Our partners at Fig Leaf are now offering a 3 day hands-on training course in ColdFusion 8 Administration. Classes are currently scheduled in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Samsung BlackJack II first shipped with Windows Mobile 6, and newer devices now come with 6.1 pre-installed. Samsung is now providing a 6.1 update for those early BlackJack II devices. One of the most important differences is a dramatically improved SMS client that features message threading (finally). Other improvements include enhancements to the GPS software, homepage customization, and voice command support.

Kristen Schofield wants you to take a short RIA survey, and in return she'll share CF8 tag posters.

FlashCamp is a BarCamp-style developer event, focused on creating expressive Flash content and applications ahead of the Adobe CS4 launch. The event is October 10th-12th and will be hosted at the Adobe San Francisco office. There is room for about 200 attendees, all of whom will receive a free (as in beer, which will also be free) advance copy of Flash CS4 Professional. Register now!

My Sams Teach Yourself SQL In 10 Minutes and Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions In 10 Minutes have both been published in Chinese by Turing Book. Links are on the books pages. And here is a full list of all book translations.

Three positions this week:

• Unnamed client (Colchester, England) is looking for a ColdFusion developer with at least 2 years of experience. Requirements include CSS and SQL Server skills. Experience with PHP and JSP a plus. Contact Brad King at Freedom Marketing.
• The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Housing and Residence Life (Charlotte, NC) is looking for a ColdFusion developer for a 12 month temporary position. Requirements include experience with ColdFusion 7 or 8, an understanding of Java and Ajax, and experience with SQL Server 2000 or later. To apply, please forward a current resume and a cover letter indicating your interest, complete contact information, and salary expectations to Housing Technology Services.
• The Catholic University of America (Washington, DC ) is looking for an Application Implementation Specialist to work half-time as a ColdFusion developer and half-time with packaged application management (Sakai and Sharepoint). Requirements include one to two years of experience. Please contact Dr. William Lantry.

itbusiness.ca is running a story entitled ColdFusion drives UNICEF Canada's heated battle against HIV/AIDS. It also quotes platform evangelist Adam Lehman talking about ColdFusion 9.

Adobe Developer Connection has published an article by Mark Mandel entitled An introduction to ColdFusion frameworks. Mark introduces MVC options, ColdSpring and LightWire, as well as persistence frameworks include Transfer and Reactor.

I mentioned MAX BOFs a few weeks ago, and linked a form to post BOF topics. We've been looking through the list, and have identified several that we think are truly worthy of hosting at MAX U.S. this year. But we still have room for a few more. So, if interested, quickly, use this form!

David Tucker has been publishing a weekly roundup of all of the RIA news for O'Reilly Inside RIA, and now presents the content in a weekly podcast that covers all major RIA technologies and platforms.

Three ColdFusion positions this week:

• Wharton Computing of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA) is looking for a ColdFusion developer to create and maintain administrative applications for the school. Details posted online at Jobs@Penn, search for reference number 080825360.
• ImageTrend, Inc. (Lakeville, MN) is looking for an experienced ColdFusion developer to grow their collaborative teams. Experience with SQL database required and working knowledge of .NET and/or Flash desirable. Details posted online.
• Unnamed company (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is looking for a junior ColdFusion developer. ColdFusion 8 experience preferred, but 7 is acceptable. Must also have strong Oracle skills. JavaScript and CSS experience preferred. Contact Virginia Davidson at recruiter Manpower Professional.

FedEx has released an AIR Desktop that lets you track packages, receive shipment notifications, and more.

HostMySite (who actually do host my site) has announced that they are offering hosting on ColdFusion 8 Enterprise licenses for $149 per month.

The Ajax Experience is a Web 2.0 centric conference now in its third year. Adobe is a sponsor of this year's event in Boston, and fellow evangelist Kevin Hoyt will be speaking about AIR and more.

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!

Is Microsoft using Flash embedded in their Silverlight Windows ads? Fellow evangelist Raghu seems to have found evidence that makes his post a most intriguing read.

If you are running Cold Fusion on J2SE 1.4, please read this tech note regarding Sun's End-of-Life announcement. This primarily affects ColdFusion 7 and JRun 4, and should not be an issue at all if you are running ColdFusion 8.

French partner Kap Lab has released some very impressive Flex / AS3 components. Trees, data visualization, component inspection, and more. And they are all free for the download!

[Via Michael Chaize].

We've had to make some minor MAX scheduling changes. My 3 hour hands-on MAX session Getting Started with Real-Time Flex and AIR via LiveCycle Data Services has been moved to Wednesday, November 19th, 9:00am-12:30pm. That's the bad news. The good news is that the room we're in accommodates over 200 people, and there are still some open slots left. I hope to see you there, and don't forget to bring your laptop!

I previously mentioned that Adobe and Zend were partnering to make Flex and PHP play better together, and today InfoWorld published some more information on the partnership.

ColdFusion Product Marketing Manager Kristen Schofield has created the ColdFusion Evangelism Kit, an 8 page PDF document that helps explain the how's and why's of ColdFusion. This will be posted to Adobe.com at some point, but for now you can grab it from Kristen's blog.

Brazilian Claudio Dias wants to attend MAX in San Francisco, and needs some help covering costs. So he's offering a PDF paper model of Park Wars Darth Vader (yep, a South Park type Darth Vader character) to anyone who helps him attend.

ColdFusion 8 added .NET integration, making it possible for CFML code to invoke .NET classes locally or remotely. The feature obviously won't appeal to all users, but for those in organizations using both ColdFusion and .NET it does open up some very interesting doors. I've posted examples of how to use .NET integration, and others have, too. But beyond snippets and examples, I'd love to hear from any of you using this functionality in production applications. Specifically I'd like to hear about how you are using this feature, I'd like for you to share your thoughts on what works and what does not, and I'd like any suggestions on where you'd like to see us take this integration as we plan and build CF9. Thanks!

Jared Rypka-Hauer IM'd me a while back with some questions on modifying ColdFusion Administrator to use LDAP authentication. The truth is that this is something I wanted for CF8 when we added support for multiple logins with different levels of access, but that feature never made it in for that release. I still want ColdFusion to support this (using LDAP, a database of your choice, and more) - maybe CF9? But Jared needed this functionality for a client right now. Over the IM thread Jared came up with a workable solution to the problem, and I suggested that he blog it for others to take advantage of. And, he's just done so. Thanks, Jared!

We're hosting eSeminars on both ColdFusion and Flex, with the first session (ColdFusion-powered Rich Internet Applications) tomorrow at 2:00pm US East Coast time. Details are posted online for the Adobe ColdFusion 8 eSeminar Series and the Adobe Flex eSeminar Series for Developers.