2008 ColdFusion Position In The Netherlands
Just one this week:
- Rhinofly (Utrecht, Netherlands) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include at least two years of experience with ColdFusion MX (or later) and SQL. Speaking Dutch is not a requirement. Details (in Dutch) posted online.
2008 Apple Class Action Suit Should Be Tossed Out, And Stacie Somers Should Be Made To Pay
A lawsuit has been filed by Stacie Somers, a resident of San Diego County, California, who bought a 30GB iPod from Target, and who is apparently upset that she has to buy music from iTunes, an alleged monopoly. The complaint is that iPods won't play audio files protected by Microsoft DRM, and that songs purchased from iTunes can only be played on iPods. (See this InfoWorld story).
This one just ticks me off! For starters, users can indeed by DRM-free music from the likes of Amazon.com (the Amazon.com downloader even seamlessly adds the purchased music to iTunes), and Amazon.com started selling DRM-free music before Stacie filed her ridiculous suit. In addition, Stacie seems to be unaware that she does not have to buy anything from Apple directly at all. She can simple buy any music from anywhere for use with iPods, all she has to do is just buy music CDs!
But even more fundamental is this: No one forced you to buy an iPod, Stacie. Owning an iPod is a choice, a choice you made. You had the choice to not buy an iPod, just like you had the choice to not buy any MP3 player at all. And as you shopped at Target (as opposed to an Apple store) you actually had lots of other choices aside from iPods! So, quit whining, and next time learn about the product you buy before you exercise your own free choice to buy it!
Bottom line, this lawsuit should be tossed out immediately. And if at all possible, the courts should make Stacie Somers reimburse Apple for all costs associated with this stupidity.
2008 ColdFusion 8 Ensures Senate Lobbying Transparency
On January 1st 2008, the US Senate's lobbyist reform bill (S.1, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007) went into effect. The bill is designed to provide greater transparency in the legislative process, and requires full disclosure pertaining to lobbying activities.
So what does this have to do with ColdFusion? The bill requires that lobbying information be accessible and searchable online, and a new site has been created to do just that. The Lobbying Disclosure Electronic Filing System is built using ColdFusion 8 and Mach-II, and even uses Flex 3 (for example, the advanced data grid used to display search results). Among the ColdFusion 8 features used in this application are PDF generation and PDF form integration.
So there you have it - much needed lobbyist transparency, powered by ColdFusion!
2008 Intelligent Enterprise: Adobe One Of Most Influential Enterprise Vendors In 2008
Intelligent Enterprise handed out their 2008 Editors' Choice Awards, declaring that "Adobe is the key company to watch in the race toward mastery of RIA/Web 2.0 development.", and noting that "Adobe has a strongly positioned client (Flash) on millions of computers, a corps of evolving development tools (Flex, AIR, ColdFusion)".
2008 The Economist Loves ColdFusion 8
I just received a great message from a ColdFusion developer at The Economist, and just had to share it:
Hi Ben,
I thought I'd let you know that Economist.com has finished it's port to ColdFusion 8 across the whole live cluster and we have seen a reduction in page generation time of around 20% which is amazing and totally unexpected. Additionally we used to get several restarts a day on each server which have vanished. ColdFusion 8 on Windows 2003 with IIS quite simply doesn't crash anymore for us. We had to set-up the right monitoring thread kills e.t.c. but the whole thing is ridiculously stable.
I am amazed.
I love messages like this! ColdFusion 8 rocks, and if you yet to try it for yourself, you owe it to yourself to do so immediately!
2008 Rakshith On How To Enable Spell Check In CFTEXTAREA
ColdFusion team member Rakshith has posted an entry explaining how to get the spell checker to work in the FCKEditor used by <CFTEXTAREA>.
2008 ColdFusion Helps Huckabee Take The GOP Lead
Ok, so the title may be a bit of a stretch. ;-) But ... without venturing into political specifics, it is cool to see that GOP front runner Mike Huckabee is using ColdFusion (and Fusebox) to power his website! Thanks to Prayank Swaroop for pointing this one out.