nil desperandum - Adobe

Blog Round up 3 Feb 2009

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 06:08:00 -0700

Errrmmm... Happy New Year! :D Sorry for not keeping up with my blog round-ups.

I've been looking at my HUGE back log of blog entries and thinking I should do a round-up and then being too daunted by the task. So finally last week I decided to go back to the 26th of January and only read those blog entries and round-up from there and then mark everything as read!

Now that have a sensible number of blog entries in Google Reader I'm finally starting to read them again, so here goes nothing!! ;)

New Blog in Google Reader

Not sure how Terry Ryan wasn't already in my blog list, but it came to my attention when I noticed various tweets about Terry being in his first staff meeting at Adobe as an Evangelist. Congrats to Terry on his appointment. I hope his passion to see ColdFusion in Higher Education reaches us here in the UK.

ColdFusion Conference Stuff

Close to home Andy and Kev have been busy promoting Scotch on the Road (if you missed the news, there won't be a Scotch on the Rocks this year!) and asking would you attend SotR in Manchester, announcing the Edinburgh venue and the ticket price! Its been a busy few days for SotR. ;)

If you want to learn a bit more about a small percentage of what ColdFusion can help you develop from your desk, I noticed that a bit further back than the 26th Kristen Scofield announcing ColdFusion eSeminars. At this point you will have missed most of the live performances, but Kristen provides a link to view the recordings.

On other conference new Andy Allan, Peter Bell and Bob Silverberg announced that they would be speaking at cfObjective and Sean Corfield notes that cfObjective have posted the schedule for their May conference.

HTML, CSS and Design

All of the blogs I read tend to be from ColdFusion developers of all flavours, but every one of us has a variety of tasks that we undertake on a daily basis, so they also post articles on these aspects as well.

Dan Wilson posted an interesting article on compressing your CSS to speed up your website.

Semantic HTML seems to have come up in my work day conversations a few times over the last couple of months, so this article on Semantics in HTML5 on alistapart was of interest to me, as well as Beta New's post on the beta release of semantic search engine Sagoon. Personally, the jury is out on Sagoon at the moment.... Perhaps I'm just too used to google...

Ray Camden has posting a couple of interesting articles on jQuery and ColdFusion.

Its alway interesting to read articles on how to do things better and alistapart always seems to deliver - Here's a nice article on advanced javascript debugging.

ColdFusion Techie Stuff

On to the ColdFusion posts I found interesting.

Andy Allan posted an article on bypassing the web server configuration tool. Its something I seem to do all the time, other than to generate the appropriate mod file Apache, but its nice to have a good write up to remind yourself of what to do.

Its stuff I've seen previously in the past, but you never remember and can never seem to find again. Mark Kruger has been writing up all his problems and resolutions whilst using cfhttp. Here are those posts.

Kevin Roche has written a couple of articles on using onMissingMethod() to generate generate getters/setters for an object based on the cfproperty tag. This is actually something that farcry has been doing for a long long time now, but its always interesting to see how new(ish) CF features are being used to implement fun tricks like this.

There's also been a flurry of blog post on how to install the various ColdFusion engines on a variety of environments.

Sean Corfield has posted an article for Railo/CF/BD on Jrun. Matt Woodward and Dave Shuck have posted articles on using Tomcat as the underlying java server. These articles should help you to install any of these java application on to most java servers. (I wish I could find the blog post that reminded its readers that ColdFusion is a Java application!)

Application Updates

A few application updates for you :

Mark Mandel has released an update to ColdDoc

Nathan Mische notes briefly that ColdFire is now listed on the Firebug extensions page

Matt Woodward has posted that Open BlueDragon 1.0.1 has been released.

Podcasts

Not exactly a podcast but Brian Rinaldi and Peter Bell have been continuing their CFArguments. The latest ones being Hibernate or HiberNOT (ColdFusion and ORM) and http://www.remotesynthesis.com/post.cfm/cfargument-state-of-the-fusion.

Kev McCabe has posted the latest in the CFDoc podcasts from the UKCFUG. Andy Allan talks about conferences and Gert Franz talks about Railo.

Other

A couple of other bits and pieces of worth noting:

Kevin Roche posted that his colleague Roger Panton has started a London Adobe Business User Group. Speakers at the first meeting on the 11th will be Claude Englebert from Adobe EMEA, David McLean of PJ Media and Roger himself.

Sargeway has highlighted the online Flash Media Server user group. Given some of the work I've been involved in recently I've just joined myself and now I need to have a read through the various discussions.

A blast from the past dropped into my email from Joost the other - the cartoon TrapDoor. There are 10 episodes on Joost for you to watch. It really is as good as I remember it being!

Blog Round up 5 Nov 2008 - The Software release edition

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:18:48 -0700

The marathon blog round-up! 390 blog entries to have a read through!
A lesson in never leave a job you should be doing today/tonight until tomorrow!

I'm never going to be able to go through all those posts in one sitting so I'm going to start with the batch of software releases that have been going on the last few weeks.

So lets dive in!

Matt Woodward notes that Open Office 3.0, which I mentioned previously in my round posts, has been released.

Nathan Mische has updated ColdFire on RIAForge fixing a few bugs and an extension for a problem with json. I'd love to know how he comes up with his version numbers. :)

Ray Camden released version 1.5 of SpoolMail with a couple of feature enhancements. If you don't know what SpoolMail is - its handy for when you're developing email feature in application and need to see what is going into the mail queue without them actually have to be sent to real people.

Ted Patrick announced the release of Flash Player 10 and gives a quick overview of the new features. Matt Woodward notes that the Linux edition of FP10 was actually released at the same time, which is a rare event!

Transfer 1.1 Final was release by Mark Mandel. If you're stuck with a pre v1 copy of Transfer you really must get updated to the 1.1 version. The performance enhancements are superb, along with the addition of new features such as cache monitoring and object proxies and the stack of bug fixes makes this release a must. If you're on the transfer list you may have noticed me making a bit of a tit of myself, but finally something has clicked and I've spent the last few days having the most fun doing development than I have in a while. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy writing CFML, but its always nice to do something that is different to your usual routine and makes you feel all warm inside. ;oD I should probably note here that Mark Mandel has done a CFConversation with Brian Meloche.

Are you an open source developer? Do you work with databases? Then you might be interested in Aqua Data Studio 7. Todd Sharp notes that they offer free licences to open source developers.

The chaps at Broadchoice have been busy releasing and updating their very cool looking AIR application "Workspace". I really should sign up for a beta account. I wonder if it comes with free "more hours in the day". ;)

Ray Camden must be making use of those "more hours in the day", because in his relentless application development he's released an update to Lighthouse Pro along with everything else he working on.

Adobe have released a hotfix for ColdFusion 7 and 8 that adds multipart support to cfhttp to support changes with the Google and YouTube APIs.

Well I think thats about all the software releases I can find. My blog entry count is down to 318 and my head is swimming. Time to get some sleep. Please let my son sleep the night through so I get more than 4 hours sleep!

Tomorrow night - "Blog Round up 5 Nov 2008 - In other news". ;)

Blog Roundup #4

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:47:25 -0700

Hmmm 250 blog entries in google reader! Whoops! Time I caught up with my reading and posted a round up!

So here goes!

ColdSpring 1.2 released along with a shiny new website
http://www.coldspringframework.org/

Web Inventor launches new World Web Foundation
Sir Tim Berners-Lee's initiative to bring the web to the 80% of the worlds populous who don't have access to it.

Peter Bell - Introducing "the CFArgument" with Brian Rinaldi
Their first cfargument is "The iterating Business Object". Something I've been meaning to find out more about of late, but never had an opportunity. This CFArgument helped me understand IBOs better.

Peter and Brian's second cfarguments is : DAOs are a waste of Time

CFEclipse Dictionary Generator released.
Daemonite, the developers of Farcry CMS, have released a dictionary generator that will parse a directory of components and tags and then create an XML file that you can use with CFEclipse projects. Looks to be very handy and shortly I'll be running it against some of the internal libraries here at work.

While on the topic of CFEclipse dictionaries - Andrew Mercer has been tinkering with the CF8 dictionary - fixing a few problems that have been around for a while.

ColdFire Update Released
If you're already running Firebug in Firefox - coldfire is a hand add on for debuggerising your ColdFusion applications.

ColdFusion Evangalism Kit
Ever find yourself need to sell ColdFusion to a client or even to your boss and colleagues? Then you'll probably find the Evangalism Kit that Kristen Schofield has posted handy. Containing C-Level Exec quote, Key stats, Recent awards, product roadmaps, measured results of CF Usage and much, it should give you more than enough measured ammo to support ColdFusion and counter the "its a dying language" and "can't scale" 'arguments' against it.

Ben Forta notes that AIR 1.1 is now available for Linux

Mark Drew, having taken over the Reactor Project from Doug Hughs comments on the Future of Reactor.

Jeff Chastain (Alagad) - What is a DSL?
What is a Domain Specific Language!?! Another one of those questions that I've been asking myself answered.

Adobe announced CS4 back on the 23rd of September with a release date some time at the end of October.

Terrance Ryan - Squidhead Still Swimming
Terry announced that Squidhead is getting some additional assistance in the shape of Nathan Mische and Dave Konopka. If you don't know what Squidhead does, its basically a DAO and scaffold generator for MS SQL Server databases. Not something that I have a great deal of use for as we use MySQL, but all the same a neat project and pleased to see it get some more resource.

On the 25th, Andy Allan and Kev McCabe hosted A Wee Dram down in London. Here are some of the write ups from this one day conference.

Sean Corfield - A Wee Dram of ColdFusion
Mark Drew - Live from A Wee Dram of Scotch
Sean Corfield - A Wee Keynote << hints about CF9 can be found here
Sean Corfield - A Wee Dram of Scotch part 2
Peter Bell - A good Wee Dram
Peter Bell - RAD OO Presentation

Well there are a stack more blog posts to go through from this week, but I'll save them for the end of the week...

Oh yeah... I bought Star Wars The Force Unleashed for the Wii at the weekend! Its lots and lots of fun :D

ColdFusion 8 - Nine month review.

Thu, 08 May 2008 07:30:17 -0700

I've been a bad boy. I was supposed to write a review of ColdFusion 8 back in October of last year, but an imminent change of job and my 10 month old boy (now sixteen months) conspired to eat up all my time to play with CF8, let alone write a review. When ever I did try to write a review I always ended up with writers block. All the blog entries, by developers far more knowledgeable and respected than I, seemed to already talk about all the great new features in this latest, and greatest, version of ColdFusion.

So, what am I supposed to write about? I started asking around. Asking people on my IM list, friends and colleagues, what I could write about. It was this process that made me realise that I should write a kind of "nine months on" round up of what people's thought were now that they've had a chance to actually use the new server, rather than just "play" with it.

I've asked a few people who's names you might recognise to spend just a few minutes to write a paragraph of their thoughts and what their top three most used new tags or features are.

Everyone I've spoken to says, that ColdFusion 8 is probably the most significant upgrade for ColdFusion yet. If you don't upgrade for anything else, then you must upgrade for the performance increase you will get for your cfcs and your application in general. One thing that has to be noted, ColdFusion 8 ships with Java 1.6 as its underlying JRE. Java 1.6 has a bug in the class loader that causes a fairly substantial performance hit when first loading your application. Recommendations that I've seen from all quarters and experienced myself recently is, downgrading to Java 1.5 will increase load time performance without detrimental overall performance.

The JavaScript and image enhancements are also top of a lot of people's lists. Many of us are jack of all trades, writing applications in ColdFusion one moment, JavaScript the next and then onto Actionscript. Operators in CF have always been just fractionally different to these other languages or missing common syntax, like i++ for increment. The enhancements to operators in CF8 make the transition between languages that little bit easier. AJAX is the technology de jour (sorry I'm a bit of a ludite and cynic when it comes to AJAX). The addition of the AJAX functionality, using the very excellent ExtJS library (ok so I can still appreciate the work being done even if I am a cynic), is appreciated by many and makes an excellent addition to cfforms.

Two other major additions to CF 8 that have had everyone buzzing are debugging and server monitoring.

Many of the long serving developers who remember the debug tools in cfstudio and the newer converts from other languages have been asking for IDE based debugging have now got their wish in the form of a plug-in for eclipse. It's not just this group of developers that are benefiting. Many others are wondering how they ever managed without it!

Server monitoring is a great new addition to ColdFusion server and compliment to the likes of FusionReactor and SeeFusion. The CF8 server monitor isn't just the realm of the server admin any more. It gives the developer the abililty to see what is going on under the hood of your application. As well as providing some pretty sophisticated reporting on requests, variable scopes, memory usage and errors, to name a few, there's also an email alert system, the ability to make snapshots of the server and an api to allow you to build custom responses to various system states.

Because I've procrastinated so long over writing even this review (sorry everyone - I'm not the most confident writer, so it takes me a while to be happy with what I've written) updater 1 for CF8 has been released. Updater 1 provides up dates to the FCKEditor, ExtJS libraries, improved AJAX, CFPDF and CFImage functionality, oh yeah and full 64 bit support on all OSs.

Again, apologies to everyone involved for how shockingly long its taken me to write this. And now I shall hand over to my friends and colleagues to give you their thoughts on CF8.

Oh - and if you want to find out more about CF8, CFML, Flex, AIR, AJAX do I really have to tell you to get yourselves to Scotch on the Rocks at the beginning of June?? ;)

The contributed comments:

Jeff Coughlin - http://www.JeffCoughlin.com

Overall I think its an important upgrade, but unless you need 64bit or new features in CF8, I personally haven't seen the "need" to upgrade.

I've been liking the new speed enhancements, image manipulation, and Ajax features.

The fact that my JavaScript skills are poor at best and I can now build feature-rich UI experience using CF's new built-in Ajax features is mind-blowing.

top 3 most used tags/new features?

cfimage

cfajax (feature, not the tag)

cfeclipse debugger plugin

Niklas Richardson - http://www.prismix.com

Basically, we're using CF8 as our server layer for Flex applications.

So we're using all the features that CF8 gives us for Flex integration.

We are also using CF8 to generate documents for our Flex applications (PDFs, etc...) and sending out e-mails with attachments, etc...

Probably all I can say is the most used features are CFCs ;-)

Flash remoting

LCDS in CF8

And that it's faster

Neil Middleton - FeedSquirrel http://www.feedsquirrel.com/

Here's the headlines:

- Performance, particularly CFC instantiation and cfthread

- Eclipse add-ons, debugger, CFC generator etc

- JSON returntype - opens up CF to a whole load of AJAX (but interestingly I don't have much time for the built in AJAX - I'm a jQuery guy)

Andy Allan - Fuzzy Orange http://www.fuzzyorange.co.uk/ - Scotch on the Rocks http://www.scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk/

PDF Forms

This has been a huge feature as it allows us to easily automate the processing of order forms and purchase orders, and the creation of invoices. Throw in the server side printing and it's job done in one easy step.

Presentations on Demand

Initially this feature was a curious one to us. We never saw the potential. All that changed when a client needed the ability to have dynamic content displayed on their in house company plasma screens that keep staff up to date with what is going on. Using <cfpresentation> we simply took the client driven content, put it together as a Connect presentation and slam, they had their dynamic, up to date company news on display, and fully under their control.

Server Monitoring

Fuzzy Orange do a lot of server consultancy and troubleshooting, and the Server Monitor has proved to be another invaluable tool for our resources. ColdFusion administrators and developers have been screaming for something like this built into the product since the release of MX 6.0 and now they finally have it.

Ray Camden - ColdFusion Jedi http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/

While I'm still very impressed by image and Ajax support, I find myself being very happy with the real small changes. For example, being able to

loop over an array using array= in a loop, or adding to a string using &=. It's the small language constructs I think that I'm really grooving too right now. Not to say I think those are the most important features - but I'm noticing that I'm real happy to have them in my toolbox so to speak.

Another one is onMissingMethod, which has made my beans much slimmer.

Also - I know I blogged quite a bit about my problems with CFFEED, but I do find myself using it quite a bit, and when it works

well, it sure is a nice feature to have.

Andy Jarrett - Andy Jarrett http://andyjarrett.co.uk/

ColdFusion 8 and what it means to me as a developer

ColdFusion 8 has changed quite a few of my apps since its been released and for several reasons. New tags and functions always change your next project but with CF8 came some great performance enhancement which made delivering applications even faster. Below 3 of the most used new functions in CF8 that I find hard to live without when going back to CF7. It's not say these are the best new features, but they are the ones that have helped me out in my day-to-day developing the most:

1. Argument collections

CF8 makes working with tags that have multiple attributes with different variations like CFFile so easy to work with. It allows you to specify the tags attributes in a single structure and pass them them to the tag.

2. CFPDF

This really made working with PDF's so simple. This tag allows you to interact dynamically with PDF's, PDF forms, merge, generate files on the fly.

3. Array and structure creation improvements

Probably one of the least exciting changes (along with JavaScript operators in expression) to be added but I find it makes code neater and easier to go back over.

Noteworthy mention goes out to all Ajax and Layout tags/functions that were introduced.

Peter Bell - Application Generation http://www.pbell.com

By far my favorite feature in CF8 is OnMissingMethod(). It allows me to make my APIs much more readable while still being able to synthesize most of my code.

I think the AJAX feature (including cfajaxproxy) are a great way to improve the usability and responsiveness of your applications without having to learn too much about AJAX and I love the cfimage features for manipulating images easily.

I use a lot of CFC's and have also noticed a nice performance boost working with CF8 and overall have found it to be a painless and valuable upgrade.

Scott Stroz - Boyzoid http://www.boyzoid.com/ Alagad Inc. http://www.alagad.com/

When ColdFusion 8 was released and Adobe started its world tour touting all the new features, it was sometimes difficult to keep track of all the new functionality and how we, as developers, could leverage that functionality. In my mind, I thought there were a few new features I would use often (step debugging, AJAX integration and CFImage), and others that I thought were cool, but really had no current need for (CFPresentation, CFExchange). About 6 months later, I use step debugging just about every day and to be honest, I am not sure how I survived so long without it. Just about every new application I create, I am using some of the AJAX integration and I find myself using cfimage even more than I imagined I would have. I think these 3 things are, by far, the most useful additions to ColdFusion we have had in quite sometime.

Toby Tremayne - http://www.tobytremayne.com

Interfaces is right up there.

I haven't done as much as I'd like but very useful for really big projects with distributed development

I also make major use of the fact that enterprise features are now all in standard - often I only want to use something like that reasonably lightly anyway so the threading limitation isn't a problem

I was excited about the app specific mappings till I realized that they're no good for me :) They happen at run time, but cfc mappings and extends for example are compile time. (Ed's note: application specific mappings also don't work with cfimport because of the runtime/compile time issues with

Happy to see the debugger in there, although haven't had much chance to use it - I think the thing I probably use most is the improved operators in cfscript that and cfthread. I write a lot of actionscript these days so it's nice to have a bit more similarity with the operators :) ooh ooh and JSON! yay for JSON!

Adobe Developer Week: The recordings

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 06:44:41 -0700

Adobe Developer Week 2008 was a few weeks ago now and I realised the other day that I hadn't written a quick post to point you to the recordings from the Connect sessions.

I was talking to Barry Beatie down in Australia at the time. He kindly pointed me to this Adobe Australia and New Zealand site : http://www.joinadobe.com/eseminars/main/index.html

Its a really nice site where you can find all the recordings, but I thought I should find the UK/USA equivalent. Thank to Ed Sullivan for pointing me to this page. http://snipurl.com/adobeonlineevents Not nearly so attractive, but is the main Adobe Online Event page and also provides some additional online events recordings. You'll need to scroll down to the "Flex Architecture" presentation for the Developer Week Presentations. The Developer Week presentations all have the following description:

Adobe provides end-to-end web development tool suites and solutions. Join us to see what the buzz is all about in this one week long event with 20 sessions covering AIR, Flex, Flash, Mobile, ColdFusion and Dreamweaver technologies. Click here to listen.

Enjoy!

Adobe Developer Week 2008

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:45:10 -0700

Between 24th and 28th of March Adobe are running a series of online seminars via the power of Adobe Connect.

You need to register for the seminars, but if they are full already there will be recordings available later.

For more information take a look at the information below.

Adobe provides end-to-end web development tool suites and solutions.
Join us to see what the buzz is all about in this one week long event
with 20 sessions covering AIR, Flex, Flash, Mobile, ColdFusion and
Dreamweaver technologies.

http://adobe.com/go/2008_developer_week

Scottish CFUG Upcoming Meetings

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:38:00 -0700

Just a quick post to point out the two upcoming Scottish ColdFusion User Group events.The two events are on Thursday 25th October and Wednesday 31st October.The first of these on Thursday this week is Andy Allan giving a presentation on ColdFusion 8 at Tidalfire in Edinburgh - for more information and how to register to attend, please see the Scottish CFUG site meeting entry here : http://snipurl.com/scfugcf8tidalfire.

The second is a combined online and live event with the UKCFUG. This will be a MAX Debrief session, as well as UKCFUG Halloween party. For those of you that can attend the meeting in London there will be a copy of CF8 Standard to win. So if you weren't able to attend MAX Europe come along to the meeting either in London or via Adobe Connect and ask your questions! For more information times, the Connect URL and details of how to register for the London meeting take a look at the Scottish CFUG Events page : http://snipurl.com/scfugmaxdebrief. As ever - everyone is welcome to attend the Connect meeting where ever you may be. ;)

Andy Allan goes MAX

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 23:26:00 -0700

MAX Europe that is!

I notice from from Ted on Flex's Blog that MAX is now sold out! And I know why!
Its not cos Ted blogged about the rapidly decreasing numbers of tickets left. Its not because its going to be an awesome conference (which unfortunately I can't attend). Its because Andy Allan has been asked to speak at Max!

Andy has been asked to speak about ColdFusion Server Monitor and Troubleshooting and will be talking at the same time as Ben Forta, Sean Corfield, Ted Patrick and Dirk Eismann. If you're at MAX you should go and show Andy your love by attending his superb and highly informative presentation.

I'm now going to run and hide before the Scotsman comes looking for me to cause me bodily pain for broadcasting this to the entire world. ;oD

Adobe Creative Licence Tour - Newcastle

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:16:00 -0700

If you haven't already heard about the Creative Licence Tour, you really should have a look in.

I'll be attending the afternoon session in Newcastle upon Tyne, which is the "Web and Rich Internet Application Development using Flash, Flex, AIR and ColdFusion 8".

There are also sessions through the day on web design with CS Web Premium, photoshop for photographers and cross media design with CS Design Premium.

For more information and to register (I'm not sure what places are still available) take a look here : http://www.adobe.co.uk/cs3tour31

If you fancy trying to catch up with me I'll try to be carrying/wearing something suitably User Group ish - otherwise I'll most likely be lugging my laptop around in a Macromedia bag (There will be only one!) ;) Or you can look up my ugly mug on my flickr account (look in the bottom right of this page)

I hope I'll get to meet some of you there.

Installing Adobe CS3 Master Suite on Windows XP

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:47:00 -0700

As a Adobe User Group Manager I filled out a some surveys for Adobe they very kindly sent me (and every other UG manager who did likewise) a copy of Adobe Creative Studio 3 Master Suite. Many many big thank you's to Ed Sullivan and everyone at Adobe for showing their appreciation of the UG community with such a generous reward. If you haven't seen CS3, it comes in a surprisingly small package that contains about 8 DVDs! It practically begged to be installed! So I tried and I tried again and finally managed it on the 3rd try!So what was going wrong and what did I do to get this working? Well everything seemed to install ok except Flash Player 9 and something called "Adobe CS3 Master Suite Component". When I tried to run to run any of the main applications ie. Photoshop I would get a message telling me "you cannot use this product at this time" and that I should reinstall it. I knew that there had been issues with installing CS3 so I did a quick bit of a search and came up with the WinCS3Clean scripts. What that doesn't tell you is that there are more than the 2 levels given to you. I haven't tested this thoroughly, but there are at least 4 levels that you can select. Try it out - use the preview option to do a dry-run before you actually run it. Anyway, I uninstalled everything, tried the script with the visible level 2 clean up and started on my second installation attempt. I should go back a little here. When I say I uninstalled everything I mean I uninstalled everything from Macromedia or Adobe. The reason for this was that I the AIR Beta installed as well as a trial for Photoshop CS2 that I'd forgotten about. You probably don't need to go this mad with the uninstallation, but its definately worth removing any beta and trial software before you install CS3. Anyway, back on track. The installation ended up going through but failing in exactly the same way... A little more search and I came across a note that said that the reason was Flash 8 Plugin - "But I don't have Flash 8 plugin" was my first thought.... How wrong I was!! If you haven't already, grab yourself a copy of the Windows Install Clean Up utility. Install it and run it. A little browse through and you may well find a few items that you didn't realise were in there, including Flash 8 Plugin! When you've done an uninstall of the broken CS3 use this utility to do an uninstall of the Flash 8 Plugin (and anything else you fancy tidying up while you're at it ;o) ) Also in the note about the Windows util was reference to the additional levels in the CS3Cleanup util, so this time, after a dry run, I ran the script at level 4 instead. This cleaned up some remnants from the CS3 install, the flash plugin and the trials/betas I had installed. (Don't forget to do those registry backups just in case ;)) Being as this is windows we're running on here, a restart is always worthwhile at this point. After this, my third install went through absolutely perfectly and I now have many much applications to play with. :D I may have gone a bit overboard with my uninstalling, it was something I needed to do anyway, so you probably only need to make sure that you don't have flash 8 plugin lurking on your machine somewhere. Hope that helps someone.

Scottish CFUG - CF8 Launch Party.

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:56:00 -0700

We're considering having a CF8 launch party in Edinburgh at the beginning of August. We'll have an exclusive Ben Forta CF8 presentation that is being made available only to Adobe ColdFusion User groups. There will be a copy of CF8 standard and (post willing) other cf8 goodies to give away, as well as free beer and pizza! In order to do this we'll need a minimum of 20 folks to show up, if you're interested please confirm by email to scotch@scottishcfug.com asap.

ColdFusion 8 - Public Beta

Wed, 30 May 2007 16:49:00 -0700

Released for public beta on Adobe Labs just today! Just in time for Scotch! You can find out more about and download ColdFusion 8 from http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion8/ If you haven't already got your tickets for Scotch - there are a few places left - come and find out about ColdFusion 8! Now then.... How much am I gonna upset Andy and Kev by suggesting we get the conference brochures reprinted with "ColdFusion 8" instead of "Scorpio"? ;)

Adobe Connect Presenting for the uninitiated - help please

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:31:00 -0700

After last night I would really appreciate any hints and tips to make my life easier when doing presentations with Adobe Acrobat Connect. How do I make sure that Connect doesn't suck the life out of my poor little AMD 2400+ processor? Jeff Coughlin mentioned last night that I should have been using a lower resolution as there is a known issue with Connect and higher resolutions. So what resolution works best? These are the kind of things I'd like to know as well as any other experiences you may have had that will help me and anyone else reading this give a better presentation first time.

Announcing Scotch on the Rocks 2007

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 21:04:00 -0700

I got accused of not blogging enough today, so I thought (and Andy was champing at the bit) that I best get something on here and make sure it was a suitably big entry. Well its not like its a long entry, but I think this is a big thing and hopefully you will too!Scotch of the Rocks is returning in 2007! Andy and I have been chatting about Scotch since July and we've finally got something concrete to tell everyone about and Andy has been busy getting the site up and running. Scotch on the Rocks will be a two day conference, held on Thursday May 31st and Friday 1st June 2007. Ticket price is yet to be confirmed, but we guarantee that it will be under £100. Whatever the price, it will include food and drink through the two days, as well as your goodie bag, the sessions and the chance to meet up with other like minded individuals. The venue will be the European in Scotland Business Center in Edinburgh. inScotland was formally Adobe/Aldus headquarters when Pagemaker was developed and marketed in Europe. We already have 3 confirmed speakers : Tim Buntel, Senior Product Marketing Manager for ColdFusion, Mark Drew developer of cfeclipse and Kev McCabe of BSkyB. The topics have yet to be confirmed, but we hope to cover ColdFusion (Scorpio), Flex, AJAX, Adobe Apollo and LiveCycle and more. Adobe have kindly agreed to be Platinum Sponsors of the event, but we are looking for more sponsors, so if you're interested give me or Andy a shout. There's more information on the website, which we'll be updating regularly and can be found at http://scotch.scottishcfug.com/ If you want any more information or want to speak or sponsor, please don't hesitate to get in touch with either Andy or myself.

ColdFusion a serious Adobe Product.

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 06:38:00 -0700

I've never doubted that any of the companies that have created, bought and grown ColdFusion have taken it anything less than seriously. There are have always been conspiracy theorists that claim that CF is treated as second-class citizen and have either not understood the power of the product and not given it the coverage it. However it is great to see that Tim Buntel is putting paid to any rumours, is helping to forward CF in highly visible locations (as suggested by his readers) and that the top brass at Adobe understand and are interested in ColdFusion. ps. Tim - you can blame Andy for putting the "Bunty" image into my head :)