Well we finally have ITunes 4.9 in all of its podcasting glory. So I have downloaded a couple podcasts and im now looking for podcast recomendations. My main interests are going to be of course developer centric casts, technology, news, internet news, and maybe a little clean comedy. Anyone have any tips? Also, does anyone see how to add your own podcast that you know of thats not in the directory?

Well, its official. I will be presenting on COAL for the Coldfusion Online Meetup Group on July 13th at 12 Eastern / 9 Pacific. Later that day will be the birthday celebrations for Coldfusion, which I am also looking forward to. Some of the things I am going to talk about are things like what COAL is, how you can use COAL as far as solutions and actual code examples; I will talk about how COAL works with the service locator pattern, and also whats next for COAL and its development. I also hope to show you how you can use COAL in your existing frameworks as well, such as mach-ii, model-glue, fusebox, tartan , etc. I promise to make it a entertaining presentation, and hopefully all of you will attend and find out how COAL can be great for you and your projects! You can rsvp at http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/events/4720103/. We already have a few people signing up, and hopefully we will see a lot more! Feel free to contact me with any questions about COAL in the meantime.

WARNING: SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW I am not a movie critic or reviewer very often, but this is a movie that I think deserves some mention. Good parts, parts that needed work, but for the most part, revolutionary. Just got back from a late showing, and I must say I am rather impressed. This is definately a different movie than its predecessors. Everyone seems to forget about DC comics (when was the last superman movie?) with all of the marvel proliferation on the big screen lately, but DC comes through big time with this one and shows they can still run with the big dogs. Thinks I liked about the movie: It had a much more realistic feel to it. The effects were well done, the weapons are much more scientific and realistic (although they mentioned kevlar too many times to count), the scenes weren't surrealistic. Just about everything in the movie was possible in real life, even though highly unlikely. Gotham was viewed in a larger scheme of things, not your usual story line that exists only in the city. Christian Bale was a decidedly different Batman as well. Definately not one of your Kilmers or Clooneys or even Keatons. But it was a refreshing change. The movie certainly focused on showing Batman as Bruce, with human charachteristics and qualities. I've always loved Batman as a superhero cause he's just one of us, just a more trained and devoted one of us. Scarecrow was great, Cillian Murphy played the part very well. Micheal Caine was the perfect alfred as well. What I didn't like: Fight scenes for sure. Not the action scenes, they were great, but the fight scenes. The director had a bad habbit of zooming in to far on the action, so all you saw was bruce or batman being confronted, all of the sudden you just see a bunch of moving shaddows, you can't even tell who is who at all, and then all the bad guys are on the floor and bruce/batman is still standing. Commissioner Gorden just was all wrong, although im going to come back to that at a later time. Gordon really wasn't a comissioner yet, so maybe the pot belly was yet to come. And who the heck is Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman's character)? I definately don't think Ive ever heard or him before. Regardless he did play the part well though. Overall, this was a great movie for DC to come back to basics and restart the whole series over from the beginning. I don't know if thats the plan or not, but I sort of hope so. I want them to redo the joker, two face, ivy, mr. freeze, e.nigma and the crew and all of their movies. If they don't this movie really doesn't fit well for a marathon viewing. Regardless, this is a movie to make sure you see. Oh, and mr. and mrs. smith was awesome too, just not such an opinion maker ;)

Anyone that knows me knows that I have strong feelings towards AOL, and those feelings are hardly ever good. Most of this comes from a time when I was offering support for one of the websites that I was a part of and the majority of users were AOL users, using that poor excuse for a browser. There were millions of problems back then (which I have no idea if those problems still exist or not), not to mention the horror stories I would hear about trying AOL with those 100 hours free cd's that you got in the mail or whatever and they never would cancel the plan, and just keep billing you through the nose. Anyway, thats not what I wanted to talk about. It seems AOL has actually done something right for once... AOL Music's Top 11 Video Countdown Show Flash interface, flash video, and some great music. They have really done it right with this one. At one point while watching American Baby, one of the vj's came on the smaller screen and pointed to the top right and it changed the navigation to what he was talking about. Very cool sync there. So check it out, it may be the last time you hear something good about AOL from me...

I love this page on Mike Davidsons site about invalidation and web standards. He makes some very accurate points about how w3c specs are about more than just validation. I find a lot of people/sites who have banners and buttons and logos all over thier site saying xhmlt/css/xml/rss/yada yada yada strict validated, but they have no real content to speak of because they have spent all their time with a validator instead of producing any content. There is something to be said for writing good, maintainable, rule following code, but there is also something that should be said about spending too much time on things that dont really matter. I say if it breaks in a browser, fix it, if it throws a warning because you forgot to specify an empty alt text on a non content image, get over it.

Pete Freitag posted to is blog a while back about Apache mod_rewrite for IIS and he mentions three commercial options. But surely someone, somewhere out there knows of a solution that is free, and easy to use? I just keep seeing all those sexy urls with no question marks and wishing I could do something like that for my projects.

Well, after about a week of working with flexbuilder, I think I've had about as much as I can take. Random crashes, long pauses when opening or closing files, auto complete that works randomly, and some very strange things that happen with carriage returns has made me switch to just writing mxml with no color coding or code hinting in dreamweaver mx 2004. So, does anyone know of a dreamweaver extension that allows for code coloring and code hints for mxml and AS in dreamweaver mx 2004? It just need something to hold me over till zorn comes out I guess. Addendum: Note that this entry was referring to the original flexbuilder, the one built on dreamweaver's core. The new eclipse version of fb2 is awesome...

I know someone that reads this will know what im talking about. Around a year ago, maybe more, I remember watching a video session on Sun where they were talking about an operating system they were building in Java. I am thinking it was called something-glass, like looking glass, or something similar. They were showing demos in the presentation, and it was a completely 3-d system, you could flip things over and have complete transparency, a lot of the things like what the new os x has in it. I just cannot think of the name of it for the life of me, and can't seem to find anything on Sun's website... Update: Nevermind, I found it. It is called Looking Glass, you can find more info here: http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/

I invite all of you to check out KDESIS a blog that some coworkers and I have just started to keep track of our progress as we develop an application for the Kentucky Department of Education. We will be building a web application with Coldfusion, Flex and mySQL, as well as a few other technologies, and will be posting about our challenges, our solutions, and our overall observances as we progress through the project. We are developing a Student Information System, that will keep track of all Kentucky Students, their schedules, their grades, their extra-curricular programs, disciplinary reports and much much more. It has been aggregated now by MXNA as well, so you should be seeing it there as well. It should be a wild ride, and we will most certainly be learning a lot along the way!

I haven't seen this in the aggregators yet, so I thought I would post this here. Of course, everyone already knows that Apple is moving to the Intel processor, and many (including me) have read synopsis of the keynote, but you can now watch the keynote address in quicktime from Apple.

Potential partners for geeks need to read this. Link Via: devnulled.com: Emily Hambridge writes about her observations while dating a developer. As Brandon suggests, some of the advice is limited to her and her situation. But it is something I am definately going to forward to my girlfriend. :) For the record, I dont think I have the first geek shirt, but I do relate to the dedication to work.

Well, two days into my Flex run and I have got to say im loving it. I am picking it up quite quickly, and even though I have been focused on coldfusion tag based syntax for several years now, I find im picking emca style actionscript up quite easily too. Learning all of the constructs and features of the language is going to be my hardest part. I have done several examples and tutorials around the web, mostly macromedia. If anyone has any tutorials they can point me to, please let me know! As far as my "Developing Rich Clients with Macromedia Flex" book, it may be that i'm not far enough into it yet, but it isn't quite what I expected. From what I have read so far, it seems to be more of a broad overview of the code and ideas behind flex, not so much a book of tutorials and syntax examples to get you started. And there are a few items in the book that arent acurate, im not sure if they are related to the difference between 1.0 and 1.5 or not. For instance, in the book at one point it mentions this code: which throws an error. this code: does work though. I'm not giving up on the book yet though, it will still offer good information regardless. As far as flex goes though, im nothing short of amazed. Rapid development is an understatement. There are a few things that are bugging me, like the debugging information, or the lack thereof. I guess im just used to coldfusion and its great error reporting. The whitelist seems to be giving me fits as well, some of the examples that come with flex wont even work; im especially having trouble with some named http-service's. But so far, having only been in it for a couple days, I can definately say my flex future looks bright. Again, if anyone has any resources or tutorials they can point me to, bring em on!

Adobe refiles Macromedia antitrust papers. Basically, and Im not sure how this works, but Adobe has pulled its current application and refiled it, so that the US Dept. of Justice can have more time to think about if Adobe will be a monopoly if the deal with Macromedia goes through. Adobe is doing this voluntarily, and still expects it to happen this fall, but im not sure thats not just stock investor sugar coating. Guess we will see, as another page turns in this saga. I would imagine something like this must at least slow the process down, I mean, isn't taking more time for it to happen the whole reason Adobe is refiling?

I just received my copy of Developing Rich clients with Macromedia Flex, as well as the CFMX 7 WACK. I already had the advanced WACK and its great. I ordered from amazon less than 36 hours ago and the books have been at my house all morning. Ill never choose anything besides the free express saver shipping! So, as I start my journey into flex, are there any words from the wise that anyone can offer?

Does anyone know of a very simple, very explanatory guide to installing flex? The flex server in general is fine, although a guide to installing it with coldfusion would be even better. I have read this: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flex/1/flexforcf.html and the basic instructions: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flex/1/install.html but they are somewhat over my head. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Well, last week was just not my week for installing servers. I started out the beginning of the week trying to get cfmx 7 installed as multi-server or j2ee server on my development laptop, so I could then install flex on top of it and be able to request .mxml files the same way I request .cfm files. (if it is not true that you have to install things that way in order to do that, please let me know). But no dice. cfmx 7 never would install correctly, flex most certainly not. I finally got everything back to normal by installing cfmx 7 back to the laptop as a normal server option (the first option in the list). Then we tried to update our dedicated production server to 7 as well. I tried over 14 times in two days, 7 of those after we completely reinstalled the os, every combination of things we could think of. Still no dice. I could not even get the normal version installed there. I was getting all sorts of errors from just the webservice connectors not being installed, jrun just flat out not working, The cf server would install but not start, the odbc services were not even being installed, I was getting error messages saying something about a licenseservice and you name it. I suppose I will be viligent and try again, I know how much the new features of 7 are worth it. But if any of these troubles ring a bell for any of you guys, please let me know if you have any suggestions.

I may be going crazy here, but I am almost certain in cfmx 6.1 you could NOT nest cfoutput tags correct? Well it looks like you can in cfmx 7. I was looking at some code that wasn't throwing an error today and noticed I had accidentaly nested them. I refreshed a couple of times because I knew it should be throwing an error but it never did. If I took out one of the closing tags it would throw an error, so I knew both sets were working. Was this something that changed in cfmx 7 or has it always been this way?