Online CF User Group

Need to get your CFUG fix online?

Mr. Erat has you covered!

Online CFUG at meetup.com meets on the 2nd thursday of each month.

Check it out.

Top Ten Reasons To Make It to Powered By Detroit

Registration for Powered By Detroit is well under way and just in case you need some last minute reasons to get your employer to pay your way I thought I'd offer up this list.

Top Ten Reasons why I think a company that uses Flash and/or ColdFusion should have representation at the Powered By Detroit Conference:

10. Unique Conference
9. Three learning tracks
8. Speaker List
7. ColdFusion MX 7
6. Detroit, MI
5. Certification Discounts
4. "Finger on the pulse" of Flash
3. Price / Value
2. Excitement
1. Interaction with true peers!

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10. Unique Conference

Powered by Detroit offers up a unique experience to learn about the latest features in Flash and ColdFusion. It goes further by also offering a chance to see how the integration between these two products can deliver rich internet experiences. While most conferences focus on one product area, with light content on how to integrate with other products, this one delivers something for both the Flash developer and ColdFusion developer in each session!

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9. Three Learning Tracks

Choose your sessions from three great learning tracks.

Foundations - focuses on core web technologies that include some introductory sessions.
Design - Best practices, design along with project management and site migration sessions. Server-Side - CFC's, Flash Remoting, Flex and CF 7 are just some of the session topics.

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8. Speaker List

Powered by Detroit has managed to secure a speaker list that has some of the top names in the industry today. I've attended the annual Macromedia Users Conference (DEVCON, MAX) for the past three years in a row, many of the speakers at Powered By Detroit have delivered sessions at the annual Users Conference as well as other large conferences. A+ on aquiring such a great range of talent and some of the most respected people in the Flash and ColdFusion communities.

View the Speaker List

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7. ColdFusion MX 7

The server product and backbone of Macromedia's offerings. With this latest release, Macromedia has shown without a doubt, that ColdFusion MX is the best platform for delivering enterprise applications quickly and easily. There are several sessions covering the new features, such as the extremely well accepted Flash Forms and how to leverage FLEX to design RIA's using ColdFusion as the backend.

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6. Detroit, MI

A midwestern conference just outside of D-Town! Lots to do, lots to see, heck you can even take a short trip across the border to Canada and make fun of those canucks.

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5. Certifications

Macromedia Certification Exams are offered at a discount at the conference.

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4. "Finger on the pulse" of Flash

The Macromedia Flash application is going to be changing over the next year, the conference gives you the chance to talk with your peers about current projects you may be working on or future projects that you may have in mind. Learn about Flash Remoting, Flash Communication Server and how you can leverage the power of CF to deliver data connected applications.

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3. Price / Value

The conference cost $349 for two days. This is a great value for the amount of information that will be covered and the training that is recieved.

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2. Excitement

With the recent release of ColdFusion and a new release of Flash in the works, now is a great time to be working with these two products. There are so many things to learn and experiences to share that this conference is sure to be filled with energy!

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1. Interaction with peers!

This has to be the number one reason I would suggest attendance at Powered by Detroit. The chance to talk to, and exchange ideas with others who are doing the exact same job that we are doing is priceless. I've been to conferences / training where there is some people in attendance who may do similar functions as my position, but this is a chance to get face-to-face with 300+ people who are doing extremely similar job functions. It serves as an excellent resource for new ideas as well as building friendships and networking with peers. There have been many times that I have sent an email to a contact that I met at a past conference to ask for advice or to see how they had implemented something in their company and it has saved me time and/or headaches. Come out to Powered by Detroit and do a little networking!

mobile heaven : USB data cable

Ok, so maybe I've been living under a rock for the past while, but I've just recently picked up a USB data cable for my cell phone. This little beauty allows me to connect it via USB to my laptop computer and then use my Sprint PCS Vision package web connectivity via a Sprint software app to give me a connection to the internet. That's right - I can browse the net on my laptop anywhere that I can get a Sprint PCS signal. This is hot! I was stuck in traffic the other day, was able to hop on my laptop, connect the phone, connect to the net and find an alternate route which saved me not only time, but my sanity as well.

Of course, you shouldn't take advantage of this back door option for downloading large files as Sprint's policy says that it can close your account etc. But I do enjoy having the option and flexibility of actually using my web functions on my phone... seeing as I would never browse the web using my phone browser.

You can grab the cable here.

NADONweb: FLiP Step One

As I've been reading many of the articles on the fusebox site, I find myself getting more and more excited about adopting the FLiP -side of doing things! The more I read about it, the more it makes sense.

The first step in FLiP is: Personas and Goals

After reading the description and finding out that this first step is to get you to create the typical users of your application, I've decided to do just that. These "users" are your make believe testers and will help you decide what your application will be used to accomplish. The goal of step one is to come up with these "users" and then come up with the goals that each would need to accomplish when using your software. It's easy to see how the application can be built much better by using this goal-oriented approach instead of basing the design on application features. The features will come later, but at this point, it seems most important for me to know who is going to come to NADONweb and what they'll need to accomplish when there. Designing the system this way will make things much easier in the long run and allow me to make sure that the true purpose of the site is met, for all visitors.

'Nuff about that. Here are the three personas I have created. I haven't gone into great detail yet about their exact stats or personalities, but I'm sure that will come as they grow and show me what they need from my site.

The IT Director -
John Myer - that's his name. He's been an IT Director for approximately 3 yrs, worked his way up through the ranks and is now looking for talent, that's of course, why he came to my site.

The Friend -
Phil DeLove - Phil loves to browse the site often and check for recent updates. He's downloaded everyone of my songs, read every article I've written and loves giving feedback and feeling involved.

The Browser -
Justin Browsing - you guessed it, he's the occasional browser that might link from Google, or happen to fumble across the site.

I'm going to start with these three personas and now I'll add goals for each. See you in a few.

NADONweb: FLiP steps

I should first break down the steps of Fusebox Lifecycle Process : FLiP

I plan to use this to build NADONweb and make sure that it fits all that I want it to be.

Steps as found on the Fusebox site:

1. Personas and Goals
2. Wireframe
3. Prototype / Front-End Development
4. Application Architecture
5. FuseCoding
6. Unit Testing
7. Application Integration
8. Deployment

Launching NADONweb

so.. I can't tell you how many times I've been told that I need to get a site up where I can have my portfolio of work. A place to call my own and list accomplishments, milestones and centralize some of the many things I like to call "hobbies"

The idea of NADONweb came to fruition about two weeks ago and I setup my home network to prepare for the launch of the new site. I grabbed all the domains that I could and I'm now ready to go. I sat down and thought about the design of the site and that's pretty much where I stopped.

I had the idea that it may be good to learn something new while putting this 'portfolio' site together. That "something new" is Fusebox and FLiP (Fusebox Lifecycle Process)

http://www.fusebox.org

I'm going to post all that is the launch of NADONweb here, to document the thinking process and maybe help a few others out there grasp the processes and why they can be so good at helping us organize not only our thoughts but what to do next, our to do list.

I've read up quite a bit on Fusebox and FLiP, but I've never taken the time to use it on a project and NADONweb is the perfect place to test drive it. I'm hoping that I'll then be able to do the same for my other projects - such as Indie Sessions.

I'm starting with FLiP, since it is the methodology that can be followed when designing a Fusebox application. The nice thing about FLiP is that it can be used even if your designing a non-Fusebox application. I know that the lessons I take from FLiP will be of benefit to me in other areas - so I greet it with open arms.

Here is where I've started:

http://www.fusebox.org/index.cfm?&fuseaction=methodology.steps

I've printed out the steps and I'm now working on Personas.

This should be an interesting project because I'm the client, the user, the project manager, the designer and the developer. I've got lots of roles to play... so here we go.

Lifetime Phone Package?

A company has a planned offering that will give you VOIP (Voice Over IP) telephone service for the rest of your life for $999.

Think about it - no more phone bills.

Read the article here

Working around the crossdomain.xml security settings in Flash MX 2004

So, my company asked me to build a small weather pod. Something very simple that would sit on our Intranet. Easy enough I thought, check around for a web service, let Flash MX 2004 Professional consume the little sucka and move on to the next big project.

Not so quick -

First, I had a heck of a time finding a free weather web service. Most - like Accuweather are charging for it. That's just sad. They should at least have a bare-bones feed that just gives the temp for free.

I finally stumbled across this service at the National Weather Service.

http://weather.gov/data/current_obs/KARB.xml

This is the XML feed for the Ann Arbor Municipal Airport (there are others there, sorted by state, and there are RSS feeds as well!) Grab those here -

http://weather.gov/data/current_obs/

The government service is free and currently experimental - but hey - it's accurate and updated every hour... for free. Tell me a free third party extension that you don't "use at your own risk"

So, now I figured - this is sweet. I just need to use the XML Connector and grab the data from this feed and bam - done, right? Nope. It worked fine locally - while testing, but once I published it and tried to view it in a web page, I ran across the new Flash Player security issues.

The new security basically states that you have to have a "crossdomain.xml" file on the server that serves the web service which will control access. Well... seeing as I don't contol the National Weather Service's servers - this wasn't going to work for me.

Then it hit me... hey - how about if I use a ColdFusion page to grab the data and then store it to a file? Yeah, that would work! And it did. Here's a sample of the code I used.

cfset url_address="http://weather.gov/data/current_obs/KARB.xml"
cfhttp throwonerror="yes" resolveurl="yes" method="GET" url="#url_address#"

cfoutput

cfset filen=" getDirectoryFromPath(getCurrentTemplatePath())"
cffile output="#cfhttp.FileContent#" file="#fileN#" action="write"

/cfoutput

Then it hit me, well this works and saves the XML from the web service to a file - ready for consumption - but what can I use to trigger this to happen in intervals or every time I view the page?

The answer: Flash Remoting and CFC's.

I created a CFC with the above code and just invoked it from Flash before I loaded the XML doc, this ensured that I was working with the latest and greatest data from the weather service!

By using this process I was able to overcome the cross domain security issue and still deliver the weather to our employees. Don't even ask me how I overcame the fact that we have ColdFusion MX on the development server and 4.5 on the Production! That's a whole other headache.

If you'd like the source for the work I did here - drop me an email.

Skinning Components in Macromedia Flash MX 2004

Here is a great Developer Center article from Chafic Kazoun regarding different methods that you can use to skin your projects in Flash MX 2004. 

Check it out.

A little peice of inspiration for you...

I ran across this article through my searches today and it just hit home, so I wanted to share it with you.

http://www.kerismith.com/blog/archives/000101.html

Church Music RIA

While browsing over at Dan Dura's blog I found this cool link to the LDS Church Music site. Be sure to check out the music player, this is one of the best web applications I've ever seen. I'd like to incorporate some of this stuff into xChange as I build it.. and seeing this makes me think that I have a long way to go! I'd really like to know who designed this site, so if you have any idea - drop me a line or comment.

Visual Music Searching

An interesting article on finding the music you want to hear. Check it
out here

Microsoft does well on the hot seat

An article from Internet News discusses how MS employees held up during barrage of questions in relation to IE's security issues in a recent chat. View the full article here

SysAdmin day - July 30, 2004

"The Sysadmin is a very special species of geek. The type of person that spends his or her day ensuring that *your* day at the office doesn't suck. Often mistreated by the suits and under appreciated by the folks they support, it's about time Sysadmins receive their own special appreciation day.

When is it?

Friday, July 30th!

What do you do?

Appreciate your sysadmin, lavish them with praise, monkeys, gifts, incense - whatever it takes to make them feel like the demi-gods they are. Are you a Sysadmin yourself? Then indulge in the sweet victory of your own day!

No, ThinkGeek didn't create this day, it's a legitimate appreciation day - go Google it! Keep reading to enter to win stuff and also get a free shirt this month at ThinkGeek as we send mad props to the Sysadmins of the world..."

Think Geek is one of the best places
for picking up all your geek needs!

Interesting Article regarding Microsoft's API war

Everyone else has blogged about this article, so I thought I would to....
let me know your opinions.

API War

Brando dies at 80

Have to respect a man who was quoted as saying telling the truth about why he acted - for the money! "Acting is an empty and useless profession" Check out the full article on Yahoo here.
I did thoroughly enjoy his performances in "The Wild One" and "The Godfather".

Wanna start your own HotSpot?

You can do so, with little hardware cost using Public IP's Zone CD! Another great article from Wi-Fi Planet.
Find out how you could be up and running in no time here

WiMAX milestone

Interesting article on Wi-Fi Planet regarding the WiMAX standard which will bring wireless connectivity to a level of throughput that allows for much larger scale uses than 802.11.
Find the article here

Empower your team!

Microsoft has a way for you to really get involved with .NET development. They'll give you a great discount on their software, as long as you promise a deliverable software product within 2 yrs. I have decided to use this to complete the backend of the xChange project. Check the Partner initiative out here

"I'm going Platinum!"... even online...

Now you can score a Gold or Platinum album through digital sales.
Read the story here