Sorry for all of the comment spam many of you have been receiving. I am not sure why the parasites think that my site readers would be particularly interested in WOW Gold and Muslim Dating, but ...

I was running a rather dated version of Ray Camden's BlogCFC (my setup is a very modified version of Ray's client code, so upgrades are rather complex), and was therefore not taking advantage of many of the newer features, including much improved comment spam blocking. But, I have now updated to the latest and greatest, so hopefully comment spam is a think of the past (I said "hopefully"!). Thanks for your patience.

Lee Brimelow has done it again. His latest Dead Drop required inspecting mail headers, performing a SQL injection attack, following GPS coordinates, lock picking ... I am amazed every time someone actually solves one of these things! But, someone did indeed solve it, and now Lee explains all.

I generally avoid political discussions and debates on this blog. I have strong opinions about the economy, bailouts, executive bonuses, congressional hypocrisy, taxation, government intrusion, partisanship, and more. (I know, you are shocked that I have strong opinions!). And I am more than happy to discuss these in person, but, as I just said, I generally avoid doing so here.

But, an anonymous paid ad ran in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (page A4), and the author has managed to clearly and effectively articulate what so many find frustrating. The ad text has really resonated with me, so much so that I have been feeling compelled to share copies of it far and wide. And so, possibly against my better judgment, I am providing a link to the ad text here. Regardless of your political orientation, this one is well worth the read.

Check out JetBlue's Welcome Bigwigs. ;-)

David Aden has written a really good article for Government Technology entitled Open Source -- Is it Free?. This is not a technical article, rather it focuses on business decisions, and measuring the true cost of "free". David presents the arguments clearly and fairly, and this one is worth the read.

Fig Leaf is now offering a one-day bring-your-own-laptop class on Dreamweaver CS4. Details have been posted online.

I mentioned Lee Brimelow's London Dead Drop last week. Well, someone figured it out, and Lee has posted details on what it took to win. This one is unbelievable! And I don't know what amazes me more, Lee coming up with this idea, or someone actually figuring it out! Incredible!

Nothing to add, this strip speaks for itself:

Lee's done it again, a new dead drop, this time in London. And the first clue is a doozy!

I've mentioned Lee Brimelow's dead-drops previously, but his Amsterdam game is the best thus far. And be sure to read Lee's explanation now that this dead drop has been found.

Here we go again, one more example of how courts and juries seem to believe that individuals should not be responsible for their own actions.

As reported in this story (on CNN), "Dustin Dibble, 25, landed in the [New York City] subway tracks after a late night watching a hockey game at a bar with friends April 23, 2006. A downtown N train ran over him, severing his right leg.". Yep, he was drunk, more than twice the legal limit had he been driving. And he mistakenly stumbled onto the train tracks.

He's lucky to be alive. But, no, that's not good enough. He sued the Metropolitan Transport Authority. And he won! "The jury ruled Tuesday that Dibble was 35 percent responsible for the accident, so his monetary compensation was also reduced by 35 percent -- from $3,594,943 to $2,336,713."

35% responsible?!? He drank, and did so by choice! He impaired his own judgment, and then tempted natural selection. Had he have been killed he'd have been a nominee for The Darwin Awards.

So, how did the jury reach such a ridiculous decision? The only explanation I can find is that perhaps they truly were a jury of his peers, people as stupid as Dustin himself.

Lee Brimelow has been watching too many James Bond movies. Or he's wishing that he'd been recruited by The Agency at MAX. Or he's trying to get in shape to replace Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible IV. Or ...

Lee is planning on hiding copies of Create Suite 4 Master Collection (valued at over $3500) in various places as he travels, and will post video clues so you can find them. He's just posted details about his first CS4 Master Collection dead drop. Too cool!

Ok, I'll admit it, I am not a Pixel Bender guru. I know this may come as a shock to many of you, but yes, it is true. Sorry.

But, there are some hardcore Pixel Bender developers out there, all of whom need to check out the NVIDIA Adobe Pixel Bender Killer Kernel Contest.

To win, you'll need to use Pixel Bender to create a killer kernel. The kernel will be judged in three categories: Best Artistic technique, Most useful in the Photoshop workflow, and Most technically compelling according to the categories below. The Best Overall Pixel Bender Kernel will win an Alienware Area-51 PC, and the top entries in each category will win an NVIDIA graphics card.

Many have blogged this already, and I feel compelled to do the same so as to help reach the widest audience possible.

Just about everyone in the ColdFusion community knows Joe Rinehart. Between his work on Model-Glue, his presentations at MAXs, and more, Joe has given continuously to our community, and now we have the opportunity to give a little back.

Joe's wife, Dale, was recently diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, and has been undergoing aggressive treatment. Dale has been sharing her feelings and experiences online, and the posts are both painful and hopeful at the same time.

A group of ColdFusion community members (including Brian Kotek, Ray Camden, Scott Stroz, Doug Hughes, Charlie Griefer, and others) have taken it upon themselves to set up a donation pool to try and offer a little assistance to the Rineharts in this difficult time by helping to offset the large and ongoing medical expenses associated with this illness. They have created a site at www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com, and are asking for the community to contribute. I just sent a contribution, and encourage those of you who know Joe and have benefited from all he has given to do the same.

Not sure how I missed this one, but ... AboutWeb's Phill Nacelli posted his rendition of Adobe Labs.

Developers seem to either love or hate Eclipse, few are neutral on the subject. But, like it or not, Eclipse is an important part of our lives as the platform on which Flex Builder is built, and is about to become an even bigger part of our lives when "Bolt" is released. The most frequent Eclipse gripes are related to performance, and so Marc Esher's post entitled Speeding Up Eclipse caught my attention. Marc offers a few practical suggestions that are worth a quick read. But, equally useful, are the comments on his post.

I'm not a big fan of IT analysts, and have noted so previously. I find that far too many of them are all opinion and no experience, tossing supposed expertise around with little to back it up and even less transparency, and in doing so often actually impacting buying and deployment decisions.

Now to be very clear, there are exceptions. Last week in Milan I got to spend some time with RedMonk's James Governor who seems to relish breaking the technical analyst stereotype - he's direct, honest, knowledgeable, and brutally blunt, and he cares less about being popular or quoted and more about finding sanity and clarity amidst cesspools of hype and hyperbole. But, of the analysts I have met (and I have met many over the past two decades), he's the exception, not the rule.

I bring this up because I was recently pulled into a conversation with a U.S. Government agency that has been using ColdFusion successfully for a long time, and has recently started working with Flex as well. Apparently, as is the case in most large organizations, multiple products and technologies are in use, and there was some discussion internally about the platform on which to build a new application. And so, the organization (I promised not to name names) sought outside expert advice by contacting Gartner who then came back with a recommendation.

Before I go any further, there is something I should state quite emphatically, and that is that I fully appreciate that there are lots of options out there, and sometimes ColdFusion may not be the right tool for the job. If careful research is performed, and a decision is made to use PHP or ASP.NET or Java or anything else, well, I can respect that decision (even though I'd try to encourage the use of ColdFusion when and if I think it is the right choice - hey, I am biased, and I freely admit it). Ok, now back to our regularly scheduled programming ...

Gartner came back with a recommendation, a copy of which I have read and reread. And they did not recommend ColdFusion. Nor did they recommend Ruby on Rails or Java or ASP.NET or ... So, what did Gartner recommend for brand new development instead of ColdFusion? I hope you are sitting down ... Gartner recommended the use of Perl. Yep, Perl, the same Perl that was created in the late 80s, the same Perl that has been a staple of IT departments and system admins for decades, the same Perl that primarily relies on CGI for use with web applications, the same Perl of which the current version 5 was released in 1994 (and yes, I know that version 5.10 came out a year ago and v6 is in the works).

And no, I am not badmouthing or belittling Perl - it is indeed proven and battle tested and powers some impressive applications including Bugzilla and Moveable Type and parts of some impressive sites including Amazon.com and IMDb. Still, it's a pretty astounding recommendation, and one that is somewhat harder to fathom than, say, recommending PHP or ASP.NET.

Ok, so why was Perl recommended? The first criticism of ColdFusion is one of leveragability, that logic created in ColdFusion can't be easily shared with other applications. Obviously, considering Web Services interfaces, and gateways to just about anything, this is flat out incorrect. I am not sure what type of integration Gartner is referring to, but I fail to see how logic in Perl is inherently more sharable than logic written in ColdFusion. The next criticism is cost, and Gartner notes that as commercial software, ColdFusion has a higher acquisition cost. Interestingly, Gartner explicitly points out that this is an acquisition cost issue, but then goes on to simply ignore any ongoing cost issues (like training time, development time, etc., even though it previously points out that a benefit of ColdFusion is that it is easy to learn and fast to develop in). In fact, the report goes on to point out that code written in Perl is more complex, and that maintenance by future developers is a potential challenge. There's more, but you get the gist of it.

Gartner concludes by stating that Perl can run on multiple platforms, and then noting that ColdFusion can also run on multiple platforms, but that Perl can also run across multiple solutions. (I have no idea what that even means!). And finally, the report makes the argument that Perl is open source and thus provides a higher level of investment protection than single vendor solutions, apparently unaware that there are in fact other products (including open source offerings) that support CFML (to varying degrees).

The report does not state whether or not the researchers have ever actually used ColdFusion or Perl (or any other player in the space), apparently that is not a prerequisite to actually making recommendations.

I know I am generalizing somewhat, and am sure that there are analyst reports and expert opinions that are balanced and sound and well reasoned. Unfortunately, I don't seem to run into them much, which makes the reliance on supposed experts a very worrying notion.

And that end of the day, analyst opinions are just that, opinions. They are not facts, they are not automatically valid, and they are not even necessarily driven by subject matter expertise. They are just opinions, albeit expensive ones. And as for opinions, well, you've probably heard the expression "Those who can't, teach". The phrase is actually rather absurd, I know many who can and teach (and many who can't and thankfully don't!). So, I propose that we update the phrase to "Those who can't, opine".

The week before MAX Europe in Milan, I spent a few days in Poland. This was my first trip to Poland, and I got to meet customers, partners, and local Adobe personnel, as well as present at an RIA Day event. One evening, Tadeusz Chelkowski and Piotr Walczyszyn gave me a quick tour of the city. The small remaining fragment of the Warsaw Ghetto wall is somewhat hard to find, in a walkway sandwiched between residential buildings. But seeing it and touching it is an absolute must. There is something surreal about staring at a wall, and knowing that had I been doing so a mere half century ago, well, the wall would have been locking me inside, and I'd not have lived to tell the tale. The experience is disturbing, inspiring, eerie, insightful, and frightening - all at the same time. I've posted a couple more pictures in the On The Road section.

Well, two mini-me's actually. ;-) These adorable paper figurines were created by the very talented Brazilian, Cláudio Dias (the same guy who sold a Darth Vader model to help pay his way to MAX). The one on the left is me in a CF shirt, and the one on the right is everyone's favorite superhero, Scorpio Man (complete with mask, cape, and tail)! Check out Cláudio's other creations on paperinside.com, you'll be amazed at what he's created.

On, and I posted a few other MAX US 2008 pics, too.

No, I am not going to get into any presidential political discussions here. But, I mentioned PolitiFact to a few people lately who had never head of it, and so am sharing it here, too.

PolitiFact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly to help you find the truth in the presidential campaign. Every day, reporters and researchers from the Times and CQ analyze the candidates' speeches, TV ads and interviews, and determine whether the claims are accurate or not using a Truth-O-Meter (which measures True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and Pants On Fire). Results are unbiased, non-partisan, succinct, informative, and fun, too!

I am in Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, waiting for my connection to Bangalore, India, where I'll be presenting at the Adobe RIA Developer Summit.

In my prior post I introduced the basics of home automation via X10. X10 is not a new standard and specification, it has actually been around since the 1970s. And over that time is has not evolved much, if at all. X10 is incredibly popular, because of its simplicity and extensibility and low cost.

But X10 also has some very real problems:

• X10 signals are not 100% reliable and can be affected by other plugged-in devices. Erroneous and seemingly random signals are not uncommon, and are hard to truly eliminate.
• X10 signals lose their strength over distances, so the bigger your house the less reliable the signals. You can buy repeaters and signal boosters, but these are not perfect.
• X10 has a very limited address range, and if your next door neighbor gets into home automation you can end up bumping into each other. And the likelihood of this happening may be higher than you think. As such, you may need to install signal filtering on the AC feed to your house to block signals from passing in and out.
• Getting X10 signals to pass between the two electrical phases in a typical U.S. AC installation can be rather painful. There are bridges that can help with this, but their installation is not for the feint of heart, and they don't seem to work perfectly.
• But the biggest drawback to X10 is the poor error correction. X10 signals are kind of tossed over the wall, a broadcast, perhaps telling device F2 to turn on. But X10 does not provide a failsafe way to check that that the signal actually reached device F2, and that device F2 truly is on. So, while things usually work and work well, when they don't there is little you can do automatically or programatically.

Still, as already said X10 remains very popular because, well, for the most part it does indeed work. And it's cheap (at least to get started).

Over the years we've seen a variety of home automation technologies appear on the scene, and I've tinkered with most. But the one I've grown most impressed with, and have started to migrate to, is Insteon (created by SmartLabs). Insteon is relatively new (the first Insteon devices started appearing in mid-2005) and works much like X10 but with some very important differences:

• Insteon never suffers from signal loss because all devices are repeaters, so the more complex and sophisticated your home automation network, the stronger the signal.
• Insteon uses 3 byte device addresses, and devices have manufacturer defined addresses (a bit like NIC MAC addresses). So device addressing conflicts are a thing of the past.
• Insteon is a dual-mesh specification, featuring AC signaling like X10, but also supporting RF.
• Bridging the two AC phases with Insteon is easy, just plug one Access Point (a little white box) into any outlet on one phase and a second on any outlet on the other, and you're done. The Access Points have LEDs that will show you if they are wired correctly (on two different phases as opposed to the same phase), and you can just keep moving the second around until the LED indicates success. And as an added benefit, the Access Points act as signal repeaters and RF receivers. too.
• Most importantly, error detection and correction is built in. Devices can be easily queried, and simply publish their current state, and signals are automatically retransmitted if they were not correctly received.
• And best of all, Insteon is fully backwards compatible with X10. In fact, just about every Insteon device can also have an X10 address allowing them to respond to both signals, and most Insteon controllers can also send X10 commands, too. While not actually required by the Insteon specification, most Insteon device vendors seem to be providing X10 compatibility.
• Insteon is also much faster than X10, and thus the "inst" in Insteon.

Insteon is installed and configured in much the same way as X10 is. To install an Insteon switch you'd simply remove the original switch and replace it with the Insteon equivalent. Same for outlets, and any other devices. Addresses do not need to be defined, as every device has a preconfigured address (that is usually on a label on the device itself). Controllers can query the entire home network and find new devices automatically. And devices also identify themselves so controllers can respond intelligently (so that, for example, a switch used for fluorescent lighting that does not support dimming can identify itself so that controllers know not to try to send it dimming commands).

The biggest limitation with Insteon right now is that there are far fewer devices available for it than there are for X10. But, with X10 backward compatibility, that is less of an issue. For new installations you can buy X10 devices (realizing that you'll not get the same level of functionality obviously). And for those of us with significant investments in X10 already, Insteon provides a vastly superior home automation network while not requiring tossing out any existing devices. (Of course, if you are anything like me, you'll find it hard to resist replacing those existing X10 devices once you get used to the richer functionality of their Insteon counterparts).

In other words, to me, Insteon feels like what X10 should have been in the first place, and is thus the heir apparent to X10.

To learn more, visit the Insteon links above. And for the largest selection of Insteon (and X10) devices, visit Smarthome (use the Insteon and X10 categories on the top left).

In future posts I'll highlight some of my favorite devices, including my new all time favorite home automation controller.

As many of you know, I am a bit of a home automation nut, and for close to a decade I've been wiring and rewiring parts of my home, while tinkering with all sorts of gadgets (some very useful, some admittedly less so). Part of the appeal is the fun factor. But there is a very practical aspect to this as well.

For example, I have a large saltwater marine reef fish tank in my house (it sits in the wall between my office and the family room). A healthy reef tank needs reliable lighting, with different lights (and different intensities) at different times of the day - brightest simulated sunlight at midday, moonlights at night, and more. Water temperature needs to be monitored carefully, a sudden drastic rise in temperature is a surefire way to kill off soft corals (I know, I've had it happen). And more. And flipping all of those switches manually is a pain (especially with my travel schedule). And so the entire setup is automated. Daytime lights start to turn on at sunrise and are off by sunset, and moonlights are obviously the reverse. Temperature changes outside of a set range are immediately reported to me via SMS, and I can check the temperature from anywhere in the world at any time. Even water leaks or overflows (a real concern when you have close to three hundred gallons of water being pumped around your house) trigger immediate alarms and notification (and will soon automatically activate cutoff valves). You get the idea.

So, how does this all work? Over the years I have played with a variety of home automation technologies, but have ended up sticking with X10. If you've not run into X10 before, here's what you need to know. The technology has been around for over three decades, and it is popular because it is easy to use, very flexible, and pretty cheap, too.

X10 works by allowing you to send signals over your house electrical wiring. To turn a switch on or an outlet off, you simply send a message over the AC wiring specifying the switch or outlet address, and the instruction. The appeal of X10 is that it needs no special wiring or data lines or anything like that. X10 commands are sent over the same electrical lines that the devices are already connected to.

Obviously, to make this work, you need switches and outlets and devices that are X10 compatible, and there are lots of these. Using standard wall light switches as an example, you'd buy an X10 replacement light switch, remove the existing one, and replace it with the X10 equivalent. The light switch would still function locally as it did before, but now it could also accept instructions sent over the same AC wiring that the switch is using to power the lights.

Every X10 device on your network must have an address, and X10 addresses are 1 byte long (or technically 2 sets of 4 bits), so a maximum of 255 devices can be connected at any given time. X10 devices do not come with preset addresses, and at setup time you pick the address you want for each device (and multiple devices can actually be given the same address, which can be a blessing and a curse). A command sent over the wire is then sent as address + 4 bit instruction code (3 for on, 11 for off, 15 for dim, and so on). Commands are usually sent by other devices. For example, if you want a light switch in one part of your house to control a light elsewhere, instead of having to run new wiring (and setting up 3-way switching) you could have the new light switch set up to send commands to another light switch, essentially creating a remote control of sorts.

Many home automation setups use large collections of switches and outlets and more all connected to each other. But where things become more interesting is when a controller is added to the mix. A controller lets you execute scheduled events, run through scripts in response to an action, activate entire scenes all at once (press a button on the wall marked "movie night" and the curtains close, lights dim, projector drops from ceiling, fireplace turns on, outside lights turn off to dissuade visitors ... you get the idea).

Which is exactly how my fish tank setup (among other things) is automated. I have a wall mounted controller that is powered by an AC feed and also sends back signals over that same feed. It allows one touch control, execution of timed events, and more.

The key is that home automation technologies like X10 allow you to break out of the simple "click this and that happens" mould. Instead, you get to mix and match triggers and their actions, using an ever growing array of triggers, and actions only limited by your imagination. And the array of X10 devices is truly remarkable. There are the obvious things, like switches and outlets and plug-in pass-through modules and keypads, to less obvious things like thermostats and motion sensors and security system integrators and irrigation system controls, to slightly more obscure devices like gas and water valves and curtain/shade openers/closers, to all sorts of connectivity modules allowing connections to IP networks and RF and phone systems. And there's a whole lot more, too.

It's fun, it's easy, it's inexpensive, and it works. Usually.

Wow, this is my 3000th blog post! Many of the early posts were actually "Tip Of The Day" entries which I migrated to the blog when I brought it online. The earliest tip/post is dated September 15th, 2000 was was 2898 days ago, so almost a post a day for close to 8 years!

So, to the thousands of you who read and comment, thanks for the support! To HostMySite, thanks for keeping me up and running. And a special thank you to Ray Camden for BlogCFC.

Here's to thousands more!

I like Vista. I've said it before, and will say it again, Windows Vista works for me, and works well.

But, it's no secret that Microsoft has run into problems convincing the masses to really give Vista a try. And so Microsoft is trying something creative, a fun campaign named the Mojave Experiment. Microsoft assembled a group of users who'd not been exposed to Vista personally, but who seem to have all of those preconceived notions that prevent Vista adoption. Microsoft presented a new version of Windows codenamed "Mojave" to these individuals, and only later revealed that what they were demonstrating was in fact Windows Vista. The videos are fun (well, some of them), as are the participants' reactions. And while I highly doubt that this campaign will change all of those lingering doubts, I really would like Microsoft to succeed at this one. After all, I do like Vista.

But here's the interesting thing. Obviously, Microsoft wants the Mojave Experiment to be viewed as much as possible by as many users as possible on as many machines as possible, and it wants a high quality experience and consistency while ensuring that just about anyone connected to the Internet could immediately view the content. And I am guessing that's why the site is powered by Flash, and not by Silverlight.