I'm on the way down to Kansas City to present "Flex 2 for ColdFusion developers" to the KCFusion user group. This group is consistently once of the best attended, so this evening's event should be lively and fun. If you are in the area, please drop by.

One of the examples that I have been using in my user group presentations is a ColdFusion Session Tracker. This application uses Flex Enterprise Services to push real time session details to a connected Flex client. The display is a grid of sessions showing request count and when the most recent request occurred, and allowing each session to be expanded (to see details) and collapsed as needed.

The application is a demonstration of:

• How to send structured data from ColdFusion to Flex clients via Flex Enterprise Services (FES).
• How to subscribe to messages channels and how to consume received data.
• The use of custom grid renderers.
• Using states to implement expand/collapse views within grid cell renderers.

To create and run the ColdFusion Session Tracker you must have the following (all of which are downloadable from the Labs site):

• ColdFusion MX 7.01 (Enterprise or Developer editions) with the "Mystic" updater installed.
• Flex Builder 2.0 Beta 1.
• Flex Enterprise Services 2.0 Beta 1.

As this application uses Flex Enterprise Services it cannot be used with ColdFusion Standard (which does not support the use of event gateways). ColdFusion Enterprise (or Developer Edition) is required.

You can download the application (along with detailed instructions and usage notes) from the ColdFusion/Flex Connectivity page.

Matt Chotin has blogged that the Flex Enterprise team is looking for Dev and QA folks to work in our Newton, MA office.

My blog has been inundated with spam lately, some comments, but mostly trackbacks. Ray's code filters lots of them out, but many do get through. I've written a quick and dirty admin tool to let me clean them out quickly, but it's still a pain.

So over the past few weeks I have been keeping tabs on the domains referred to in the trackback spam. There are lots that show up over and over, and whois lookups on these domains shows that the vast majority are all registered to less than a handful of registrants.

I know communicating with spammers is a waste of time, but what the heck, I fired off messages to several telling them to cut it out, and never received a response from any of them of course.

Until last week. Lots of the trackback spam has been posted for domains registered to a "Scott Hoggett" from an Australian domain. Now to put this in perspective, this seems to be the same creep who got in trouble for registering the domain name singaporeairlines.com.au (assumedly as a way to extort money from that national airline). His name also shows up on several known spammer lists.

I had sent several messages to Scott, including this one on Friday February 24th:

Surprisingly, I received the following response from Scott just a few hours later:

I responded with the following:

Well, apparently that upset the creep. Here's the response I received on Saturday:

Nice, now he is threatening me. Too funny. Definitely time to give him a taste of his own medicine. So, I just sent him the following:

The code I have set up is rather simple. He'll get 1 confirmation the first time. 2 the next, 4 the next, and then 8, and then 16 ... you see the pattern.

And yes, I know this is a waste of time, but what the heck, it kinda feels good.

I wonder when I'll hear from him next.

Lead ColdFusion engineer Tom Jordahl will be discussing ColdFusion and "Mystic" in his general session at cf.Objective (adding to the already illustrious speaker list). He'll also present a session on Web Services and Java, and will go in to detail on how ColdFusion uses the Apache Axis WSDL2Java tool to create code to consume Web Services. (Tom is an Active Committer on the Apache Axis project).

Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend this event. But based on the posted speaker and session lists, this is going to be hardcore event that serious ColdFusion developers will want to attend.

The PayPal Integration Center provides SDKs that can be used to accept PayPal payments from within your applications. ColdFusion MX 7 is a supported platform (it uses the Java SDK), and a ColdFusion Component is also included (it uses the Java APIs, and exposes simple high-level methods that can be invoked from within your code). Sample CFM code is also included.

I've blogged my experiences with AT&T Wireless before, both the good and the truly bad. A while back Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless, and apparently, also acquired AT&T Wireless incompetence, as demonstrated by the following ...

Two of my family members have AT&T Wireless phones on a shared family account. Or rather, they did. Back in December I migrated both of those accounts over to Cingular, which of course required new phones and new SIM cards. The migration did not go smoothly, initial programming was incorrect and it took a few calls to Cingular to get things like text messaging working. But eventually all was good, with one notable problem - the voicemail indicator would not show up on either of the new phones (LG C2000).

So I called Cingular, and was told that there was indeed another programming problem, and that it had been fixed. They also asked for the two IMEI numbers and said that those had not been programmed into the account - that makes absolutely no sense to me as you can switch GSM SIM cards between phones without ever having to notify the carrier of the equipment used. Still, I went along with it. But no, that did not fix the problem.

Another call to Cingular, a long call while I was made to try all sorts of settings and options, and put on hold repeatedly. This was followed by additional calls, until eventually I was told that I had been given the wrong SIM cards for the new phones, and that replacement SIM cards would be sent out.

A week later I installed the new SIM cards and called Cingular to have them activate them. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Still no voice mail indicator, and still more calls needed to Cingular.

Finally a breakthrough, today I spoke to yet another representative who (after putting me on hold repeatedly) came back with some research. Apparently ,there is a known problem with a batch of these phones essentially making them incompatible with Cingular SIM cards. This problem has supposedly been addressed by the manufacturer, and exchanging the phones for newer versions thus solves the problem.

But, my local Cingular store won't exchange the phones as it is now well past 30 days since I bought them. So I was given an 800 number to the Cingular exchange department to do an exchange by mail.

The guy who answered the phone at the exchange department made me repeat the entire story in detail, even though he should have had all the records in front of him. He put me on hold (several times) and then came back and started asking me to check settings and configuration options (stuff I had done over a month ago!). I refused, and back on hold I went. Then he came back and said that I was mistaken, that the phones were fine but that I needed new SIM cards, and that my local Cingular store would have them!

Fortunately for him I lost the connection, and had to call back. The next rep I spoke to (a couple of hours ago) made me explain the whole story again. She then started asking "was the phone dropped?" and "is there any condensation in the screen?" and "has it been exposed to extreme hot or cold?" and my favorite one "check the battery connections, do any of them look bent?", and so on. Huh? The phone works! It turns of and off, it makes and receives calls, it sends and receives text messages! Condensation? Temperature? Battery connections?

I tried to explain the futility of the questions being asked, but no go - I assume she had to work through her script, as irrelevant as it was. And then she put me back on hold, and came back to tell me that this was a known problem with the phone, and that it needed to be exchanged. Really? No way! I guess it's a good thing that I called the exchange line, huh?

So, apparently two replacement phones are on their way. Whether or not they'll fix the problem is anyone's guess. I'll post a follow-up when they arrive.

For now, Cingular definitely takes the lead in the incompetence race!

The CFDJ folks dropped by to see me while I was in NYC yesterday. Simon Horwith used the opportunity to interview me about ColdFusion, Flex, and life at Adobe. The interview runs about 25 minutes, and is live online now.

Last night's NYC session went well. There was just under 60 attendees (sorry NYC, Philly has you beat!), and as I have come to expect from this particular group, lots and lots of questions and comments and interaction.

This morning I presented to the WAMMO group in Washington, D.C. Adobe Evangelist, Lori Defurio, gave an opening presentation and talked about the new post-acquisition Adobe, and then I presented Flex 2 and CF/Flex integration. Lori and I will do it all again this evening at another WAMMO user group presentation (that's a first I think, I have presented to multiple user groups in one day before, but never the same group twice in the same day). If you are in the D.C. area, please drop by. Details are on the WAMMO site.

I'm in New York, parked in Adobe's NYC office (it's nice having so many more regional offices to take advantage of).

Last night's presentation in Philly went really well. Over 60 attendees (largest crowd thus far this tour), in a really nice auditorium in The Wharton Business School. The Wharton guys first showed off some of the apps they have built, powered by ColdFusion and some using Flash and Flex front ends. These are impressive apps, from student portals (even accessible via SMS using a CF event gateway) to virtual simulation teaching tools to server monitoring tools and much more. Every time I have seen The Wharton guys present their apps I have been impressed, and this time was no exception.

My presentation and session went smoothly, no last minute reinstalls or anything. I also used a free half hour or so before the preso to tweak the Session Tracking example I had been using so that it uses nested grids instead of two related grids. I did have one bug with row sizing that I could not figure out in time for the preso, but with some help from the Flex team I got it working in the wee hours when I arrived in NYC last night. There's nothing like changing demos at the last minute, keeps it more exciting.

Anyway, if you are in the NYC area, please drop by the NYCFUG tonight. The more the merrier!

I'm sitting in my office-on-the-road (aka Starbucks) on the University of Pennsylvania campus (blocks away from Huntsman Hall, venue for tonight's user group presentation), working on a new ColdFusion Flex demo. If you are in the area, be sure to drop by. We'll be chatting about Flex 2, and specifically Flex / ColdFusion integration. Details on the user group website.

feed-squirrel.com is a news feed aggregator (currently) catering to ColdFusion, Flash, and Flex users. It is currently y watching over 100 blogs, and publishes RSS feeds for all or by category. Lots of other cool features too, and all powered by ColdFusion MX 7 (of course). Thanks to U.K. developer Neil Middleton for creating the service, and for brining I to my attention.

I am in Los Angeles today for customer meetings, and head back home tonight. This week's usergroup presentations went really well, and attendees seemed really excited at the opportunities made possible by Flex 2, and the clean seamless integration between ColdFusion on the server and Flex generated Flash on the client.

The only real gotcha occurred last night, when Flex Builder 2 (which had been working for me perfectly all week) started throwing JVM errors on startup. Normally I'd have repeated the steps, capturing error logs in the process, and sent them to the engineers to look at - after all, that is what beta is for. But with attendees waiting for me to get started - well, after the obvious fixes (-clean, deleting the workspace, removing most recent plug-ins) didn't work I uninstalled Flex Builder, cleaned up the folders, and performed a clean install. That did the trick, and the presentation started only 20 minutes late. To those of you sitting there patiently, thanks.

One question that came up repeatedly (in various forms) was "are Flex Enterprise Services needed for Flex apps to communicate with ColdFusion?". And despite explaining this repeatedly, there still seems to be some confusion about this one. So ... the answer is no. You can use <:mx:RemoteObject> and <mx:WebService> to invoke CFC methods in a Flex app built using Flex Builder, and you can deploy the generated SWFs which will be able to communicate with ColdFusion, without needing anything else installed on the server. Of course, you may still want to use Flex Enterprise Services as doing so exposes important additional functionality, but even without FES, Flex 2 can communicate with ColdFusion backends.

It just works, that's about all there is to say. This week I configured an internal server running Windows 2003 64-bit (on an AMD 64-bit box) and SQL Server 2005 64-bit, and ColdFusion MX 7 (I previously mentioned the IIS 6 tweak needed to make this work ). And it all just works using the default ColdFusion SQL Server driver.

I am in San Francisco, in the Adobe office (former Macromedia office at 601 Townsend), the venue for tonight's CFUG presentation on Flex 2 and ColdFusion/Flex integration. If you are in the area, please drop by!

Last night's presentation in Seattle went very well. There were about 45 attendees, including a contingent who drove up from Portland (and a really cute six month old named Indigo, the youngest attendee at any CFUG that I can recall).

I just arrived in Sacramento, and have parked myself in a Starbucks (coffee and WiFi, what more could you ask for?). If you are in the area, be sure to drop by for tonight's presentation on Flex 2 and ColdFusion Flex integration.

London is now confirmed as the fourth location when I visit Europe in March. The presentation on Flex 2 and ColdFusion to the UKCFUG is scheduled for March 20th.

I'm already scheduled to present in Amsterdam and Brussels in March, and now Munich has been confirmed, too. I'll be presenting Flex 2 and ColdFusion / Flex integration to the local CFUG on March 21st in the Adobe Munich offices.

I am in Adobe's Seattle offices, working on some last minute changes for the demos I plan on using this evening at the CFUG event.

If you are in the area, I hope to see you tonight at the first stop on this user group tour. Details are on the Seattle CFUG page.

The Guitar Center story began in 1959 in Hollywood, California. Over the years the stores and locations grew, and the name was changed to The Organ Center, and then The Vox Center, and finally The Guitar Center. Today, The Guitar Center is a publicly traded company with locations in 38 states.

This evening I had to drop by my local Guitar Center, and when I visited http://www.guitarcenter.com/ for store locations and hours was pleased to discover that the site is powered by ColdFusion MX 7.

Tim Buntel has announced that he is leaving Adobe and the ColdFusion team to pursue his true passion, education. Tim has been an integral part of the ColdFusion team for many years (and not just thanks to his memorable MAX performances). We'll miss you, Tim!

Simone Bateman has posted his adventures in getting Flex 2 to compile on a Mac.

WebServeUSB is just that, a web server (and FTP server) that runs on Flash memory on a USB device. Just plug the device into a USB port on a Windows box, and your server will be up and running and ready to respond to requests. It features a web based administrator, can run CGI scripts and server Perl and PHP pages, supports ISAPI, can run Java apps ... all on a USB device (128MB, 256MB, 512MB, and 1GB sizes available). This could be really useful for product demonstrations - imagine being able to walk into a customer location, plug in the USB device, and run your apps. Now, the big questions is whether or not we could get ColdFusion to run on it. Any takers?

No, there is no <cfdump> tag in Flex, but if you do need to dump objects, use the following code (replacing obj with the appropriate object name):

I attended the first two Spring <br> events in Athens, OH, and was impressed with both. Both were well attended, professionally run by Dave Hannum and his crew, and I was honored to have been able to keynote. Unfortunately, I missed last year's event because of a scheduling conflict, and will have to miss it again this year as I will be in Europe that week. But other Adobe folks (I have to get used to saying that) will be there, along with other well know community members. Details are at the SEOMUG site.