I was due to speak at all three venues for Scotch on the Rocks but unfortunately, I have to stay home. As many of you on Twitter and Facebook already know, my wife slipped and fell on Friday and hurt her ankle very badly. We were in the ER until 4am and x-rays confirmed her ankle was broken. Badly broken! She has a tri-malleolar fracture which essentially means she's snapped off the bottom of both her tibia and her fibula. She'll be going in for surgery as soon as the swelling has gone down enough to operate, hopefully on Thursday. She's going to be off her feet for about a month and I need to stay home and look after her.

I'm very bummed about missing Scotch - it was the one conference I wanted to speak at this year (and originally was going to be the only conference I spoke at)! Here's looking forward to Scotch 2010!

Andy and Kev should be publishing an updated schedule in the next few days - I know they have backup speakers on the waiting list.

In the meantime, here's Jay's x-ray:

Click for a bigger image!

A few people have asked me for a full write-up of the San Francisco gig so here it is...

When I got in line outside the Grand Regency Ballroom, I found myself between a couple who'd seen TG at Coachella and a guy who'd seen them at the LA show. Nothing but praise for both performances which heightened my anticipation. Inside, we head to the merchandise tables to buy the new album (The Third Mind Movements - wonderful!) and the special per-venue T shirt (a very cool idea). Despite the very wild looking crowd, everyone is very polite and friendly, patient in line, smiling. You'd never think you were at a hardcore industrial music concert!

I wandered into the main theater space and was able to get right up to the barrier at the front, just right of center stage (right in front of Genesis, as it happened) and found myself next to the couple from Coachella again. We got into a deep discussion of politics (pointless since we agreed on everything) and then the support band came out at 8pm. A bit surprising since no mention had been made of a support act... they seemed small and young... they said they would play just one song and it lasted 30 minutes. Check out Erika M. Anderson recording part of "Kind Hearted Woman". I liked it a lot and the album is coming soon apparently... can't wait!

The stage cleared, much roadie activity (and Erika's band clearing up their own instruments) and then at 9pm, Genesis, Cosey, Chris and Sleazy took the stage for the main event. They opened with "Very Friendly" (about Ian Brady and Myra Hindley) followed by "Persuasion" (which was equally creepy). It was about this point that I realized just how shocking and controversial their music must seem to most people, even 30 years on. I recognized almost every song they played but I had to go look up the set list to be sure. We got a creepy/funny "Something Came Over Me", a chilling "Hamburger Lady", a beautiful "Almost A Kiss", an echoey "Endless Not", a romping "What A Day" and an immensely powerful "Discipline", the final number. In between songs we had humor (esp. the humiliation of Stephanie) and sweetness (the introduction of Genesis' daughter and the admonishment for thinking bad things about her). The sound was incredible, pounding bass making your internal organs shake (standing next to the right hand speaker stack helped) and being so close to the band added to the power of the performance.

And then, very politely, it was all over and the wild looking crowd filtered gently out into the night, smiling. When I woke up the next morning, I was still buzzing from the concert and my ears were popping for days afterward. TG in SF will probably be one of the most memorable concerts of my life.

A great interview with David Allen looks beyond the hype of GTD to the practical reasons why GTD works and how it came to be. There's a lot of great advice here if you're considering GTD or already trying to apply it. It's a lot more pragmatic than many people seem to think.

Excuse the off-topic post... I am going to see Throbbing Gristle at the Grand Regency Ballroom on April 23rd (Thursday next week). The show is SOLD OUT but I bought two tickets so I have a spare... If you'd like to go to the concert with me, it's $40 for the second ticket.

Here's what the Ann Powers said in the Los Angeles Times:

Throbbing Gristle: Coachella is known for helping reunite alternative-rock elders, but rarely is a returning group as foundational to a style of music as is this English outfit. More than 30 years ago, Throbbing Gristle basically invented industrial music, melding synthesizer music with found sound and provocative, sometimes repulsive imagery to push punk into its darkest future. Its members continued to shape the genre in groups such as Psychic TV and Chris & Cosey, but this return to the source allows fans to participate in a collaboration that's essential and consistently inventive.

Here's what the TG website says about the San Francisco gig:

THURSDAY 23rd APRIL - SAN FRANCISCO Grand Regency Ballroom - 1290 Sutter St, San Francisco, CA 94109
TG will play one 75 minute set of various material from throughout their history.

THIS SHOW IS SOLD OUT!
Special 'TG USA 2009' merchandising will be on sale, including: all new TG CD album, TG T-shirt specific to this event, TG Tour Enamel Badge, TG Tour Embroidered Patch.

So most people like to blog about how poor a company's service is. At the risk of being accused of fanboi-ism, I'd like to blog about how good Apple's iTunes Store support is.

I recently bought a copy of Pavement's "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA's Desert Origins" album (awesome!) and found that tracks 20 and 21 had an audio problem: the end of track 20 and the first 30 seconds of track 21 sounded like CD skipping.

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Recently I've received a number of "add contact" requests from people on Skype who have nicknames I don't recognize, who have not completed their profiles and who don't put any information in their "add" request. Why do such people think I'm going to accept their add contact request?

I generally just block them since they seem to have such poor manners (and one such user actually called me twice via Skype without introducing themselves and then pulled me into a conference call with the Skype echo tester!).

So, if you're going to add me to your Skype contacts, please at least say who you are and how you know me when you send the "add contact" request! Better still, fill out your Skype profile with your full name and blog / website address so folks have some context.

As "usual", I start the year with a round-up of the highlights of last year, based on things that I blogged. It's been a strange year for me. After (seven) years with Macromedia / Adobe and most of 2007 spent freelancing, I took a full-time job with a startup and hired some amazing CFers to be part of my team. I (finally) learned Flex (and AIR). I learned a new language (Groovy) and did a lot less CFML programming than I've done in years while at the same time joining first the Open BlueDragon Steering Committee and then the CFML Advisory Committee, as well as attending more ColdFusion-related conferences than usual (cf.Objective(), Scotch on the Rocks, CFUNITED, Wee Dram of Scotch, MAX).

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I've been experimenting with a variety of "todo" managers over the last year, trying to find one that fits my needs. I have been a fan of 43actions for most of 2008 because it offered a nice iPhone-compatible web application that was fairly intuitive and, with Fluid allowing me to have a "desktop" version of 43actions, I had synchronized access from both my iPhone and my desktop. The problem was that it was a web app so it didn't have any integration with either the iPhone or, more importantly, the desktop.

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I've mentioned this service before - $199 / year to skip the lines at airport security (you don't skip the security checks, just the lines) - and here's a way to get a month free: use this refer-a-friend code when you sign up - DSCAM1163375. The price has doubled since I initially signed up but the time savings are incredible if you travel a lot and now they offer photo ID on the CLEAR card so you can use it as your only form of ID to go through an airport which simplifies things still further. You can also use the CLEAR card to jump the lines at certain sports grounds :)

I saw this on my way to work Monday and snapped it:

Wow! .00 is... like... FREE!

(The gas station is being renovated and they've put in a zero price for some reason... very eye-catching tho'!)

Today I filled up the Honda for the first time. The nearest public station to the office is about 12 miles away at SFO airport. The station was empty apart from several buses that service the airport. The "Gas Gallon Equivalent" price was $2.75 and the station has a couple of 3,000psi pumps but is mostly 3,600psi (which is what the Honda takes).

You have to watch a training video before you can pump gas unless you have a Training PIN (which you get after you've watched the video the first time). I totally missed one of the key instructions in the video and ended up trying three pumps and watching the video over again before I realized my mistake (the gas nozzle has to be "opened" with a lever before it can be attached and then "closed" with a lever - I'd missed the opening step so the nozzle wouldn't fit... duh!).

The pump makes a ton of noise (well, it's a 3,600psi compressor so that isn't a surprise) but the filling process is quick and clean.

We're going to keep a record of gas usage and mileage so we can see how it compares cost-wise to a regular gasoline car. If you care, you can watch my public Evernote record of CNG usage.

This morning I just took delivery of my new car - my new very green car:

It's a 2008 Honda Civic GX in Green Tea Metallic. As you can see from the image above, it runs on compressed natural gas. There are quite a few CNG stations around the Bay Area but we plan to buy a "Phill" - a home refueling station that connects to our home gas line so that we can fill up for about $1.25 per gallon!

So I said I'd post an off-topic piece about my trip to Vegas. If you don't like off-topic stuff, stop reading :)

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I'm 46 years young!

Probably the best Guinness advert ever made! Raise a glass!

OK, a personal rant...

I've owned my house in Castro Valley for seven years (next month) and I just took advantage of the great interest rates and the new conforming loan limits to lock in a 30 year 5.5% mortgage, paying off my previous two mortgages (a $300k 30 year and a $70k 15 year balloon payment). This is the third refinance in six years and the first to lock in above what I paid for the place (paid $370k, financed $409k, value $600-700k depending on who you ask, although Indymac Bank thinks it's only worth $515k... go figure!).

So, I'm happy with my new mortgage. I am not happy with the stream of insurance spam I've received in the last week. Several offers every single day (six today, OMG!). Mortgage protection, health insurance, home insurance. Jeez, leave me alone! I have all that shit already!

I know that a mortgage is a matter of public record but this is ridiculous! The worst thing about these slimy insurance and loan spam offers is that they are all - and I mean ALL - couched in terms of something you should complete and return for your lender. Sure, they all have small print saying they're not associated with the lender but with some of them you really have to read it two or three times to convince yourself you're not reading something important from your own lender.

It's disgusting. Especially given the sub-prime lending disaster we're going through right now. Clearly these companies have no ethics at all.

I'm here at The George (and a very nice hotel it is!) getting ready for Scotch on the Rocks. Tomorrow I'll be putting the finishing touches on my presentations (more than finishing touches on the "Getting Dynamic" presentation since I'm still changing it every few days!).

Jay & I arrived in England on Friday, spent the night at my mum's lovely new house in the south then drove up to the Lake District and stayed at the wonderful Bridge House Hotel in Grasmere. The food was great - a four course meal is included in the room price (I had smoked mackerel salad with pink grapefruit followed by poached hake in a cranberry cream sauce - plus a soup course plus great desserts!), as is breakfast - and, as you can see, it has a nice space to relax outdoors, right next to the bar!

Then we headed up to visit my friend Miles in Kilwinning near Ayr. He's an old university friend and we haven't seen him for a few years so much alcohol was consumed during ten hours of reminiscing! He's also a great cook so more good food was had (including a stunning white chocolate brioche pudding for dessert).

Today we headed up Loch Lomond, stopping at the Duck Bay Restaurant for a wonderful lunch (Finnan Haddock Duncryne) followed by a nice drive up to Crianlarich and through the Trossachs then down to Stirling and finally into Edinburgh.

The George is a very nice hotel. We settled in, I caught up on email and then we had dinner in the Tempus bar. Jay had the filet in bearnaise sauce and I had the pheasant, both of which were extremely good.

Not that I'm at all obsessed with (good) food, of course...

Go on... you know you want to... An Engineer's Guide To Cats.

If you're planning to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5, make sure you backup or move whatever you have in your /home directory before you start. You know, don't have your ColdFusion 8 install or your Eclipse workspace in /home. Like I did. Oh, I know, why /home? Old Unix habit, I guess.

So, why should you be careful about this? Because the Leopard upgrade kindly blows away your /home directory. Yup. There goes my ColdFusion install, there goes my Eclipse install and all my projects.

Backups? Fortunately, yes, I had a backup. Not a very up-to-date one, I'll admit (and I did toy with the idea of backing up my entire HD before upgrading to Leopard).

Fortunately, everything is under SVN so I just pulled out my old backup (and put it in /Developer this time) and then ran svn update on everything.

Other than that minor(!) trauma, the upgrade to Leopard seems to have gone well. I think.

Watch this space for more Leopard experiences.

Oh, and after all I've said about not upgrading early, why did I finally upgrade? Because, finally, everything I use on a day-to-day basis has been updated for Leopard. Or at least close enough to make the pain worthwhile. That and a new VPN client at work that is not compatible with Tiger.

Heard of CLEAR - Fly Through Airport Security? If you travel a lot, you might want to check it out. My wife and I signed up this year because we're flying a lot (four CF conferences for me and countless cat shows for her). It's $100 per person per year (with an initial $28 setup fee) but, oh boy, is it worth it!

Our first experience was flying back from Denver recently (Oakland hadn't quite got the system up and running for our outbound trip). You know how security lines are at the airport? Imagine this:

Walk up to the CLEAR lane and present your microchipped CLEAR card. A quick biometric identification (retina scan or fingerprint scan) and then you are escorted to the head of the line, ahead of everyone else, with airport staff carrying all of your belongings that need to be scanned. They cut you in right at the metal detector and watch over all your things as they are x-rayed. Then you're on your way.

You can pretty much guarantee less than five minutes in security, regardless of how long the lines are!

It's even true of international security. Jay went off to Hungary this week (to judge a cat show in Bekescsaba) and was able to completely bypass the lines at security.

If you're traveling a lot and want to sign up for this, contact me and I'll send you a referral code that will give you one month free (and I'll get a month free too!).

A pet peeve of mine. This time the culprit is Gensys Infotech based in Fremont, CA.

I received an email from a "Vivek Bhaskar" the other day to my almost brand new Broadchoice email address, offering their services along with pricing. I replied, asking how they obtained my email address since it was so new. Vivek responded that they buy lists from a third party. I told them to remove me from their mailing lists and not to contact me again.

Today, I get the exact same email introducing their "services" and requesting a phone call. I reported the email as spam and added them to my SpamCop blacklist.

Grrr!

Dopplr is out of beta and open for everyone to sign up now. It's a good way to see who is going to be at conferences (or cat shows!) that you are attending. Sign up and start sharing your trips with colleagues and friends.

For immediate release

On-Demand Services Attract In-Demand Architect

CASTRO VALLEY, Calif. -- Feb. 16, 2008 -- Sean Corfield today announced that he will be joining Broadchoice, Inc. headquartered in San Mateo, California as their Chief Systems Architect and Vice President of Engineering. In this new position, Corfield will oversee the evolution of Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ platform, expanding the capabilities and scaling the on-demand service to meet the ever-increasing customer base. Corfield said "Broadchoice has a really gifted team that has already created a winning service, used by companies such as Cisco. I'm excited to be part of that team and to have the opportunity to really take the platform to a new level." Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ is created and powered by Adobe technologies.

Richard Bennion, Broadchoice Founder & CTO, is a long-time advocate of ColdFusion and has been a pioneer in digital marketing for twenty years. "Bennion's energy and enthusiasm was key in attracting me to this role," said Corfield, "and he and I share an enthusiasm for great experiences created by great technology."

Also joining the Broadchoice team is Luke Kilpatrick, co-manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group (BACFUG) and manager of Fire on the Bay, an Adobe Fireworks User Group serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Kilpatrick brings a wealth of experience in UI development and content management systems to the Broadchoice team. Corfield said "Kilpatrick's a friend of mine and I'm looking forward to having him on my team."

About Sean Corfield
Sean Corfield has been a freelance consultant since leaving the Hosted Services group at Adobe Systems, Inc. in April 2007 and was formerly the Senior Architect for the IT division of Macromedia, Inc. for almost six years. Prior to joining Macromedia, Corfield drove the architecture of a number of high-traffic, high-profile websites for a diverse group of companies after working on the ANSI J16 C++ Standards Committee for eight years and building compilers, interpreters and runtime systems. He is also manager of BACFUG and a frequent speaker at ColdFusion conferences around the world, as well as a contributor to a number of open source ColdFusion projects.

About Broadchoice, Inc.
Broadchoice is the leader in providing on-demand marketing solutions for the enterprise. The Digital Marketing Manager™ platform provides a fully integrated, enterprise application for web content management, enterprise marketing management and channel partner management.

For those who aren't sure, this is intended to be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek announcement but the news is real. I start the new job on Monday, February 18th, and I'm looking forward to hiring some of the best talent to help me grow a very exciting product! Stay tuned!

A few years ago, Jay and I went to a friend's wedding in Montana and had a fabulous time at the spa and at our friends' ranch. Last year, we went back to help on the new house our friends were building on their new ranch in Montana. Part of what they had in mind was offering unique, private vacations on their ranch with an eco-friendly, back-to-nature approach. We had such a wonderful time there that I thought I'd blog a quick mention of their Bison Quest Sanctuary and Spa package in case it appeals to any of my readers as a way to really unwind and take a break from our hectic, high-tech world!

Please do not send personal email to my Gmail account! I use it exclusively for mailing lists. I sometimes go days without checking it and I get so much email there that I often just mark swathes of it as "read" without actually reading it.

If you want me to see something and actually respond to it, send it to my corfield.org account (or use the contact form on my blog).

Some people were not very excited about Apple's keynote yesterday but the 1.1.3 firmware update for the iPhone is plenty enough for me, along with Google's updated mobile apps.

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

Followed by:

• 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!

Then my menu bar is:

• Mail
• Phone
• Safari
• Settings

On screen two, I have a row of games:

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

Then my multimedia tools:

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

And, yes, they are in alphabetical groups. Call me anal retentive and see if I care!

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!

An interesting blog post aimed at helping non-programmers recognize the indicators common in good programmers. The comments are long (over 180 as of this writing!) but mostly in agreement although there are some interesting dissenters as well.

He talks through six major issues and then summarizes in positive and negative bullet points. It's not a perfect list but I agree with most of it. When I'm hiring, I look for someone who is passionate, programs in their spare time, works on personal side-projects, learns additional technologies "for fun". I want someone who has "strong opinions, weakly held" (which is a toned down version of what is presented on that blog post). Similarly, I hear alarm bells when I am interviewing a developer who views programming as "just a job", only learns new technologies when the company sends them on training courses and only knows one set of technologies. I'm less concerned (than the blog's author) about someone who started programming "late" in life.

As folks who've been interviewed by me know, I don't "quiz" people or set them "clever" tests. I get them talking about their work and their projects. I want to hear passion, I want to hear about problems and how they solved them - and how they dealt with managers (or peers) who didn't see eye to eye with them on solutions.

Are your criteria different?

I'm working with just three clients right now and with each of them I am essentially doing the same thing: taking an existing system that has been built up over a number of years and helping them rearchitect it for better maintainability and better scalability. The technology stack is pretty similar in all three cases:

• Model-Glue (two clients), Mach-II (other client)
• ColdSpring
• Transfer

In addition, we're using cfcUnit and ColdMock for unit testing (Brian Kotek's ColdMock project is awesome for unit testing beans that are actually Transfer decorators!).

All three clients are on - or imminently moving to - ColdFusion 8 (as most of my clients have been) so we can take advantage of AJAX, performance, array/struct syntax, enhanced operator syntax, onMissingMethod() - which powers ColdMock - and many other recent enhancements.

These three clients have been keeping me pretty busy - I was even on-site with one of them for three days this week which, as folks who know me will realize, is pretty unusual since I've mostly kept to remote work since I left Adobe. I think they're going to be keeping me busy for at least the first quarter of 2008.

I haven't been blogging much this past two weeks but I've been posting to a few mailing lists, covering decorators (Transfer), dependencies (ColdSpring) and various OO design issues. I've also been writing an article for FAQU which will be in issue 6 (issue 5 is at the printers and should be in readers' hands soon). The article covers the whole "beans + DAO + gateway + service" object stuff, looking at four possible ways to structure your code and examining the pros and cons of each.

I'm also reviewing a new ColdFusion book that is in the works. It's a great introductory book that covers a lot of best practices and focuses on CFCs up front. It's target market means that it probably won't get on most American developers' radars but I think it will be worth tracking down and reading if you're a novice (to ColdFusion).

I'll also be writing a regular column for [name withheld] on my favorite subject: architecture.

As you can tell, 2008 has started off busy and looks likely to stay that way. I think the year will offer me some interesting challenges and some interesting opportunities - and maybe some big changes too.

You've always wanted to know what I really do at weekends? Here's a great little interview on Geek Entertainment TV that was filmed at a local cat show... My wife is one of the judges shown in the opening sequence and, yes, I know everyone they interview and most of the cats they feature as well :)

A Leopard is in my future. I've been holding off upgrading to Leopard until Adobe (and others) have updates available to ensure compatibility. My financial controller (Jay) pointed out that it's year end and if I need any "last minute" software or hardware I should buy it a.s.a.p.

Smart woman, my wife!

So I just ordered Leopard, a car charger for my iPhone and a 750Gb USB 2.0 HD that I can stick on my Apple BaseStation as a network drive. 750Gb for just $230... amazing... and scary how cheap storage has become...

The question is: can I resist upgrading until all the software I use has been updated?

It's almost that time of the year where we tend to take stock of the last twelve months and make resolutions for the coming twelve months. I've never been much for making resolutions but I always provide a review of the last year, based on my blog postings, so expect my review of 2007 within the next week or so.

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!

You used to be able to go to the online Apple store and buy iTunes gift certificates for people and send them directly via email. In fact, my "wish list" used to contain a link directly to that page on the store in case anyone wanted to buy me a certificate (thank you to those folks who have!). I just clicked the link to check it and found myself on the home page of the Apple store. Huh? So I hunted around and you can only buy gift cards online now, which Apple will dutifully mail out to the lucky recipient.

So I clicked the "Chat Now" link and got online with Lori. She informed me that the only way to buy these email gift certificates is to fire up iTunes and purchase them from the iTunes Music Store itself. Lori helpfully pointed out "iTunes is free"... So apparently Apple think that if you're buying music for someone, you'll download and install iTunes in order to do so. I can't say I'm very impressed with this change.

At long last, I've gotten around to creating a business card for my consulting business. Or rather, my wife has. Thank you Jay!

Consulting is my full-time business now - I recently stepped down from my CTO role at Scazu - so expect to see the red crab cards being handed out at user groups and conferences.

Today Jay & I went to the AT&T store and bought his and hers iPhones. I have to say that I'm even more impressed with the phone than I ever could have imagined. The virtual keyboard is good enough to type blog entries and the overall integration with email, calendar, contacts and browser is stunning!

As regular readers know, I've been running Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate for quite a while now so I can have a full local Windows development environment (ColdFusion 8, BlueDragon.NET 7 and MS SQL Server Express). Despite my general grumbles about Windows, it has been working out pretty well (but I really try to do all of my development on the Mac side whenever possible).

I hadn't been running Vista for a few days so, Monday morning, needing to do client work that involves SQL Server, I fire up the virtual machine and VMware tells me an update is available. Cool! I've been waiting for the 1.1 fixes!

I download the new image and shutdown Vista (wondering "how can an operating system take so long to boot up and shut down?") and then shutdown VMware and run the installer. It says VMware is still running. Hmm. The installation guide says if you hit this problem, look in the VMware Help (why can't you put the hint in the installation guide?). So I fire up VMware, fire up Help and it says sometimes a vmware-vmx process doesn't quit and you should use the Mac Activity Monitor to kill it. OK. Shutdown VMware. Open Mac Activity Monitor, find the vmware process and kill it. Run the installer. Success. I get to upgrade VMware.

Fire up VMware, boot Vista (wait...).

Upgrade the VMware tools. Reboot (more waiting...).

Up comes Vista and now it wants to update Windows with some important updates. OK. Wait for a bit. Reboot (more waiting...).

Up comes Vista and now... Argh! Apple wants to update Safari, iTunes and QuickTime. OK. Safari updates fast enough but iTunes / QuickTime takes forever. Guess what? Yup, reboot time. Sigh...

Up comes Vista again and now I can get on with some work. It only took about 90 minutes from start to finish. Who'd have known that between VMware, Microsoft and Apple (to be fair: mostly Microsoft), I'd lose the first hour and a half of my week? Vista had been up and running happily for about two weeks since I last rebooted it (so, to be fair, this makes Vista the most stable version of Windows I've ever used!).

I work through the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon until about 3pm my machine pretty much grinds to a halt. WTF? Oh, Microsoft wants to update Vista again! This time the updates are so important that Microsoft goes ahead and reboots my machine for me. Thanx Bill! Yeah, it sat there with a little count down warning that it was going to reboot but, hey, I normally keep Windows minimized and work on the Mac, right?

So Vista has now been up for 17 minutes. Do you think Bill would pay if I sent him an invoice for my lost time?

KFOG's been playing a lot of Led Zeppelin today and I think it's because the entire back catalog has just been released on iTunes! The third album I ever bought was Led Zeppelin's "Physical Graffiti" and I've always had a soft spot for the band. It's really, really good to see their music remastered and available for purchase and download via iTunes (so it's all sitting in my shopping cart just waiting...).

My first two albums? David Bowie's "Live At The Tower Philadelphia" (aka "David Live") and Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon". A recent iTunes gift certificate bought me a pristine copy of "David Live" which is still a thrilling album over thirty later.

If you watched this week's "Chuck", right at the end he has a C++ book on the bench and, much to my wife's amusement, I excitedly recognized it "OMG! That's Barton & Nackman's book!"

"Scientific and Engineering Programming in C++" was a landmark book that introduced powerful techniques based on templates. When we (ANSI Standards Committee) were trying to redefine the language rules around name lookup as regards the friend keyword, we were forced to preserve the examples in that book because they had passed into common usage, even though we really wanted to restrict how the friend keyword worked. We did, eventually, come up with suitable rules.

Watching "Chuck" tonight (we recorded it from Monday) brought that whole committee experience back to life for me!

I know a lot of people rushed to installed Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) last night and my friends found it very odd that I was not one of those early adopters. I've owned and used Macs day-in, day-out for almost two decades, since the early System 6 days. I've been through two changes of hardware (68000 to PPC, PPC to Intel) and several of the "major" O/S upgrades (I skipped System 8 and System 9, for reasons that anyone who actually used them will happily expound upon for hours!). I'm on my sixth or seventh Apple laptop and my fourth Apple desktop. I'm a huge fan boy.

So why did I not pre-order Leopard and rush to install it?

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Google is experimenting with some very cool options for searching. First off, they have show new view: keywords that display additional ways to view / filter search results:

• view:timeline - displays a graph indicating the number of results by date so you can track trends, e.g., coldfusion view:timeline
• view:map - displays a map highlighting top search results, e.g., sean corfield view:map
• view:info - displays additional ways to highlight parts of the results based on dates, measurements, locations and images, e.g., sean corfield view:info (then select "Locations")

In addition, from the experimental page you can choose keyboard shortcuts (to navigate your search results) or left-hand / right-hand search menus (they're slightly different).

You can choose to "join" one of the experiments which makes it your default Google results format (assuming you're logged in). I picked the left-hand context menus which seem to be richer.

Summary: MAX Europe was great, except for the food.

I've already posted the raw notes I took in the sessions which were pretty much just a brain dump of what the presenters were saying without much of my own commentary. In general, the sessions were extremely good. My goal was to learn a lot about AIR and some useful stuff about Flex and the conference met that goal perfectly. The AIR sessions were great and covered a lot of ground, with plenty of information about the file APIs and using SQLite, the embedded database. There was also a fairly good balance between Flex and AJAX in the AIR sessions (some presenters actually showed the same functionality in both Flex and AJAX side-by-side). The two Flex sessions that I attended - both led by Joe Berkovitz - were really good with a lot of practical information about designing and building large Flex applications.

What about the other aspects of the conference? The size of the conference (around 1,000 people I think) meant that all the sessions were together on one floor and all the food / community / vendors were together on another floor. That meant you didn't have to rush between sessions and you had a chance to network in the hallways between sessions. The session rooms were rarely completely packed so you always got a seat. It was nice and relaxed. It was much better than Chicago in that respect.

The food, however, was a serious disappointment. Tapas-style food was fun and interesting on Monday lunchtime but it was the same sort of thing at the reception on Monday night, at lunchtime on Tuesday, at the special event Tuesday evening and at lunch on Wednesday. Nothing was labeled so if you had allergies or just plain ol' don't like certain things, well, you were pretty screwed. And if you didn't like / don't eat fish, you went pretty hungry. I eat pretty much anything but I lost a few pounds this week because not much appealed to me on Tuesday (either at lunch or at the special event) and on Wednesday I completely skipped lunch. The most charitable thing I can say about the special event was that the jazz band was pretty good. Like Chicago, the event was in the conference center and was just food and drink (and they ran out of beer apparently - I stuck to wine). The Chicago event was $100 for guests and since I couldn't imagine what would be so special it could be worth that much money, my wife & I skipped the guest pass. From what I heard, we made the right choice. The Barcelona event was $75 for the guest pass and, with hindsight, we probably wouldn't bothered with that either. Come on Adobe, do something special next year in San Francisco - or at least don't charge guests such outrageous amounts.

Apart from the food - and Tuesday evening's event - everything else about the conference was really enjoyable. It was great to finally meet so many European community members - there was a large British contingent, as well as folks from every part of mainland Europe. Barcelona itself is a beautiful city with great public transport and is also an interesting city to walk around. The beach was really nice (so I'm told) and the hotel restaurant was really good (at the Vincci Maritimo), although the relaxed European approach to schedule meant that they opened when they were ready, not when the posted hours said they would open.

Of the two MAX events, Barcelona was by far the better experience in many ways. It'll be interesting to see what Adobe do next year since both events will likely be even bigger...

One other thought (added later): whilst it was great for speakers that they were in one of the nearest hotels to the event (as was the case in Chicago), there seemed to be no networking in the speaker hotel: folks did not congregate in the bar in the evening. The hotel was amazing quiet in the evenings. That was also true to some extent in Chicago. The bar was more of a networking location in Chicago but still you only got to network with other speakers instead of a broader range of attendees. I suspect this will be less of an issue in San Francisco since everyone should be staying within walking distance of the Moscone Center but it's something to think about.

I've been teased repeatedly for the very, very old picture of me that has been turning up on conference sites and brochures for the last few years. Back in early August, Jay took a picture of me that I put on Facebook and submitted for MAX. I figured I should blog it so other conference folks can access it (also available in black & white), along with my current speaker bio:

Sean Corfield is the architect behind large-scale, high-availability websites for companies such as Macromedia, Toshiba, Oracle, Toyota and Thomas Cook. He is currently a freelance developer and CTO of Scazu, Inc., a health and wellness social network. His passion for standards and software engineering led him to work on the C++ Standards Committee for eight years. He is a frequent speaker on software design within the ColdFusion community, at user groups and conferences across the world.

Back when I worked at Adobe, I got a steady stream of emails asking if I did consulting and I always said, no, I was kept too busy at Adobe for that. Since I announced my departure from Adobe in April, I've been working on a startup (scazu.com, a health and wellness social network) but I've also been doing consulting to pay the bills. I haven't been particularly public about the consulting (other than to describe myself as a freelance consultant in bio slides in a couple of my presentations) so I figured it was probably time to emphasize the consulting aspect of my life.

Yes, I do consulting! Contact me about consulting!

Most of what I've been doing so far is architectural in nature - either auditing existing systems and making recommendations or assisting in the architecture and design of new systems - but I've also done some mentoring and I do actually build systems (in ColdFusion and Java primarily but I'll be adding Flex soon). While I've been working hard on getting the Scazu site out there I've focused on short-term, part-time work but now that Scazu has launched in Alpha, more time is freeing up so I can look at larger projects as well.

Yes Virginia, you can run multiple copies of Vista on a Mac at the same time!

I've been happily running VMware Fusion for the last few days with Vista up pretty much continuously (14 hours, 21 minutes uptime currently) and I'm pleasantly surprised to report that I'm not hating Vista (I'm not loving it either but I'm definitely not hating it - even with UAC enabled!).

However, I still have Parallels installed (with my heavily tweaked install of Vista to try to eke some performance out of it) and that means that SmartSelect is active where you right-click on a Mac file and you can Open With... a Windows application fairly transparently. I just accidentally opened a PDF with Adobe Reader 8.1 - on Vista under Parallels! It took several minutes to stabilize but, sure enough, I now had two copies of Vista running side-by-side as well as all my Mac apps. Yikes!

I must get around to switching SmartSelect off or I'm going to do that again by accident. I'll probably keep Parallels around to see if they improve enough that I'll want to switch back to it but, right now, VMware Fusion is definitely my first choice for running Vista. Now, if they can just implement support for DirectX 9...

I have six more invites... Rich, Ben, Fred get the first three for asking last time (see below) but that still leaves three invites!

I read this article a few years back but a friend just reminded me of it, in response to some questions being asked on a mailing list that we are both on.

Eric Steven Raymond's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way may come across as rude and elitist but it contains a lot of useful information about getting your problems solved effectively (and if you think it really is rude or elitist then you may be one of the people he insists doesn't "get it").

Compared to how the ColdFusion community behave (at least, in general), the Unix community is much less tolerant of laziness and "stupidity" but I expect we all recognize certain people or certain questions in ESR's article.

I know I have certainly answered questions with a link to a Google search or to a LiveDocs page (when all I have done is copy'n'pasted the user's question into Google and found the user's answer).

Underlying the basic advice is an important sentiment. Well, several important sentiments. Don't assume the problem is the software (and that applies especially to open source projects that the authors have poured their soul into). Don't assume you are entitled to an answer. Don't ask a question you haven't at least tried to answer on your own - read ESR's article if that makes you in the least bit indignant!

I make myself available on lists and IM for questions. I try very hard to be polite and tolerant and patient when I'm fielding a constant stream of questions. Sometimes I don't succeed but if you read that article you should get a sense of why I might sometimes be a bit sharper in my reply than you would like!

I went a long, long time before I added a wishlist to my blog (and I've stated several times very publicly that I will never, ever add paid advertising to my site). That said, an iTunes gift certificate makes me much, much, much more tolerant and patient and much more inclined to answer questions that I may think you haven't tried hard enough to answer yourself!

Anyway, read the article - if it offends you, read it again. Once it stops offending you, absorb all the hints and tips on how to get answers faster - and then look at the various mailing lists and forums you're on and you'll see why some posters are ignored (if they're lucky) or answered with rude retorts.

Newbies are always welcome, "lusers" are not (read ESR's article for commentary on that).

Assuming I live to 90, I'm officially middle-aged today. Thank you to all the Plaxo and Skype users who sent me birthday wishes - a very nice inbox surprise!

My wife is away in Kelso, WA judging a cat show so I'm home alone, kitten-sitting. We had three new kittens on Tuesday. If you're on Facebook, I uploaded five pictures into a "Kittens" album on my profile page.

So I'll probably spend my birthday doing one of the things I enjoy most: coding :)

After a very uneventful direct flight, I'm here at CFUNITED, in the User Group Managers' meeting, listening to Adam Bell talk about how to run a user group for "free".

I'm in room 401 if anyone needs to contact me, or you can use my SkypeIn number: (904) 302-SEAN (forwarded to my cell phone... which I actually remembered this time!).

As many of you noticed (or not?), my site was offline pretty much all of today. A couple of people notified early in the day that there was a problem but I'm used to the occasional outage on a shared host so I didn't think anything of it at first. All the same, I sent an email to HostMySite support asking "wassup?" but instead of the usual (polite, helpful) email response, I got a phone call.

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.

Apple just released Safari 3 Public Beta and it is now available for both Mac and Windows! So I'm blogging this from Safari running on Vista running on Parallels running on OS X... Er...

Oh, yes, I bought Vista Ultimate to run on Parallels. More on that in due course but, compared to Windows XP, it's dog slow and constantly chewing up CPU.

I'll be reachable on my SkypeIn number - (904) 302-SEAN - which will be routed to a borrowed cell phone (my wife's - I haven't got around to getting my own cell phone since losing my Adobe number and I don't want to give out my wife's number). It'll be an interesting experiment to see how Skype's call forwarding actually works in practice.

---

Ahem... Well, it would be if I'd actually remembered to borrow the darn phone! So, SkypeIn and Skype voice mail it is. I'll be checking for messages as often as connectivity allows.

Realizing that my main layout was partially table-based after CSS Naked Day '07, I switched to a pure CSS layout tonight. I changed to a three column layout, placing primary blog navigation on the left, with everything else on the right. I also got rid of that terrible old picture of me - now you get a great photograph of Coit Tower with Alcatraz in the background courtesy of my friend (and ex-Macromedia colleague) Vern Viehe, a name some of you may remember.

Today was my last day at Adobe. It's the first company I've worked at that has official "exit interviews" so this afternoon I sat down with a nice, friendly HR person who walked me through what would happen with all of my benefits and what my continuance options were. Then I sat down with my (recently appointed) manager and went over some more logistics and handed back all my company assets. Then he walked me out around 4pm. It's all been very friendly and amicable and I hope I've documented everything necessary to ensure my former team members have a nice, smooth transition. They know how to contact me if necessary!

It was a somewhat odd feeling walking out of those doors for the last time as an employee. It's been an interesting (and sometimes wild) ride over the last seven years and I'm going to miss the people, the enthusiasm and the great way the company treats all its employees. If you get a chance to work at Adobe, I'd highly recommend them.

I'll be back in the Adobe building as a visitor on the 24th, when Ben Forta brings the Scorpio roadshow to San Francisco. Don't forget to RSVP on the BACFUG website for that must-see event!

And moving forward I will become a customer of Adobe. By pure coincidence, I bumped into a long-time colleague in the enterprise sales division this morning and let him know I was leaving but that I would be contacting him in due course to buy some ColdFusion Enterprise licenses.

So, see you at BACFUG, see you at cf.Objective() and see you at CFUNITED!

A bit late in the day (hey, I've been in meetings nearly all day!) but I saw Andy Jarrett mention CSS Naked Day and commented out my CSS files...

Hmm, I smell tables... but that's what you get for a very old BlogCFC version converted into Fusebox 4.1 (originally) I guess.

I don't know how many folks out there have my current cell phone number but it will no longer be valid after Thursday April 5th. I will eventually get a new cell phone(!) but wanted to let folks know you can contact me via my Skype number (bottom of the right hand column on my blog).

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!)

A couple of people complained that my "wishlist" link for iTunes Gift Certificates was going to the wrong place and making it hard for people to buy me music...

After digging around on the Apple store, I eventually found the right page. So I updated my "wishlist" link. Hopefully no one will complain now...

Simeon Bateman likes his Mac interface the way it is but points folks to my entry about tweaking. So I figured I'd show folks what my current desktop actually looks like:

(click for bigger image)

You can see the cascading transparent menus with image preview (the Scorpio wallpaper), the row of minimized windows across the top of the screen, the "Cold" theme applied to the UI.

I joined Macromedia on July 17th, 2000 so I've been at the company nearly seven years now. I've seen a lot of changes in that time and a lot of product releases. Most everything was at release 4 or 5 back then and now most Macromedia / Adobe products are 4 or 5 releases further down the line. ColdFusion has grown dramatically over that time, from the final C++-based release - the first Macromedia-branded release - in CF5 to the much-anticipated Scorpio "8" release this year. Flash has grown up from a "Skip Intro" animation toy to a serious virtual machine platform for building heavy duty applications. Web Services have become "the norm". New products such as Flex and Apollo and Spry have appeared, bringing Rich Internet Application goodness to "the masses". Time flies on the Internet.

On April 5th, I leave Adobe for new ventures and new challenges. I will be taking on a new role as CTO of a local startup, Scazu Inc., which will be offering interesting new ways of interacting within the sphere of the health and wellness industry (ColdFusion-powered, of course). I will also be available for consulting work, two to three days a week - something that my full-time job at Macromedia / Adobe kept me too busy to entertain.

Macromedia (and Adobe) has been very good to me - I've made a lot of friends over the years and I love the technology. Now it is time to depart the mothership and scratch that seven year itch.

I hope to be even more active in the community than in the past, evangelizing the technologies that keep us all in business and - now my time is more flexible - helping others be successful with those technologies.

I was having a discussion with a friend about consulting and hourly rates and they bemoaned how hard it is to keep track of exactly what you're doing all the time when you're working on per-hour billing. Off the top of my head, that sounded like a problem that could be solved with an IM bot (assuming you're always online!) and noticed that you can add Google Calendar to IMified and tell it to add events "in 0 minutes" which allows you to track ongoing activity.

What do folks use for time tracking that's unobtrusive and fits in with our busy lives as developers?

My 17" MacBook Pro arrived today. Last time I switched laptops, I did the entire migration manually and it took me several days to get everything across and running properly. This time I decided to try the "easy" route using a FireWire cable and Apple's "Migration Assistant"...

Unpack the MBP, plug it in, connect an ethernet cable, power up. The whole welcome experience is just so beautiful and warm and fuzzy that you instantly feel good - Apple have this so right!

Do you want to migrate files from another Mac? Yes. Connect the FireWite cable, restart the other Mac and hold down the T key. Continue. Transferring files. Time passes.

Up comes the new system, fully configured to exactly match the old system. Wow! That was easy. 60Gb+ of files and settings migrated without manual intervention.

It's not quite perfect. Apollo didn't migrate so I had to reinstall that. MySQL didn't migrate either so I just copied /usr/local manually from the old laptop. iCal crashed when it was opened. Odd. Ran a Software Update (to 10.4.9 plus a bunch of other stuff). iCal works just fine now. Parallels wouldn't start either so I had to reinstall that but all my VMs and settings were still intact. Everything else seems to be running just fine.

A very pleasant experience - thank you Apple!

As my iTunes collection gets larger and the number of open source projects I work on grows, it gets harder to share space on my work laptop so I just took the plunge to buy a laptop for me. After a lot of deliberation - and negotiation with my "financial controller" (aka "wife") - I settled on a 2.33GHz 17" MacBook Pro with 3Gb RAM, the glossy screen and the 160Gb HD. We've been planning to buy a new Mac for Jay for a while so I also added a 2.16GHz 20" iMac with 2Gb RAM and the 250Gb HD. We also decided to try the Airport Extreme Base Station which brings together high-speed wireless with a multi-port router and a networked USB port. That'll make it easier for us to share our myriad USB devices over the network. In theory. I'll post more about how this holds up in reality in due course.

You may not be aware but, for several years, I've maintained a "bookstore" on my site, which lists my "recommended reading" on various software (and non-software) topics. For a long time, I was a Barnes & Noble affiliate and all of the links on the bookstore pointed to the B&N site with my affiliate code in the links. It was never very lucrative and the B&N affiliate system was a royal PITA at the best of times. They've just announced a big change to their program and I'd already had a couple of notes from people saying some of my book links were broken so I decided to swap out all the B&N links to Amazon and drop the whole idea of affiliate incentives.

If you visit my bookstore now, you'll just get my recommendations, without any incentives on my part, and links to Amazon. Enjoy!

I initially saw this on Ryan Stewart's RIA blog and then again on Aaron West's TrajikyHip blog: the next version of Trillian, codenamed Astra, will be based on Flash and will also have a desktop client that provides integration with the host operating system - possibly even cross-platform. I was a long-time fan of Trillian, back when I was using Windows, but they didn't have a Mac version so I had to switch to Fire and then Adium X. Via the Trillian site, you can apply to the alpha program - I've signed up for testing the new Mac client.

I think it's very interesting to see projects like this switching from proprietary architectures that are locked into a single operating system to a de facto cross-platform standard - that is based on an open source virtual machine - as a way to not only reach other platforms but also, according to the buzz around Astra, to improve performance.

Creating a desktop client like this also validates Adobe's approach with Apollo, bringing Flash (and HTML) applications to the desktop in an integrated, cross-platform manner. It's not clear how Trillian is achieving their desktop presence - details are very sketchy right now - but this would be an ideal use case for Apollo and should seed this concept in a lot of minds.

Update: Google just reactivated my account after about 72 hours and three or four emails from me to their support team.

We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The issue you described should now be resolved.

However, please be advised that we have received reports regarding unsolicited messages sent from your account.

I'm following up on the latter but this should at least offer hope for others who have had their accounts disabled.

---

Update: It's still disabled. Google have not responded to my emails about it.

In the meantime you can reach me via sean.anthony.corfield (at gmail dot com) for Gtalk. But, as usual, personal emails should always go to my corfield.org, never to the Gmail accounts which I use purely for mailing lists.

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For no good reason, my Gmail account (seancorfield) was disabled this morning (18th). Searching around the Google site uncovered that over the last few days many, many hundreds of users have also been locked out of their accounts. In one thread, someone quotes a Google employee as saying:

Hi all, We have been investigating these disables and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. Be advised that we received reports regarding unsolicited messages sent from many of the accounts that were disabled. We are investigating accounts in accordance with Gmail's Program Policies and your account may remain disabled or be re- enabled as a result. Gmail's Program Policies (http://mail.google.com/gmail/help/ program_policies.html) prohibit the use of Gmail accounts for sending unsolicited messages, or spam.

Seems like a massive SNAFU on Google's part, given the volume of complaints on their forums in the last few days. Hopefully they'll get their act together and fix the problem soon.

What is really frustrating is that you can't even get through their Contact Us form without all sorts of information from your original Gmail invite. Since that came to me a couple of computers ago, I no longer have that data.

Not sure how many of you are using the SkypeOut part of Skype's service but I thought I'd point out that for a (very) limited time, you can get unlimited US/Canada calling for only $14.95 for a year. I've started using SkypeOut more and more lately because it's just so darn convenient and this seemed like a good deal to me. You also get just over an hour of additional international credit when you sign up for the unlimited calling plan.

Tim Buntel start the developer persona meme (for a serious purpose so please check out his blog and comments) but it's inspired several people to blog about their own persona using his data points. Since it's Friday, I figured I'd waste some electrons by doing the same.

• 44 years old.
• Married for 7 years, no children (but lots of cats!).
• Drives a 2005 Toyota Prius, gold.
• Bought a house five and a half years ago, "ranch" style on a quarter acre... of suburbia. Decorations are non-existent (unless you count cat trees).
• Loves Macs (a Macaholic since the early 90's). Hates Windows with a vengeance.
• Thinks the Oscars are a waste of time because fun stuff like Over The Hedge never wins.
• Into Heroes, Medium and CSI and tries hard to hate Dancing With The Stars but still watches it.
• Likes snowboarding, but since he moved close enough to the mountains that he could go any weekend, hasn't been snowboarding even once!
• Food? Sushi, curry (hard to find good curry in America).
• Music? Still loves The Fall but thinks most modern music is rubbish.
• Doesn't get videogames or video websites at all. Occasionally gets sucked into a Sudoku website.

I'm taking a few days off to help some friends in Montana - we'll be working on their house.

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

Just saw this great quote mentioned on The Server Side:

There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful.

Like Jared, I like snakes. A friend of his in Arizona has put one of her snakes up for "pet of the month". Read Jared's blog entry where he explains why it would be cool for Chu'a to win the contest instead of yet another dog... (and he gives the link to vote in the contest).

Michael Dinowitz has an interesting piece about monitors and productivity on Fusion Authority. I've never tried three monitors - my standard setup is two (one built-in and one external) with the external monitor being 19". Since Fusion Authority doesn't allow comments, feel free to leave comments here about your preferred monitor setup and what makes you productive.

I love Brian Eno's work! I loved what he did with Roxy Music in the early days, I loved his solo stuff (well, almost all of it) and I love most of what I've seen of his artwork to date. I also have Eno's Oblique Strategies as a dashboard widget and enjoy the random thoughts it brings.

Eno's latest project is 77 Million Paintings and you can read about the man and his art in his profile on Apple's website. [via John Nack]

Recommendations: Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy); Music For Films (volume 1); The Drop.

As you probably realized, I'm back from my (hectic) vacation in England and France. I've cleared my backlog of (4,000) emails. Really.

After the Mitsubishi commercial, I was keen to retrieve some of my Fall albums from the UK (I left my 2,000 CD collection behind when I moved over to California). I brought back just under 20 Fall CDs. It was a tough choice (I left about 30 behind for future visits). I've just ripped them into iTunes... 18 hours, 1Gb. Of course I've been playing a few of the tracks as I imported them... I really do love this band!

I'm off on vacation and won't be dealing with comment moderation for a week or so. I get a lot of sp@m comments so if you post a comment between now and my return, be warned that it may get lost in the sp@m and deleted accidentally although I'll try not to!

Happy Thanksgiving (in advance!).

...appear as theme music in a TV commercial?

The latest Mitsubishi Outlander commercial "Out-..." uses a driving piece of music that had me sitting bolt upright going "Omigod! It can't be!!! That's The Fall!!!"... A bit of 'net research revealed that it is indeed The Fall - "Blindness" from "Fall Heads Roll", released late last year.

I've been a major fan of The Fall since their first utterings in the late 70's ("Live At The Witch Trials" and "Dragnet") and I've seen them live countless times (including one extremely dodgy performance at Dingwalls in Camden). They are, in my opinion, the most groundbreaking band of the last few decades although their output over the last few years has mostly been a steady stream of re-issued bootleg recordings (of extremely variable quality) that span their career.

So I rushed over to iTunes and bought "Fall Heads Roll". Only to find that the track listing is a little confused. Fortunately, Amazon has the correct track listing so I was easily able to rename the errant tracks in iTunes (right-click, Get Info, select the Info tab and update the track name). It's a great album!

"Blindness" (track 7, despite iTunes' insistence this is track 2 - which is actually "Pacifying Joint") is a storming track with hints of "Chicago, Now!" from "Extricate" ("Do you work hard?"). I'm really pleased to hear this on TV commercial!

While I was there (in the iTunes store), I saw another recent album by The Fall that I didn't yet own ("Real New Fall Album") so that had to go in the cart too...

If you've never heard of The Fall (now-deceased British DJ John Peel's favorite band), you owe it to yourself to check them out...

In November, my wife starts judging (cats) and we'll be off to Arcadia (SoCal) and then Bourges, France via England. It'll be a bit of a whirlwind tour so we won't have much time to meet up with people for beer or, heaven forbid, CFUGs.

Jay Bangle (USA) aura la charge de juger les bengals participant à cette spéciale. Mrs Bangle est une spécialiste de cette race qu'elle élève depuis 1994.

(Bengal Exposition).

I try really hard not to have political rants here but the latest anti-87 television ad has me fuming!

You should vote "no" apparently because... wait for it... this proposed law is... full of... WORDS. Yes, that's the main complaint in the latest television ad. The proposition is full of "legally-binding words".

Shock! Horror! A proposed law is made up of words and it would be legally binding. I never knew that about laws. Wow!

To be honest, 87 isn't the only victim of this sort of stupidity. Almost all of the propositions on the ballot next week have suffered from incredibly dumb, insulting television ads both pro and con.

Jay & I spent many hours on the drive up to Portland last weekend going over the analysts' reviews of the propositions and deciding how we are going to vote. I'm mostly against bond measures, for example, because California is already way to deep in debt... but the Federal matching propositions are less disturbing. Some of the propositions are a slam dunk (85, requiring teens to notify parents about pregnancy is a resounding "no" - it would put some teens in a much worse position with violent / abusive parents; 86, raising the cost of tobacco is a resounding "yes" - I don't care where the extra tax goes if the increased cost helps stop people smoking) but others are really hard to call. We had to read the actual wording of the proposed laws on a couple of propositions to be able to form any opinion at all!

And Prop 87? It's a great idea but a terribly flawed proposition. I want greener energy and less dependence on foreign oil... but I want a much better thought out law to help that happen. 87 is a badly thought out proposition.

After seeing a flurry of blog posts about IE7 and how folks should rush out and download it, David Fekke is one of the first to post a caution that it might actually - shock! horror! - break some websites!

I think a lot of enterprise-level corporates will be very wary of IE7 because they typically have applications that are Win/IE specific and/or have browser plugins and I'll bet money that many of those will break horribly in IE7.

Like everyone else, I get a lot of sp*m in my inbox. A friend of mine in England collects some of the best sp*m and treats it as poetry written by "Digi-Shakespeare".

I recently received a slew of sp*m that is a blend of technical terms and random nonsense but this one entry I kept around because... well... I think it reads like poetry...

I'm putting behind a More... link so you only have to read it if you want to...

[More]

Vince Bonfanti continues his line of reasoning about the future of ColdFusion, based not on official Adobe position statements but on my personal opinions expressed here in this blog:

I think it's reasonable, though, to make a number of assumptions: (a) Sean is probably in regular communication with the CFMX development team; (b) Sean probably knows which features are in and which are not in Scorpio (CF8); and, (c) while I believe Sean's opinion's are sincerely held, I doubt he'd ever say anything publicly that knowingly contradicts the official Adobe position (what employee of any company would?).

Perhaps I should add the same disclaimer Ben Forta has on his blog:

NOTE: This my personal blog, and the opinions and statements voiced here are my own.

So, let's see if Vince's assumptions are correct:

• a. Yes, I am in fairly regular communication with the ColdFusion development team I guess. I forward them questions from customers. I occasionally file enhancement requests. I ask their opinion on something that I'm trying to do if I can't get it to work right. That's definitely a benefit of being an Adobe employee.
• b. No, I don't know much about what features are or are not in Scorpio. I know some, obviously, but nowhere near as much as Vince assumes. I'm not part of the ColdFusion team so I'm just another ColdFusion developer for the most part. If the product doesn't have feature X, then I can't use feature X - just like anyone else. Having said that, I do get to participate in the prerelease programs so I get as much insight as those other prerelease program participants. And occasionally - very, very occasionally - someone on the ColdFusion team might share a tidbit of information about a feature coming in a later build cycle. All-in-all tho', if it's not a completed, QA'd product feature, I can't use it in a production system - I'm a realist as well as a geek. Future features are interesting but not much use to me today.
• c. No, I've publicly expressed opinions on this blog that are at odds with the official corporate position. Several times. A few times, I've been taken aside and given a bit of a talking to about something I've written. I'm entitled to my opinion. Just because I work for a company doesn't mean I agree with everything it does or rave about every product they make. Most often tho', when I'm expressing an opinion, I don't even know whether the company has an official position on the subject! Macromedia certainly valued the fact that many of its bloggers operated independently and expressed their own opinions - good or bad - about things. I don't know whether Adobe has a position on that but I'd like to think that the atmosphere hasn't changed that much.

And now you might look at this post and wonder why I didn't just comment on Vince's blog explaining this? Some time ago, Vince asked me to never comment on his blog again. He asked that if I had something to say about his blog posts, I should post them on my own blog instead of in comments on his blog...

I never thought to mention this before but I'm a reseller for HostMySite (who host both this site and the On Safari website - the annual "breed national" cat show for Bengals). I keep forgetting that I can now get HMS accounts at a discount and sell them on... until an antipodean friend asked about moving his site to a new hosting company and I remembered that I could sell him an HMS account and save him some money (and make myself a little money in the process).

If you're interested, let me know (via my contact form).

I'm off to Salt Lake City in a few minutes for a cat show and will be off-air until Tuesday. Any comments will have to await moderation until I return so don't think I'm ignoring you! There's lots of interesting blog posts and comments around at the moment that I'll be replying to when I get back.

Pete Freitag highlights a very cool feature of Google Analytics that lets you use JavaScript to track clicks on links for things that would otherwise not be trackable (file downloads, outbound links).

When I get a few minutes (hah!) I'll be adding this to my download links so this post is mostly a reminder to myself but I hope other folks find it useful too...

In November, I'll be visiting the UK. My wife recently became a cat show judge and has her first two judging assignments in Arcadia, CA and Bourges, France. So I'm taking nearly two weeks off so we can visit friends and family in England and then go on to Paris and then Bourges.

I arrive in England on November 20th and we'll head down to Paris on the 23rd I expect. Then on to Bourges on the 24th for the Southern European Regional Awards Show and Banquet. Bourges to Paris to London on the 27th and fly home on the 28th.

Not sure if I can fit a CFUG talk in while I'm there but feel free to ping me offline about the possibility.

'nuff said...

Wow! I have been so careful and so suspicious of URLs over the years and I've really tried hard to avoid anything that doesn't look right in terms of web pages etc. Tonight I got an IM from a colleague with a link that looked interesting that lead me to a sign-in page for a service I've used for years. I signed in and was presented with another sign-in page. Uh-oh! Sure enough, looking at the first link it really didn't look right but I hadn't noticed.

A frantic round of password changing and I think I'm relatively safe but it's made me even more paranoid than I was before.

It's made me realize just how many online services I've signed up for and how many passwords I have out there. After years of happy online shopping, I've suddenly become very, very nervous about entering my password...

My father retired quite a number of years ago and he's long been a composer of occasional pieces for his own amusement. Over the last few years he's written a couple of dozen short piano pieces and he made a CD of them as a present for me for Yule last year. I promised him I'd put them up on the 'net at some point so other folks could hear them.

I've finally gotten around to that! 20 Piano Pieces by John Corfield. Enjoy!

We got the notification this morning that the TICA board (The International Cat Association) voted to approve Jay's application to become a probationary specialty judge, the first of four tiers of judging. As those who know us well probably understand, we're very excited about this!

To get to this stage you have to pass a six-month open-book exam (180 questions, mostly essay style) and complete at least 40 hands-on training sessions with other cat show judges, followed by four solo judging rings under supervision. That's at least 22 two-day cat shows and a proportion of them have to be at least 500 miles from home. Jay started her exam in May 2004 and we did a lot of traveling in 2005 for all those shows!

To be eligible to take the exam in the first place, you have to have been a TICA member for at least five years and bred a number of championship level cats in multiple categories as well as exhibited cats in a certain number of shows, become a certified ring clerk, acted as entry clerk (several times), master clerk (several times) and show manager.

The path from probationary specialty is: approved specialty then provisional allbreed and finally approved allbreed. Hopefully Jay will reach that point around 2010!

I love my wife very much and I'm very proud of her - she's worked incredibly hard to get to this point and it's very much her dream. I'm very happy that I can support her in achieving her dream!

A timely coincidence: Ryan Hartwich offers his thoughts about the value of conferences on Fusion Authority, just as I excuse myself from MAX. Adam Lehman will be taking over my Fusebox section of the frameworks debate and one of my colleagues will be taking over my partner summit sessions.

I have a personal conflict on the Thursday, the day of the partner summit, and since someone from my team will have to replace me there, I can't justify going because my team just has too much going on around that time.

I've been very lucky over the last few years to attend a lot of conferences - mostly to speak at them - even though it hasn't been core to my job. When you speak at CFUNITED, for example, and get all of your material in on time, your room is paid for which substantial lowers your budget. I've had to justify only the flight costs - and the time off work. Yes, time off. When I'm at a conference, I'm not "working" and that is a cost, just as Ryan points out, even for fully-funded employees.

I've said more than once that ColdFusion community work and conferences are "not my job" but this year the rubber hits the road and MAX is out, as is the upcoming TeraTech frameworks conference (likely January 2007, either in Florida or DC). Beyond that, I can't say... CFUNITED 2007 is probably out but I will make cf.Objective() 2007 even if I have to pay for that out of my own pocket and take vacation time to attend!

Windows XP just alerted me that Java 5 Update 8 is available so I figured I'd go ahead and install it and was quite surprised that the Java installer offered me the Google Toolbar (pre-checked) and the Google Desktop (not checked). I don't have any feelings on the "bundled offer" one way or another, just thought it was interesting...

Or why my site was offline for a day...

This page speaks volumes... Lou Honick, CEO of HostMySite, has sent a long, explanatory email to all their customers. The emergency page linked above was regularly updated throughout the day and that, combined with Lou's email, makes me feel very good about HostMySite. I've found them to be very attentive and helpful whenever an issue has cropped up with my site and I have to say I'm very satisfied with their service.

I just received my third juror summons since I moved to Castro Valley in Alameda county. The first couple of times I excused myself because I was "not qualified" (not a U.S. citizen). So I was actually quite excited when I got my third summons and could actually participate!

However, the date doesn't mesh well with my current workload so I have to postpone for about six months. I was disappointed and was about to fill in the form when I noticed that I could submit my request online! Yes, Alameda county have an e-juror system!

I guess not too many people are using it right now because the user experience is pretty sucky in many, many ways. It cries out for a Flex user interface! It ought to be a fairly simple process but it forces you through a very unnatural process in order to get both a home phone number and an email address entered, then when you ask to defer, it doesn't give you any hints about what date is acceptable... my first choice was exactly six months in the future. Submit. Refresh. Not acceptable - must be less than six months. So I picked the day before. Submit. Refresh. Not acceptable - that's a Sunday. Sigh. Why not popup a calendar that only allows you to pick valid dates??

And why can't I enter a work phone number? They have a field for it but you are never offered the option to modify it!

Updated 8/5/2006 - notifications fixed.

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I've finally gotten so sick of those unpleasant comment sp@mm$rs that I've implemented moderation on comments on this blog.

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.

I've been using Skype quite a bit for calls out to phones and I'm pretty impressed. I even called my mum in England - the quality was great and it was just 1.7 Euro "cents" (?) per minute which is less than I was paying through Working Assets.

I've started putting my SkypeIn number in my email signature and I've added it to my blog (below the Skype drop-down in the right hand column). So if you don't have Skype (why not?) and want to get in touch with me, you can use the phone: (904) 302-SEAN. It took me a while to find a SkypeIn number with my name in it (7326) and this area code had the most memorable prefix... it's Jacksonville, FL!

Speak to you soon?

I've had a Skype account (seancorfield) for quite a while and my blog has had a Skype drop-down to make it easy to contact me, leave me voicemail etc.

For a while I've been tempted to get SkypeIn (a phone number that routes to Skype on my desktop wherever I am) and SkypeOut (the ability to call any phone number from Skype on my desktop and pay only two cents a minute worldwide). I finally decided to take the plunge this weekend and add those services. On Jared's recommendation, I also bought an Altec Lancing AHS302usb headset / microphone ($38 including delivery from Amazon, due to arrive some time next week).

I generally don't like the phone and avoid calls in favor of chat or email but having started to use a headset on my desk phone at work, I'm finding the phone less intrusive so adding phone services to Skype seems like a good idea now.

Every now and then I just stumble across a favorite album on iTunes. Tonight is one of those nights:

801 Live featuring Phil Manzanera and Brian Eno.

The best version of Tomorrow Never Knows. Ever. And a kickass version of You Really Got Me, as well as some classic Manzanera / Eno stuff (Baby's On Fire, Diamond Head, Third Uncle). Spoil yourself!

Oh, and while you're on iTunes, check out 808 State - another favorite band I only just figured out was on iTunes... 808:88:98 is their best of and a great starting point!

Catching up with podcasts, I was listening to Helms and Peters Out Loud (episode 26, "Groupthink") tonight on the way home and in amongst Hal's ranting about everyone following the herd, a real nugget stood out...

I'd never thought of blogging it before because, well, I just assumed everyone did this...

Jeff Peters said he has a "test" directory in his local development environmnt that he uses to test... no, not code... hypotheses, ideas, concepts. He was talking about how everyone should do this and be able to go "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I did X?" and actually trying it out (instead of perhaps just asking a mailing list).

Since he highlighted this, I figured that maybe not everyone actually does do this and therefore it's worth mentioning.

Seriously, create a "test" or "scratch" directory in your local development environment. Any time you find yourself wondering "what would happen if...?" or "can I do Y?" or "how does framework Z behave if I do this?", just write some code and try it out! Before you post to a mailing list, before you just simply give up because you "don't know the answer". Just. Try. It!

You'll be amazed: you'll find out the answer on your own and you'll be able to post to a mailing list and tell other people what you learned.

I'm not going to pick on anyone by name but I will say this post is actually inspired by a recent raft of posts on some mailing lists asking questions - and often sending somewhat irate follow-up posts a few hours later because no one responded - when a five minute test would have answered the question.

As a community we need to stop being so lazy. If you don't know how something works, don't just fire off a lame question to a mailing list! Those hundreds of other folks are busy with real work too - they're not there to do your job for you! Try it out for yourself. If it works, post the question and the answer. If it doesn't work, then post the question - along with all the details about what you've tried that didn't work.

I really (really!) don't like seeing follow up posts complaining that no one has answered a post when a simple bit of personal detective work could have answered the question in far less time that was spent waiting for an answer.

During the last day or so my blog passed the 1,000,000th page view since I created it in June 2002.

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.

I was saddened to learn today that the madcap founder of Pink Floyd died this week of diabetes, aged 60. His time with the band was relatively short but his impact lasted across most of their classic works. He was a crazed visionary and an inspiration to many.

I've been reading several news reports of his life and death and I think the Mercury News has one of the more interesting and varied pieces of coverage.

I guess he's with Arnold, Emily and Julia and, of course, the terrapins...

July 7th, 1962.

Does that make me "middle-aged"?

Room 718 if anyone needs me (at The Marriott).

Good to know: Las Vegas McCurran airport has free wifi! A two hour layover for America West, OAK / LAS / DCA. No wonder it's a cheap flight!

At least McCurran is smoke-free now although the slot machines still bing and bong and chime constantly.

Time to catch up on email and maybe see if anyone is on IM :)