Want to generate labels using ColdFusion Reporting? Dean Harmon has posted a label creation wizard that you can download and drop it to your existing ColdFusion Report Builder. Please note that you MUST be using ColdFusion MX 7.0.1 to use this wizard (it will not work with CFMX7).

CNN is reporting (an AP story) that four fraternity members pled guilty in the death of a college student who was "forced to drink large amounts of water during an initiation rite". The judge in the case wanted to consider a torture charge with a potential life sentence. All four men will serve time, and the victim's mother is "proud" that the men accepted responsibility.

The word "forced" caught my attention. Was 21 year old Matthew Carrington actually forced to drink five gallons of water and then perform calisthenics in a freezing basement? Forced seems to imply that a gun was held to his head, or that his life had been somehow threatened. But thus far I have yet to find a single report indicating that this took place.

It seems to me that a 21 year old "opted" to take part in a freakish initiation ceremony. No one held a gun to his head, and no one threatened his life. He wanted to join the Chi Tau fraternity. And even if he had no idea of the initiation ceremony in store for him, he still could have got up and left. But he didn't.

A 21 year old is a legal adult in this country. 21 year olds (in every single state) can drink, drive, vote, get married, be subpoenaed ... a 21 year old is an adult. And Matthew Carrington, a 21 year old adult, took part in an initiation ceremony that killed him. But he was not forced to do so. He made a choice, albeit a bad one, and paid with his life.

Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

The lists have been buzzing the past few days over the use of XML, framework configuration storage, and more. And the conversation has more recently shifted to a ferocious debate about naming conventions. And to be brutally honest, I am both dismayed and appalled.

As far as I am concerned there are no absolutes when it comes to naming conventions. I personally insist on two things:

• Consistency (whatever you do, do all the time)
• Descriptiveness ("foo" is unacceptable, as is "x" and "i1", although I may allow the latter as the index variable within a loop, perhaps, and perhaps not).

That aside, have a party. If you want all caps, go for it. Camel case? Sure (although, I can just see it now, a debate over should it be ArrayAppend() or arrayAppend() or ...). All lower case? Fine. Starting with $ or _ or any other character, that's fine too. The objective is that you, and whomever has to work on your code next, can easily ascertain what the code is doing and why - that is it. Variable naming choices say absolutely nothing about the quality of the code, the caliber of the developer, and whether or not the application is architected soundly and built properly.

Or put differently, if your app design is so perfect that all you have left to worry about is whether or not to name your variable firstName or FirstName or first_name or $FirstName - well, it's probably time to find something else to be working on.

Enough said.

This message from Vineeta Srivastav of Lintas:

One of our clients in Midwest region has a need for Macromedia Flex Developer.

Skills Required: Strong Flex, Cold Fusion, Oracle and SQL development experience with TOAD, UNIX Shell Scripting, Java, and Web Services/XML would be definite assets. Education/Knowledge: University or College Diploma in related field;

Experience / Skill: Five years of Web Development experience

Job Knowledge - Knows, understands and appropriately applies the technical /soft skills, methods and processes required for the position. Is able to learn, retain and apply information to the job, keeps current with new and/or updated program information, trends and developments in field.

If interested please send your resume to vsrivastav@lintas.com in word format along with desired hourly rate and contact details.

ColdFusion developer Tuan Le has been blogged at Google Maps Mania. His 2RealEstateAuctions app meshes Google Maps and eBay real estate listings to display regional real estate listings. The back end is ColdFusion MX 7, using Flash Forms for data entry.

This one forwarded to me by coauthor, Ray Camden. Devil7 is a UK blogger, who is (in his own words) "sick of using ASP and too thick to go Dot Net… hence the ColdFusion stint". He's been blogging his progress working through our ColdFusion MX7 Web Application Construction Kit.

As requested by several users, my CF Docs bot now allows you to do partial lookups, so if you did a search for "array" it will return all functions that start with the text "array", and so on.

The long awaited MySQL 5 has been released. New to this significantly update are views, triggers, stored procedures, and more. I've been using MySQL 5 since very early beta days, and it has been solid and stable (and every bug I reported has been fixed). Download your copy now.

I've spent a chunk of the weekend playing with the latest Community Technology Preview (CTP) edition of the forthcoming Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and I am more than impressed. And I am not even talking about features, functionality, or the installation and configuration experience (which was, by the way, superb). What I am most enjoying is the new SQL Server Management Studio (it replaces the old Enterprise Manager, Query Tool, and more), and is clean, intuitive, and astoundingly powerful. From the uncluttered interface to the logical groupings of features and functions (columns, keys, constraints, triggers, indexes, etc.) to the choices in how to present data to the automatic relationship diagram generation to the various wizards (database engine tuning, for example) to the instant access to execution plans and activity statistics to the automatic generation of stored procedure and trigger shells to ... you get the idea. Everything I have tried to do thus far has simply required a button or right click just where you'd expect it to be. If you use SQL Server now (6.x, or 7 or 2000), I'd strongly suggest that you download the CTP so as to try it out yourself.

This gem sent to me by Claude Englebert of Acelis.net. match.msn.es is powered by ColdFusion MX. Ok, so it is actually MSN Spain branding on top of Match.com International (every one of the over 30 non-USA Match.com sites are ColdFusion MX powered), but it's still a useful one to name drop where appropriate.

I recently received this message from Andrew Tomlinson, a Senior Lecturer in Information Technology at the University of Gloucestershire (a ColdFusion powered site) in the U.K., and am sharing it with Andrew's permission. Thanks! :-)

Just a short email to let you know that we have adopted Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes (ISBN 0672325675) as a recommended book on our undergraduate module IS203: Introduction to Databases on which we teach Oracle SQL. I was very impressed by its clarity and conciseness; the students who have bought it have said the same.

Thank you for producing such a useful little book.

Macromedia Labs is online. This new site is your source for early looks at emerging products and technologies from Macromedia, and you can download the Flex 2 alpha (including Flex Builder 2 and the ColdFusion adapter) right now.

CFUnit is a unit testing framework for ColdFusion, modeled after the popular JUnit framework. CFUnit is an open source project hosted on SourceForge and is freely available. The idea behind unit testing it to build a framework of scripted tests that are frequently executed to verify each method or function behave as expected. Building unit tests are an investment into the stability of your code. It may require a little extra time up front, but will save your and your fellow developers extensive amounts of time and resource down the road. An introductory primer was recently placed online.

MAX 2005 is right around the corner, and excitement is building for what is shaping up to be an incredible event (and the biggest MAX to date). I, however, am miserable. Ever since the first Allaire Developer's Conference in Boston in 1999, I have not missed a single DevCon or MAX. Until now. Because of my personal schedule requirements, I will not be joining you in Anaheim this year. Well, not in person. You will see me on the big screen during a highly entertaining Day 2 keynote (I can't give any hints, but I'll just say that Tim Buntel will be back in fine form). And the rest of the ColdFusion team will, of course, be there. So, if you are one of the lucky ones heading to beautiful Southern California, have a great time in MAX, and feel free to have a drink for me at the bar! ;-) I'll see you at our next conference, if not sooner!

Qasim Rasheed is a member of the ColdFusion community (many of you met him at CFUNITED this year), and he also helped out on my Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions In 10 Minutes. He asked me to post the following:

You might be already aware that an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter Scale struck in the north of Pakistan on the morning of 8th October 2005, followed by several after shocks just 80 kms north of the Pakistan capital, Islamabad. Areas of Kashmir in Pakistan are most severely affected by the earthquake. Areas of Kashmir in India are also affected. It is estimated that over 30,000 are feared dead and more than 40 thousand injured. There is a massive disruption in the region including landslides and collapsed houses. Here is the link to various organizations where you can donate.

• ICNA Earthquake Relief Fund
• Islamic Relief
• Muslim Hands
• Donations to President's Relief Fund
• Mir Khalil Ur Rehman Foundation
• Minhaj Welfare Foundation

Check out the Macromedia Asia Pacific Events page to learn more about over a dozen upcoming online seminars at times that will work for users in Australia and New Zealand. Flash 8, Dreamweaver 8, and Flex Builder 2, and more are being covered.

Here is a quote from a press release issued today:

Macromedia is also introducing a new tiered licensing model to bring the power of Flex development within reach of every professional application developer, while also offering value-added capabilities that scale to meet the needs of the most sophisticated enterprise projects. Flex Builder 2 will be sold for less than $1000 per developer and will include the ability to develop, compile, and deploy Flex applications that connect to XML and SOAP web services with no additional charges or server licensing required. Flex Enterprise Services 2 will be licensed on a per CPU, per project, and enterprise license basis to offer the development efficiency, performance, advanced integration capabilities, and testing support that advanced applications will require.

More details to follow. But for now, this means that ColdFusion developers will be able to build CF powered Flex apps without the price tag being an issue. And for those that need the enterprise services (and many will, I suspect), that will be an option, too.

David Wadhwani, V.P. of Product Development for Macromedia Flex, has posted an introduction to the Flex 2 product line.

A user just e-mailed me with a problem. He had to process the results of an existing form which was made up of fields named with invalid characters (one was "first name"). Trying to access the field as #FORM.first name# won't work and will throw an error. So how to access these fields?

The answer is to remember that FORM is not just a prefix, it is also a structure. Structure members can be accessed as #structure.member# and as #structure["member"]#. And that latter format will allow access to badly named form fields (as the name is enclosed in quotes). So, the solution is to use #FORM["first name"]#.