I'll be in Dayton, OH, next week for a customer meeting. And while I am there, I'll be chatting about ColdFusion 8 at an event at Books & Co in Beavercreek. The event is on January 9th at 7:00pm.

Incidentally, this Books & Co location is at The Greene Town Center, and the The Greene site is powered by ColdFusion.

We are scheduling a massive big Flex 3 / AIR Pre-Release Tour in the upcoming months. The whole Platform Evangelism team is involved in this effort, along with many others, and I'll be presenting in just a few locations. In the U.S. I am currently scheduled to present in Atlanta GA, Cary NC, and Nashville TN. Those dates are confirmed and are listed on my homepage (along with links to the specific events).

In addition, I'll be covering the Brazilian segment of the tour, although I don't have final dates and venues yet. I'll post details when I have them.

The FTC requires that copies of your credit report (from all three major national credit reporting companies) be made available free of charge annually, and free must really mean free! Checking your credit report is important, if for no other reason than to make sure that there are no accounts or cards that you are unaware of. And taking advantage of the annual free report is a no brainer.

My annual reminder just popped up, I am printing my three reports right now, and am therefore reminding you to do the same. If you've not done so recently, the site you want to visit is www.annualcreditreport.com. (And yes, the individual sites will try to sell you stuff you don't need - just click the No Thanks options).

XNA Game Studio is a development environment for creating games for Windows and XBox 360. And the XNA team has announced that XNA Game Studio 2 has been released and is ready for download. Lots of new samples and tutorials too. Cool stuff!

Microsoft Virtual PC uses virtual machine hard drive images as disks. These VHD files are typically dynamic in size, they grow as necessary. And I had one grow on me yesterday to over 40GB in size! Microsoft provides a Virtual Disk Wizard which can be used to compact virtual disks (when the virtual machine is not running). But, running it barely reduced the size at all. The problem? The wizard looks for space that has been zeroed out, so that must be done before running the wizard. It would have been nice if the wizard had spelled this out, and also provided instructions on how to do this. But it doesn't (which is odd, as Microsoft actually provides a mechanism to do this)! So, in case anyone else runs into this one, this is what you need to do:

1. Power up the virtual machine.
2. Clean up the drive (empty the Recycle Bin, get rid of temporary files, and so on).
3. You may even want to defrag the drive.
4. Then, locate a file named virtual disk precompactor.iso (it should be in c:\program files\microsoft virtual pc\virtual machine additions), and capture the ISO image (right-click on the CCD icon to do this). This will start the precompactor program which zeros out unused space.
5. Then shut down the virtual machine.
6. And finally, run the Virtual Disk Wizard which should shrink the virtual disk, removing all zeroed out space.

My virtual disk is now down to a more manageable 6GB, whew!

If you have yet to run into WebKinz, don't feel bad - it may just mean that your age is measured in double digits. For the uninitiated, WebKinz are stuffed animals that each come with a secret code that uniquely identify them. Armed with their stuffed animals, kids go to the WebKinz site, create a login, and adopt their pets by providing the secret code. They can adopt as many pets as they'd like (or as many as their parents will buy for them!), and the pets live online happily in a house in a virtual world (with a Flash front end). Kids earn KinzCash (virtual currency used in Webkinz World) to buy stuff for their pets (pamper them, build nicer houses, buy food, keep them clean and healthy, and so on). In reality this means that the kids ignore their stuffed animals and only play with the online equivalents. But, it's clean harmless fun, and the system is designed to be very kid safe.

And one of my kids got a WebKinz this week, and right away wanted to play with it online. No problem, I helped him get set up, and he started buying furniture for his pet, and more. But then he wanted to access Webkinz World from the computer in his bedroom. My kids are allowed to go online with supervision only, and so the computers that they can access alone are very locked down. My firewall grants access as appropriate, and what is appropriate for younger kids is a whitelist system - basically, they have no access except for sites that we explicitly allow.

And that's where things become problematic. WebKinz uses a whole lot of IP addresses, some contiguous ranges and others not, and some in whole different IP ranges. Fortunately, WebKinz has a Technical Issues page which lists the IP address that need to be allowed. Unfortunately, the list is completely wrong! Heck, the IP address that WebKinz resolves to is not even on the list! So, I had him try and try again while I watched the firewall logs, and I gradually opened up the addresses needed until all worked. That was yesterday, but now it won't work again. Why? A whole different set of IP addresses are now in use!

Really, this is pathetic. WebKinz is targeting young children, and it is very likely that filters and parental controls are going to be an issue. Is it really that hard to A) find a fixed set of IP addresses (preferably a sequential range), B) don't keep changing them, and then C) actually post correct information on your web site? Oh, and just to make it a bit more frustrating, try finding a way to contact support or send feedback!

Too bad. The concept is nice, but the implementation leaves much to be desired. If you have young-uns, consider yourself warned.

CNet is running a story entitled New players enliven open source summarizing important open source announcements and projects of 2007, stating that "In 2007, much of the open-source action happened outside the corridors of the usual corporate suspects."

The story then lists several companies and projects, and the very first reads: "Adobe Systems was one. It's long been a powerful proprietary-software company, but its acquisition of Macromedia led to a new sharing ethos. Shortly after a major donation of script-execution code to the Mozilla Foundation last year, Adobe announced in April the open-source release of its Flex tool for Flash programming."

The ColdFusion 8 edition of the ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit is now 1800 pages in 3 volumes. And that was not enough space for all we had cover. So, an additional 678 pages of content were published electronically in PDF form, and may be freely downloaded (whether or not you buy the books). You'll find Chapters 21-23 on the Volume 1 page, and Chapters 41-54 and Appendixes C and D on the Volume 2 page. Enjoy!

CFWACK 8 Volume 3 - Advanced Application Development is now shipping (I received my copies a few days ago). Some of the new content includes server monitoring, .NET integration, working with data feeds, and more. More details on the book page.

The 2007 CFeMmys have been announced, and RIAForge has won for Best Community Site. Ray Camden gets much of the credit for this one, as he did the bulk of the work creating RIAForge and continues to do all maintenance and management. Still, as RIAForge was my idea (and I was the one who roped Ray in and helped arrange some funding for the project) I can't help but be proud, too.

Oh, and our own Kristen Schofield (ColdFusion's new Product Marketing Manager) tied for Best Newcomer (CF Blog that started in 2007).

Flex and LCDS positions available this week:

• Makana Solutions, Inc. (Lexington, MA) is looking for a Sr. User Interface Engineer for Flex development. Requirements include BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience, 7+ years experience developing and launching products, experience with LiveCycle Data Services, strong XML and SQL skills, and expertise with one or more OO development languages. Flex (MXML/AS) proficiency preferred. Contact nextstep@makanasolutions.com.
• Makana Solutions, Inc. (Lexington, MA) is also looking for several Flex developers. LCDS proficiency is a big plus. Contact nextstep@makanasolutions.com.

Kevin Hoyt has updated his extensive collection of Ajax based AIR applications for AIR Beta 3.

ILOG Elixir is a collection of UI components for Flex 3 and AIR. Included is an org chart, interactive gauges, map displays, charts, and more. You absolutely must check out the demos, and you can download a pre-release version, too. Very impressive stuff!

The alpha of Flex Builder 3 for Linux is up on labs.

eWeek has a story on user reactions to Ruby on Rails 2.0. It contains the following quote (from a Baltimore based software development company): "We are engaged to build the Johns Hopkins Clinical Research Management System, and after experimenting with the usual suspects - J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition], .Net, MDA [model-driven architecture], PHP, ColdFusion - we found that only RoR provided the development speed of PHP or ColdFusion with the powerful functionality and maintainability of J2EE or .Net.".

Of course, one has to wonder why they waited - if they wanted the "development speed" of ColdFusion and the "powerful functionality and maintainability of J2EE", well, that's called ColdFusion (as of CFMX in 2002)!

But, that aside, I must admit that I like seeing ColdFusion recognized as helping to define the benchmark for "development speed".

Two positions this week, a ColdFusion position in MI, and a Flex position in CA:

• Decypher Corp (Berkley, MI) is looking for a senior ColdFusion developer with at least 3 years of experience. Requirements include strong ColdFusion background (CFMX7 or later preferred), as well as experience with SQL Server, XML, and JavaScript. Experience with Flash preferred. Contact Andrew Agbay.
• Unnamed client (Los Angeles, CA) is looking for a Flex developer for a 12 month contract. Contact Charmaine Colvin (at recruiter P. Murphy & Associates, Inc).

Luis Majano notes that NASA JPL has committed to ColdBox. NASA JPL is a long time ColdFusion customer, on one visit there I saw code written in DBML!

ColdFusion Team Member Rakshith has explained how to enable upload features in the FCKEditor used by ColdFusion 8 <CFTEXTAREA>.

With the big announcement of the release of open source BlazeDS on Labs, ColdFusion users have been trying to figure out which option is better for them - the full LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) which is included with ColdFusion 8, or the new open source BlazeDS option.

BlazeDS is, for the most part, a subset of the full LCDS. It supports remoting and messaging, and it can be used with ColdFusion. And it's free. However, BlazeDS does not support data management (including the data synchronization functionality) which is one of the most appealing aspects of LCDS for ColdFusion users.

ColdFusion 8 can be installed with an embedded LCDS engine. If a license is provided then it is a full LCDS implementation, otherwise it is LCDS Express which has a single CPU license restriction.

So, should ColdFusion users stick with the integrated LCDS or use the new open-source BlazeDS?

If all you need is messaging (the ability to push from ColdFusion to the client), then BlazeDS may be a better option, if for no other reason than there is no license to worry about. But, if data management is important then LCDS is the better option.

We've been busy! AIR Beta 3 is on Labs, and here is a post that describes what's new in beta 3.

Title says it all. We just posted the latest (and final) beta of Flex Builder 3 on Labs.

BlazeDS is an open source Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Flex and AIR applications. Previously these were only available as part of LiveCycle Data Services, and today we announced that BlazeDS will be released under the LGPL v3, and along with it we'll also be releasing the specification for AMF (on which Remoting is built). BlazeDS is now on Labs, and Christophe Coenraets has posted lots of details.

Flex Camp is coming to Chicago on January 18th, 2008. This is a full day event featuring numerous speakers including Bob Tierney, Jeff Tapper, Mike Nimer, and more. The event costs $20, and registration is now open.

Todd Sharp created a cool example of on-the-fly conversion from PowerPoint to HTML and then to Connect. And then he explained how he did it. Very cool indeed.

NATO has announced that it will be using Flex and LiveCycle Data Services to create a system that will "reduce the time it takes crew members to prepare for flights. Once airborne, pilots will also benefit from the swift relay of data from 80 different sources - from emergency flight routes to information on their local environment." (Story on BusinessWire and computing.co.uk).