I can never find this stupid page when I need it, so I am linking to it here so I won't lose it again. Use this when you want to download a specific JDK from Sun's site and don't want to wade through their confusing-as-heck "featured downloads" mess. http://java.sun.com/products/archive/ Update-- the URL appears to have changed. I'll put it here in case they ever deprecate the old one. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/archive-139210.html

The other day I was writing a wrapper CFC to consume a web service, and return the results. Several of the web services' method returned arrays of structs and I was in the mood to experiment, so I decided to have my CFC present the data back as an array of components. I knew that there would really never be more than 20 or 30 objects coming back so the cost of object instantiation wouldn't be a big deal. There were 7 different "types" of objects coming back in the various method containing mostly strings and an occasional binary image. I didn't want to do all the typing so I decided to toy with Object Synthesization similar to what Peter Bell has been talking about.

Well, I'm settling in to my new job and today my boss showed me an old third-party app they have which shows a dashboard of bar charts outlining the companies progress. It's a nifty little program that lets you drill down into the data and choose different graph types. They wanted to do a face-lift on the graphs, add a little more functionality, and make it web-accessible so it could be viewed remotely. It didn't take me long to sell him on the charting package built into Flex 3 Professional.

Kristin Schofield released a long-overdue Evangelism Kit PDF on her blog today that is basically marketing information about ColdFusion aimed at the Executive level. I found this timeline from page 6 rather interesting. It shows Centaur being released in 2009, but then it goes on to show what I can only assume to be the next two releases of ColdFusion: "Sully", and "Link" in 2010 and 2011 respectively. (See picture) Most Notably, Link lists a "Pluggable Architecture". Hmmm...

In a weird and monetarily lacking way, I enjoyed the extra free time lately after being laid off. I feel like I have finally gotten out a rut. After a month-long hiatus from full time employment I have accepted a position at a Kansas City company called National Seminars doing ColdFusion and SQL development. We hope to add in some Flex as well soon. My first day was last Friday.

I am doing some work with Subversion now so I got a chance to play with some hook functionality. Unfortunately, 99.99993% of all information out there for Subversion seems to be directed towards Linux, but after an appropriate amount of head-banging I got it working. Our dev server has Subversion installed with a repository holding our code. Each developer has installed TortoiseSVN (which is a Windows GUI client for the server) and checked out the code for local development. Then, on the server we also checked out the trunk folder into our wwwroot for IIS. The problem was, ever time we committed code from our local machine and wanted to run it on the dev server, we needed to remote into the server to update the code checked out to the wwwroot folder.

Can anyone tell me why there is no widely adopted protocol for instant Messaging software? Every web browser and web server use HTTP. Want to transfer files with your favorite FTP client? No problem, they all use the same protocol. What about sending and receiving E-mails? There's always POP3 and SMTP. Telnet and SSH are the same story. Sure, there's some different flavors, but most all clients are interchangeable. Why then, must I sign up for AIM, Yahoo, Skype, ICQ, and MSN just to keep in touch with everybody? Trillian sure helps, but I still have to have all those accounts. Why? Why can't we all just get along?

I am not just a programmer, but to some extent a sys admin. Because of that responsibility (and the fact I have had servers compromised before) I am always interested in security. I think to stop crackers; you've got to think like them. When was the last time you tried to hack into your own server? If you don't know what your vulnerabilities are, how can you close them?

If you missed it, Jeff Chastain put up a very interesting post over at Alagad's Blog. Also good was the "spirited" discussion that followed between Barney and Peter Bell. I don't know how I feel about all of it, but the entire thing is very fascinating.

This week I got a much belated chance to play with some of the CF8 Ajax features I've never gotten around to. I've had CF8 developer's edition on my home PC for a while, but never worked for a place that actually had CF8 in production so I didn't get to play much with the new stuff. I had a big show stopper though. Both my cfgrid bind attribute and my cfajaxproxy tag weren't working. The CFC's I wanted to bind to were web accessible, but there were in a series of subdirectories. ColdFusion, however, kept constructing Ajax code to look in the web root.