We'll be back in September with Seth Duffey and image manipulation.

As the announcement on the Fusebox website states, my work commitments have gradually taken me further and further away from Fusebox over the last year. Although I managed to get Fusebox 5.5 out the door in December followed by a maintenance release in March of this year, I have not been able to make any headway on my plans for 5.6, which was supposed to have been in public alpha around CFUNITED.

Adam has been a dedicated Fusebox user for four years and has closely followed the development of Fusebox 5.x. He's an experienced architect and I'm very pleased to have someone of his caliber step up and carry the torch for the Fusebox community.

I will stay on the Fusebox 5 mailing list (on Yahoo! Groups) for a while to answer questions about the transition and I will drop into the forums about once a week but I expect to drop off Team Fusebox and all Fusebox-related mailing lists and forums by early September.

Adam and I are in constant IM contact so the transition should be very smooth (and he already has full access to Trac and SVN).

I have a bunch of data in a database encrypted via ColdFusion and I need to figure out the exact Java equivalent so that I can encrypt / decrypt across application boundaries.

The ColdFusion code uses encrypt() / decrypt() with DESEDE and a hex encoding. I know the key value (duh!) but I can't figure out the exact same Java equivalent code.

Anyone know?

I'm not much of a sports fan so it doesn't give me any incentive to download Silverlight but my wife wrestled with the installer yesterday and spent fifteen minutes cussing Microsoft over the installation process (she's no fan of Microsoft these days after several years on a Mac where the only software that crashes regularly is MS Office).

Has the MSNBC Olympics coverage caused you to install Silverlight? What did you think?

Go on over to Mashable where they are running a poll about Silverlight and the Olympics to see whether people like the Silverlight experience or whether they prefer the Adobe Flash Player experience!

Over the last two years, they've changed the URL patterns and had numerous bouts of downtime on WebDAV. It was free, it was unsupported, it was only marginally annoying.

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This is the fifth roundtable format episode and I was fortunate enough to be part of the discussion. The CFConversations blog entry covers the content in more detail than I want to go into here. Suffice it to say the discussion covered a lot of ground, from the free training offered by bFusion and bFlex in Indiana in early September to hiring CF developers to "Centaur" and the CFML Advisory Committee to SQL injection and CFUNITED (again). And an announcement from myself and Adam Haskell that the podcast seems to have scooped because someone else hasn't gotten around to making the announcement at the end of July like they promised! :)

Thank you Ray!

Moral: always use cfqueryparam!

Feel free to browse around and, if you want to participate in the forums or ideas exchange, register as a user on the site (it's free of course!).

The site is powered by the Broadchoice Collaboration Platform and runs on Adobe ColdFusion (despite the lack of .cfm in the URLs).

So what does it mean for me, Joe, Brian, Ray and Nico in terms of our personal blogs? Well, posts that relate specifically to what we're doing at Broadchoice will appear on The ArgumentCollection and posts that are more general - or more personal - will continue to appear on our own blogs. We may also post additional commentary on our own blogs, referring to a core technical post on The ArgumentCollection.

We're hoping that the Broadchoice engineering team blog becomes a valuable source of technical information for folks building complex, large-scale systems with ColdFusion, Flex and other complementary technologies. We're also hoping that you all continue to read our own blogs too of course!

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.

Like Joe, Brian was also part of our Global Developer Meetup and, as Joe hints on his blog Brian also survived our somewhat unusual interview process :)

Brian is a great contributor to many online discussions about OO and I'm really looking forward to working alongside him as we all learn from each other on the team.

Brian is taking the engineering lead on our Demand Accelerator product and you'll be hearing more about that on our soon-to-be-launched team blog.

Matt Chotin is asking what non-Flex resources helped you learn this in order to grasp Flex's programming nuances.

If you are a Flex developer these days but had to go through that broader learning curve, comment on his blog post with specific recommendations for books, blogs, websites etc that helped you.

We're planning our next generation services (products) we can't talk much about that. Joe has hinted at the analytics work we're doing but we have a roadmap for three distinct Software-as-a-Service products. We'll be talking more about our products later in the year - stay tuned.

We're adjusting our technology stack to take advantage of performance, power and expressiveness. Again, I can't really talk about what we're doing in detail but I can say that we have more Java and Groovy code in our SVN repository today than we had a few weeks ago. We're still deeply wedded to Adobe ColdFusion but I think this trend toward Java and Groovy - and Spring and Hibernate - will continue. On the other hand, we're adding Flex to our stack now and looking at AIR. We're just diversifying.

We're talking about a Broadchoice team blog where Ray, Joe, Nico, myself and - oh sorry, we can't say yet - will blog about technical issues we hit and (hopefully) solve!

This is all just to say the quietness of my blog is temporary and I expect to be back to full volume soon!

• AIM - I'm not using this as much as I expected but it definitely is useful occasionally (when I'm away from my laptop and need to ask someone a quick question).
• WeatherBug - This has dropped down my list and I may delete it fairly soon.
• AirMe - As suspected, I am taking more photos and using Flickr because of this app!
• Evernote - This has become core to the way I organize my life and work, as has the desktop version!
• People - An occasional app but still useful.
• Dobot Todos - Unused after a week so it was deleted.

• Units - A useful little conversion calculator. It was 99c - cheap enough that it doesn't much matter if I end up not using it.
• Urbanspoon - A free, fun restaurant picker. It uses the accelerometer built into the iPhone to operate a "slot machine" style UI which is a great novelty but the restaurant reviews are actually useful. Recommended if you travel and you like food!
• Shazam - Recommended by lots of people and it will hopefully solve a recurring problem I have of hearing music I like and not knowing what it is! More on this when I've actually used it a few times.
• Sudoku Unlimited - $2.99 - The first app I actually paid for. I'm a sucker for Sudoku and this is a really nice looking app that plays pretty well. Great for keeping boredom at bay in the unlikely event I actually get some free time...

I'm very excited about Joe joining Broadchoice as Systems Architect. I've always enjoyed interacting with Joe on software design and development issues (and socially) so I'm very happy that I can now do that on a daily basis!

Joe's blog post talks about why he joined and what he'll be doing. By the end of his first day on the job, he'd already produced a thought-provoking document on the analytics system that he'll be building with Nicolas (Lierman) and our database specialist, Robert Xiong.

We're a Model-Glue 2 shop right now but we'll be migrating to Model-Glue 3 soon so you can expect several blog posts (from all of us) on that!

Working at Broadchoice just keeps getting better and better! Stay tuned for more hiring news within the next few weeks...