behind the scenes - especially where we get to "eat our own dog food".

Back in 2001, after the Allaire acquisition, I created a small team whose remit was to rebuild macromedia.com using our own (new) technologies. In 2006, I find myself in a similar situation but instead of producing a website for product consumers, I'm looking at services for business consumers. The business unit I operate in now includes pretty much all things Breeze-related and PDF-related so it has a different dynamic and a different set of challenges.

I hope you'll stay with me in this new phase and I hope I'll find relevant things to talk about here.

It was interesting in 1.2 Beta to hear the logic behind the versioning of the podcast and the piece on webcharts3d was very educational - I sort of knew the chart designer was there but had forgotten about it so it was good to have my memory jogged. My only nit with 1.2 Beta is that the stereo effect is a bit strident.

Definitely one to add to your subscriptions - very much an audio magazine and quite professional, even in these early stages.

Then I got an iPod shuffle and figured I'd get around to listening to podcasts as I walked to BART (30 minutes in the morning) or, more recently, drove down to San Jose (30-60 minutes). After autofilling my iPod several times, I began to get suspicious that it was 'avoiding' the podcasts. Not one podcast turned up in the random selection. So I created a new playlist: all the files I'd added in the last four months but not played. Lots of podcasts in that. Ran the autofill... not one podcast. Odd. So I made a playlist of podcasts alone. Autofill selected no files. OK, so that confirms that iTunes' autofill ignores podcasts.

Not to be deterred, I simple used brute force and dragged several podcasts into the iPod shuffle in iTunes. Great! Now I have a bunch of podcasts in my pocket. First walk down to BART, lots of music, no podcasts. Next day I drive to San Jose (I use a cassette adapter to listen to the iPod in the car through the cassette player). Lots of music, no podcasts. Drive home... still no podcasts. Walk to BART the next day... no podcasts. By this point, the random song selection on the iPod was beginning to repeat the few non-podcast items.

OK, one final test: empty the iPod and drag in just a few podcasts only. Try to play the iPod - nothing. Add a song and try again - the song plays. WTF? The iPod won't play podcasts even tho' they're just plain ol' MP3 files. Weird.

No podcasts on the move for me then :(

And then I was given an iRiver U10. It's an impressive piece of technology: very small and light, an FM radio and a music / video player that can also record (voice and radio) as well as a few other things. But it only works with Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10. Well, that sucks. But, hey, I have Virtual PC so I can run Windows XP in emulation. I won't recount my experiences with multiple installations of Windows XP and the problems I've had with them (come on, you know how I feel about Windows!).

Anyway, first off I converted a bunch of videos to the (proprietary) U10 video format and transferred those across and watched / listened to them in the car, driving home from San Jose. By positioning the iRiver on the dashboard, facing away from me, it acted as a "heads-up display" on the windshield, allowing me to watch (loosely) a video while driving without taking my eyes off the road. However, I didn't feel entirely comfortable doing that and couldn't imagine using the video capabilities of the U10 much.

Well, it plays MP3 files so I moved all my podcasts onto it and now I can listen to them in the car. It's not as slick as iTunes: I have to fire up Windows XP under Virtual PC and copy files to / from a network share (actually my Mac) and then sync files to the U10 using Windows Media Player. But the net result is that it works.

So tonight, driving home, I finally go to listen to some podcasts. I listened to all of ColdFusion Weekly 1.0 alpha and most of 1.1 beta and I have to say I'm very impressed. Matt and Pete have a good rapport and are generally well-informed and their show has very little "fluff" (although they need to tone down that cheesy organ music!). I enjoyed the interview with Jared about cf.Objective() in 1.0 and I was just starting Jeff Coughlin's interview on FarCry when I arrived home tonight.

I'm in San Jose on Monday so I'll get to listen to the rest of 1.1 and probably 1.2 as well so I'll have some more comments then. After that, I'll start going through the ColdFusion Podcast and I'll write those up too (I've listened to one or two early episode but wasn't terribly impressed - I'll bet they've gotten into their grove now that they've done over twenty episodes. And then I'll be catching up on Helms' and Peters' Out Loud series (which I love, based on the two or three episodes I've listened to parts of!).

What are your thoughts on podcasts?

I'll be speaking at the Austin CFUG on Friday and the Dallas CFUG next Monday. "Objects & Persistence" both times. See you there?

I would think my goal would be to ... make sure the code was as complex as possible ... so that nobody would ever want to spend any amount of time working on the code ...

The upside of blogging is that everyone gets to say their piece in public. The downside of blogging is that everyone gets to say their piece in public.

At least they have the decency to say "I am no expert when it comes to Open Source Development" - as if that wasn't obvious.

It's rare that I "roast" anyone in public and very rare that I do it on my blog but this particular blog has been little more than an advertising campaign for a piece of software they produced (almost every single post mentions it - and it appears in all the RSS feeds). This sort of behavior does our community no favors at all.

How many folks use Technorati? What do you think of it?

blogs.adobe.com

I've been reading their blogs for quite a while... lots of good stuff there!

Also, if you click on a category that has a lot of entries, you will get the first 100 and a "More articles..." link at the bottom.

And I've added a Skype badge at the bottom of the right hand column.

I just noticed that my blog has now passed 500,000 visitors since I set it up just over three years ago. August saw my highest traffic ever with 21,000 visitors and 31,000 page views. A big "thank you!" to all my readers. In a couple of weeks I'll be back at work and should have a steadier stream of posts and, perhaps, some more interesting stuff to blog about...

I'm going to be working with them to see if I can migrate to a CFMX 7 server at some point (hopefully sooner rather than later) but it will mean a database migration to a new server too - so it may well require downtime again. I'll keep y'all posted.

So what about this new project? Well, unfortunately I can't really tell you anything about it. It isn't ColdFusion-related. It will require me to learn a bunch of new stuff. I'll also get to use a lot of skills and techniques that I haven't needed for quite a few years. I'm very excited about being able to work on this project so it's frustrating that I won't be able to share what I'm doing.

I'm still around to chat to about ColdFusion and I'll still be talking to user groups and answering email sent to my corfield dot org account.

I probably won't be blogging very much for a while (since I can't talk about what I'm doing) although I'll still keep reading blogs and commenting on stuff that I see.

I will of course take copious notes and blog after the fact.

Enjoy the weekend!

• ColdFusion Developer Portal Site (Chinese)
• Oguz Demirkapi's Notebook (Turkish)

http://corfield.org/search/keyword will search this blog for keyword as if you'd typed keyword into the search field (below, right).

This has been achieved with an Apache mod_rewrite directive (search this blog for mod_rewrite).

Enjoy!

Christian Cantrell's blog has a more detailed list of new features.

I'll be updating my "Top ColdFusion Posts" pod (bottom right here) to use the new web service API shortly.

Scott Fegette was on the same flight as me but his room isn't ready so he's here, sharing my network connection (gotta love Macs!) and we're both catching up on email etc.

Anyway, blogging will be slow this week. However, I'll be writing the conference up in full for Fusion Authority shortly after I get back!

I think I have pretty free reign on my blog - especially since it's not on markme.com - but I have had my knuckles rapped for a couple of comments over the three and a half years of blogging. Just mutterings and vague warnings. I'm not sure what it would take to rile Macromedia enough to fire me but I'd like to think I'm not stupid enough to make such a mistake unwittingly.

Delta targeted a blogger too, a stewardess who posted slightly alluring pictures of herself in uniform (her blog was hilarious!). Frankly I don't think she deserved her dismissal - I think Delta over-reacted.

Mark Jen, on the other hand, clearly deserved what he got - he really did write some pretty dumb stuff about Google's HR practices. I mean, don't bite the hand that feeds you...

Back to Google and Microsoft... I've been approached by both companies - several times by Microsoft and once, recently by Google. I wouldn't work for Microsoft for many, many reasons, not the least of which is their legendary interview process - I went through that **** with ObjectSpace years ago when they flew me out from England for an interview and then treated me like dirt until I walked out of the interview (and they had the nerve to call me up a week later and say they still wanted to hire me - so what was with the insulting interview process?). I really don't appreciate that high-handed treatment in an interview. I don't know about Google. They're very cool, of course, but I suspect they think they're even cooler and that always bothers me. I love what they do but...

As I always tell companies that approach me, I love Macromedia and I have a lot to do here before I'd even consider another company. I've been here nearly five years now and I'm still loving it - and, boy, is there a lot of work I still need to do here... years of work!

But this all has an important message for bloggers: consider your relationship with your employer. If it's restrictive enough to affect your blogging, you might be working for the wrong company...

It only supports:

• style=blue
• style=green
• style=darkgreen
• style=mono
• style=default

And, yes, I know I haven't added this to the comments popup yet!

Here's the code:

My apologies for that (and thanx to Phil for alerting me).

I have posted an updated version of blog41.zip that fixes the problem.

Note that you'll still need to download Ray's app separately and the wrapper is written around 3.5.1 - I believe Ray has changed the API a little in 3.5.2 so you might need to perform a few tweaks to get things working cleanly.

In future I may well run presentations from Breeze - or encourage other participants to do so (since I can make anyone a presenter). I'm also interested in what you'd like to see done with this permanent meeting.

I've already received some good feedback about Breeze itself which I've passed on to the product team and there have been some suggestions for future polls as well.

Naturally, the store has generated a lot of comment in the blogosphere and a lot of people seem to think that Delta are out of line for suspending her. It's a tricky area. There's no doubt that Delta's action has dramatically increased the amount of attention her situation is getting - which could easily be considered self-defeating.

I'm not sure where I sit on this - I think bloggers should either align themselves with their employer or should distance themselves from their employer but whichever they choose, they need to hold to that position. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts...

You can read the BBC story (including 'that' picture) and The Register's story.

The reason? Ray's rss.cfm expects a mode2= attribute containing the original mode= attribute from the page that displays the RSS links. After my FB41 facelift, that had transformed to do=blog.xxx where xxx was what mode2= should have been. I applied a simple fix to rss.cfm to map do= back to mode2=.

The problem is an unclosed <center> tag in the calendar pod. IE and Mozilla / Firefox seem to cope with this but Safari does not. Add </center> near the end of the calendar pod and it's fixed!

Many thanks to Narayanan on the macromedia.com QA team for discovering this and reporting the problem. Thanx dude!

How did I break it? The Application.cfm file in the Fusebox 4.1 version redirects to index.cfm if the requested file is not index.cfm (or is not a CFC). The RSS feed comes from a file called rss.cfm...