One of our stops in Europe last week was in Liège where Serge Jespers and I presented at a local RIA event. While there, community members Cyril Hanquez and Steven Peeters interviewed me briefly for their local usergroup. They have now posted that video interview online:

Interview with Ben Forta on March 9, 2010 in Liege, Belgium from CFUGBE on Vimeo.

I mentioned the upcoming U.S. Census recently, and noted my disappointment at having to mail back forms instead of filing them electronically which would save money, encourage greater participation, ... whoops, that was the other post.

I was going to leave the topic alone, but, I can't. Last week I received a letter in the mail letting me know that the Census form would be coming. And sure enough, this week the form showed up, with a prepaid envelope to return it. Three mailings. But nope, that's not enough. I just received a postcard from the US Census Bureau reminding me of a toll free number available for help filling in the form!

Apparently, 120,000,000 letters were sent out ahead of the form to announce its pending arrival, and another 120,000,000 postcards were mailed afterward as a reminder!

The waste of $s is truly sickening, even by government standards!

India based PCQuest has published an article on getting started with ColdFusion 9 Using Adobe ColdFusion Builder.

Thanks David Dharmaraj for sending this one my way.

Title says it all.

I still wish they'd not have created multiple versions. But, I'll take it anyway.

Fellow Adobians Paul Gubbay (Sr. Director Engineering) and Lea Hickman (Sr. Director Product Management) from the Creative Suite, tools, and services teams, have launched the Design And Web blog to discuss product plans, technology prototypes, and even broader topics around industry trends.

I'm replacing the blue fluorescent lighting above my fish tank with LED strips. The original intent was to use blue LEDs, but as I'm already going through the effort, I opted to use RGB LED strips (each LED is made up of three LEDs, one red, one green, and one blue), allowing me to create and endless choice of colors (although I know that I'll primarily use various flavors of blue to simulate moonlight).

The RGB LED strips come on a reel and are encased in rubber so they are waterproof. The strips can be spliced and reconnected at specified cut marks, and the reconnected strips can be waterproofed, too. RGB LED strips are powered by 4 wires, one each of red green and blue, and a common wire. Run power on the blue and common and the LEDs glow blue. Run power down the red and green and the common and the LEDs glow yellow. You get the idea.

Simply turning on and off power (at full intensity) to any wire is easy, any switch can do that. For greater control, and to be able to mix amounts of each color to obtain the exact color you want, that requires a RGB controller. Most controllers allow for some sort of color selection, and adjust the power to each wire accordingly. Pretty simple.

Where things get trickier is finding the right controller. Most RGB LED controllers are interactive, push a button or turn a knob to control the lights as you wish. What I needed was a way to do this under home automation control, so that changes could be scheduled or occur in response to other actions. And I could not find a single RGB LED controller with a programmatic interface. The next best option was to try the IR route. There are controllers with remote controls, and Insteon home automation can use an infrared link to fake remote control sequences. Unfortunately, that option did not work. The remotes that I found all allowed for cycling through programs or increasing and decreasing lighting power, but none allowed for explicit control over the R, G, and B values.

So, time to introduce a whole new technology and protocol to the mix. DMX512 is a communication standard commonly used to control stage lighting and effects. It's been around for over 20 years, and is what most clubs and concert halls use to sequence lighting, fog machines, moving lights, and more. It's a very simple and open protocol, and is widely supported by all sorts of hardware, software, devices, and more.

I found a DMX Decoder which accepts DMX512 commands to power RGB LEDs. The decoder plugs into any DMX512 source on one end (using an XLR connector), and connects to the RGB LEDs (via a simple screw terminal) on the other end. So now all I'd need to do is generate DMX512 sequences programmatically to fully control my lights. Simple, right? Not quite. Unfortunately, my Insteon based home automation system does not support DMX512.

My home automation controller, which I've discussed previously, is the ISY-99 from Universal Devices. One feature of the ISY-99 that I had not previously played with was its Network Module, an optional component which allows the controller to communicate with network resources over HTTP, TCP, UDP, and more. Using the Network Module you can talk to just about any networked device, sending raw text, binary data, and more.

With the Network Module I could send DMX512 commands to the DMX Decoder, all I would need is something to bridge DMX512 and Ethernet. And I found this exact bridge, the Ethernet / DMX512 Generator made by Cinetix in Frankfurt, Germany. This device does exactly what I was looking for, it acts (among other things) as a Telnet server, accepts commands, and generates DMX512 sequences which then get passed to the DMX Decoder which in turn controls the RGB LED strips. And the commands are pretty simple. For example, send S001,V$FF to turn on the red to full brightness (S001 is the first slot, red, and V$FF sets the value to 255), and so on. (The only gotcha is that Cinetix does not sell the device in the U.S., so I had to have it shipped to an address in Europe and then brought it over myself).

The last thing to do was to define the commands in the ISY-99. I added a whole bunch of commands, one for each color I'd want. Each command simply sends raw text TCP data to port 23 on the DMX512 Generator, and in milliseconds the lights respond. These commands can now be triggered as needed in the home automation controller. I can invoke them on scheduled intervals, in response to buttons being pushed or toggled, and much more.

So, I now have RGB LED strips above my fish tank powered by a DMX Decoder which receives commands from an Ethernet DMX512 bridge which in turn receives Telnet commands from my ISY-99 home automation controller. (And I even have a little in-house ColdFusion app on my home Intranet which pops up a color picker, allows for color selection, converts the selection to the required DMX512 Generator sequence, and then sends the command as a socket request to the controller)!

Now that I'm reading through everything I just wrote up, it seems like a whole lot of work for what started as a simple fish tank lighting enhancement. But, hey, this stuff is fun. And it's cool to see all the pieces fit together. And it's really cool to see just how flexible the Universal Devices ISY-99 is.

DZone Refcards are free printable cheat sheets for popular applications, tools, languages, and more. DZone has now posted its ColdFusion Builder Refcard, created by our own Terry Ryan.

Intelligent Software Solutions has developed and deployed an application to enable critical infrastructure monitoring to the White House Situation Room. The application uses touch technologies to provide insight into the current status of various elements of critical infrastructure across the United States. The application provides users such as the President and his staff with the ability to view the status of any of thousands of pieces of critical infrastructure with a single tap on a touch surface. And the application was built using Adobe Flex.

A bit more detail in the press release.

Robert Scoble dropped by our San Francisco office, and chatted with execs from the Flash team. His thoughts (and videos) on Flash and Apple devices are a worthwhile read.

Lately, some (okay, someone) have accused Flash of being a resource hog. And lots of others have jumped on the bandwagon, without actually having performed any real tests or gathered any real data. But Jan Ozer has been doing just that, and has posted all of the details online. Streaming Media has posted their summary as well.

Title says it all. Some really nice Flash charting examples. Check it out.

I reset online passwords regularly (as should everyone). And I approve of password restrictions (minimum lengths, no reuse, at least one digit and one uppercase, etc.). But, as you can see in this validation screen, American Express apparently does not want passwords to be *too* secure! FAIL!

FlashCamp is coming to Boston next week on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 5:00pm. This is a free event with limited space, and the speaker lineup is pretty phenomenal, and includes Deepa Subramaniam, Heidi Williams, Doug Winnie, Chet Haase, ColdFusion's own Alison Huselid, as well as presenters from Zend and more. Registration required, so sign up now.

Who says you can't have it all? Check out this YouTube video showing the web, Flash and AIR on an upcoming HP slate device:

Also, see this Wired story.

HTML5 includes geolocation APIs that work even on devices without GPS support. And Serge Jespers has posted a demo showing how HTML5 and Flash can work together to use HTML5 geolocation to power a Flash app.

My Google Nexus One just alerted me to the fact that an update is available to Photoshop.com Mobile for Android. While the update downloads, here are some application details from a product team blog post. In addition to contrast, color, blur and other photo editing changes, the biggest enhancement is that the photo editor can now be embedded into other apps.

I'm a long time TiVo fan, and so I've been paying attention since TiVo announced that a new device was on the way. And the newly announced TiVo Premiere looks really impressive - everything that TiVo owners so love and then some. And, to top it all off, the UI is our very own Flash (and rumor has it that TiVo will open the box to 3rd party Flash apps, too).

I ordered a part from the Lenovo web site, and just received an e-mail shipment notification pointing me to the Lenovo Order Status site which is powered by ColdFusion!

TechRepublic is running an article by Brian Kotek entitled A look at ColdFusion 9's new features.

Check out this video:

Pretty slick (background music aside).

The United States Census is a decennial census mandated by the United States Constitution, and is used (among other things) to determine how more than $400 billion dollars of federal funding each year is spent on infrastructure and services.

Participation is mandatory, and the US Government (including the President) are engaged in a campaign to raise awareness and drive participation. Indeed, they have a very modern looking website, a blog, and are even using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, flickr, downloadable widgets to get the message out (see the What You Can Do) page. And I'm really impressed with this use of the Internet, social networking, and more to get the word out.

Or rather, I *WAS* impressed. Until I saw the message "We Can't Move Forward Until You Mail It Back". Mail it back? Really? We have a really nice web site in over 50 languages, social site integration, even a slick Flash powered interactive version of the form .... and then this:

Q: Can I fill out my form online?

A: No. Not at this time. We are experimenting with Internet response for the future.

The future? Really? As in the next US Census in 2020?

2000 was still early Internet days, so back then this would have been forgivable. But this is 2010, people live online, a couple of months ago online holiday shopping $s exceeded in store shopping $s, we bank online, utilities prefer to send you e-bills, and on and on and on .... But mail back your Census form, and we'll revisit in the future!

Ouch! What a failure!

In case you missed it, Adobe Flash has been in the news lately. Seems some don't care much for it. But, a PC Magazine columnist has just weighed in on the subject in a post entitled In Defense Of Flash.

Michael Hu, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Adobe AIR, as just noted that today is AIR's 2nd birthday!

Google Australia team member Pamela Fox explains HTML5 vs Flex for rich internet applications in this O'Reilly video from Ignite Sydney. She compares openness, UI components, vector graphics, 3D, bitmap manipulation, video, file system access, development environments, testing options, compatibility, and more - all in 5 minutes or so. Nice job, Pamela!

There's been lots of discussion about the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 and its phenomenal performance on the 1GHz processor Google Nexus One. But what about battery life? Fellow Adobe evangelist Mark Doherty weighs in on this one in a post entitled Battery Performance with Flash Player 10.1 on Nexus One.