Two positions this week, both in the Netherlands:

• Peoplexs (Rijswijk, Netherlands) is looking for two ColdFusion developers, one more experienced and one more junior. Details on both positions are posted online.

The Adobe LiveCycle team is now blogging at About LiveCycle ES.

During the MAX Japan keynote we announced that Adobe AIR has been installed 100 million times since it's release less than a year ago! We also announced that Flash Player 10 had been installed on 55% of computers in its first two months! TechCrunch also just reported the story.

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!

Fellow platform evangelist Lee Brimelow is a die-hard Flash user. But even Lee acknowledges that sometimes Flex is the best tool for the job, and he has just posted a video tutorial, targeted at Flash users, on getting started with Flex.

Michael Chaize is an Adobe Consultant in France, and he also teaches Flex in a school in Paris. He recently ran an "AIR Idol" contest for his students, and the apps they built are really impressive. The students have also published the applications they developed during 2008. Good stuff!

I previously mentioned Amethyst, SapphireSteel's upcoming Flex Visual Studio plug-in. SapphireSteel has just posted a demo of their Visual Designer, an interactive Flex page layout UI that will be part of Amethyst Professional.

TOP GUN (formerly WebManiacs) is Fig Leaf's new 3 day training event covering ColdFusion, Flex, and AIR. Top Gun runs June 8th-10th in Washington, DC, and is limited to 100 participants. Registration is now open, as is the call for papers.

TheServerSide (a popular Java community site) is running a story by Brian Kotek entitled Using The ColdSpring Dependency Injection Framework for ColdFusion.

Flex Camp Orange County is scheduled for Saturday, January 31, 2009, at Boeing in Huntington Beach, CA. The speaker lineup has been posted, and includes fellow Adobe evangelist Kevin Hoyt. Seating is going to be limited to 150 people, and registration is now open.

EcoDrive is an AIR based application that uses data collected by your Fiat car to help drivers adjust their driving style so as to improve fuel efficiency. The app was shown during the keynote in MAX Milan. Andrew Shorten and Serge Jespers recently spent some time with Fiat and with AKQA who built the app, and have posted this video report. The video runs about 20 minutes, and is well worth watching.

I love Fireworks. I've recently started to use Photoshop for some projects. But for day to day use, for resizing pictures or adding drop shadows or doing quick crops or batch resizing ... Fireworks is so quick and clean and simple.

But what about you? Do you use Fireworks, and if yes, how? Where does it fit in your workflow?

Don't answer the question here. Doug Winnie (aka Agent Doug), Adobe's Group Product Manager for Workflow, wants your input over on his blog.

FedEx has announced FedEx Desktop, a desktop application that you can use to track shipments, check statuses, and more. And, as noted in the FAQ (under Technical), FedEx Desktop is an Adobe AIR application.

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.

ColdFusion Product Marketing Manager, Kristen Schofield, is asking ColdFusion developers to fill in a survey on cloud computing plans.

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.

Two this week, and both in Minnesota:

• Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN) is looking for a senior level ColdFusion developer. Requirements include experience with ColdFusion 7 or 8, as well as experience with at least one of Model Glue, ColdSpring, ColdBox, FarCry or Mach II. Other requirements include technical competence in SQL, JavaScript, HTML and CSS, XML/XSLT, and object oriented design and development. Experience working with RIA development using Adobe Flex, Adobe Integrated Runtime or AJAX is preferred. Details posted online (look for job code 23356).
• Unnamed client (Minneapolis, MN) is looking for a Flex developer for a 3 month contract (with extensions probable). Requirements include experience with AS3, XML, Web Services, Flash Remoting, as well as experience with large enterprise level projects. Contact recruiter Jim van Bergen at Concord USA.

At MAX I demoed Ensemble's Tofino, a Visual Studio plug-in for Flex development. But Tofino is not the only kid on the block, and SapphireSteel (who created a Ruby plug-in for Visual Studio) is also working on a Flex Visual Studio plug-in called Amethyst. SapphireSteel has just announced the release of Amethyst Beta 2 (which, among other things, adds IntelliSense support for both MXML and ActionScript).

The reality is that we'd never be able to create every tool for every category of developer, and so it's good to see the growing support for Flex and the Flash platform.

LiveCycle ES Developer Express is an EC2 cloud hosted pre-configured, virtualized installation of LiveCycle ES Solution Components in a self-contained development environment. And if you really want to know what that means, Duane Nickull explains.

Remus Stratulat has posted the source code for a simple Flex Regular Expression tester. If you need to use Regular Expressions in ActionScript code, this can get you started quickly.

Now Boarding is an AIR based airline simulation game. You get to buy planes and destinations, build your terminal, ensure that your passengers are happy, and (hopefully) build an airline that is profitable. This is a really great sim, and the fact that it is AIR based just makes it better. But be warned, it's addictive and quite the time-waster (not that I'd know from personal experience, of course).

I know, we just wrapped MAX in the U.S. and Europe, and MAX Japan is still a week or so away, but ... MAX 2009 is just 9 months away. And, believe it or not, I am already involved in MAX 2009 planning e-mail threads, which, truth be told, is cool and exciting and sick and twisted all at the same time!

While demoing the ORM features in Centaur (CF9) and Bolt (the CF IDE) during the MAX keynote, I showed and executed some code, and this snippet appeared on the screen for a short time:

I have now received three e-mails asking if that code was real or not. And the answer is yes, that is real code generated by Bolt, and it really was running in Centaur. Really! And yes, I know the code is not great (heck, it's not even that good, good thing we're not shipping yet).

But, you have to wonder, what made them ask? And did we inadvertently let a CF9 enhancement slip out of the bag? ;-)

ReadWriteWeb is running a story entitled Adobe's LiveCycle Powered by Amazon about running LCES on Amazon Web Services.

Just a reminder, there are several ColdFusion 8 e-seminars coming up:

• Upgrading Seamlessly to ColdFusion 8 - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 11:00 A.M. PDT and Wednesday, February 18, 2009 11:00 A.M. PDT.
• ColdFusion-Powered Rich Internet Applications - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 11:00 A.M. PDT.
• Beyond HTML: Using Ajax, PDF, and More to Create Engaging Applications with ColdFusion 8 - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 11:00 A.M. PDT.