Helping with the stage for Scrooge. Nice to help, some people have put some serious time into this!

Oh, and Happy T-giving to all you 'mericans! Canucks celebrate our thanksgiving in October - http://ping.fm/PFLQJ

Managed to get a script working in minutes, allowing me to interface from ping.fm to any Jisko-based microblogging application. Yay!

Sitting at Starbucks Langley having hot choc with my 4 yr old daughter. Fun times and good lemon poppyseed loaf.

Accepted into the Centaur (CF9) prerelease program - looking forward to getting it up and running

Google GrandCentral shrinking/running out?

I've been in awe of the concept of GrandCentral, which was acquired by Google in July 2007. The concept of having one phone number, and being to control the routing and functionality of that number via the web is amazing. There are many services like it, but none that appear to have even close to all the functionality at the low/free pricepoint.

However, as a Canadian, it's been frustrating waiting for a phone number - the site currently supports the US only. I've been waiting for years.

So I set up a ChangeDetection account to watch the list of GrandCentral phone numbers to see if new phone numbers are getting added. What I've noticed is that the list of numbers is shrinking by a few every week.

Is the system running out of phone numbers? Are they closing the service in certain area codes? They haven't added any new area codes for the entire length of time I've been watching - since mid-October.

GrandCentral, when will you add more numbers? When will you add Canadian numbers? Please?

At Edmonds Santa parade w the kids. They are so excited, it's sunny but freezing.

It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. The enigma is inside a chicken, within a duck, stuck into a turkey.

Adobe Max - follow up pics and CF9

Well, I'm still getting my pictures up... so far I have the pictures of being all tourist in San Fran on Saturday.

Ray had a good summary about Cloud Computing with Stax.

I also read a good summary of CF9 at CodersRevolution. Check it out.

T

Headed into work late after getting in from Max. Great conf, looking forwarded to updating code and caching.

Adobe Max - San Fran - Day Four

Wow, a jam packed last day, made a bit crazier by the fact that we really had to rush away to get to the airport. It seemed that everyone needed to recover a bit from last night's party.

Right of the bat, today a couple CF gurus made our lives much happier - Mr Delmore and Mr Camden. Ray put on a fantastic and fun session about the Ajax tools within CF 8 and Jason "Slackware" Delmore spent 20 minutes just with Jay and I geeking out and trying not to tell us anything about Centaur. Thanks for reaffirming our faith in the CF community guys, you guys are great!

Rumour has it (not from Jason, that guy is TIGHT lipped!) that there will be some nice caching improvements to CF 9 (something like ehCache's in-JVM caching system??). After some of the sessions and discussions, I think there will be some major Ajax improvements and possibly some new ways to tie into event-driven programming. They are definitely pushing object-based programming. The new Bolt IDE sounds promising, and Jason made sure we understood the rationale behind a commercial CF-centered IDE. I'm also impressed with the way they are using Apache Derby now, great product!

To start the day we had a nice quick breakfast and some extra time to meet some other attendees. We headed over to Ray's "ColdFusion Powered Ajax" session which was fun and informative. It was neat seeing the UI elements and getting opinions from a CF developer we trust. The QueryConvertForGrid() function surprised us and the CFAjaxProxy is obviously quite powerful.

I hit the "Uber Panel" in the Unconference area, and listened to some discussion about the new IDE, and raced over to a session on CF Caching Strategies by my new hero Rob Brooks-Bilson. Great session, and exactly the way I would have wanted it to be. I loved hearing the real-life applications along with some good definitions of the terminologies used in caching. Both third-party tools memcache and ehCache sound really great. I'll definitely have to check out highavailability.com.

Jay and I grabbed some lunch and headed done to the pavillion for some swag, sitting with a couple of Adobe LifeCycle guys from Ottawa - go Sens!

Mr Corfield put on a great session on Event Driven ColdFusion that was a bit hard to follow (why would we want to do this again?), but it was obviously designed for CF developers that were finding the Flex and ActionScript programming models compelling. There were some great tips to follow up on.

We dove into a session about Cocomo - Flex is really gaining some wonderful ground, and seeing it in action connecting to Cocomo in the cloud - wow!

We raced to the hotel, took a quick taxi ride to the airport, waited for the plane, and got home in record time. Bags of swag and duty-free booze for the boss, and now it's time for bed.

Thanks Adobe, the conference was amazing!

Adobe Max - San Fran - Day Three

Well, another amazing conference day, but a bit disappointing as a ColdFusion developer.

Started really early, rushing over to the other hotel and grabbing a muffin and a juice. My first session was 'ColdFusion Powered Flex' - Simon was a great presenter, but it didn't really introduce anything particularily new for me. There are always a few good small tips and things to remind us about how the technologies work.

The keynote for the day was all about new products. We had been told by the ColdFusion team to eagerly await this speech. There were some great technologies introduced, such as Catalyst and the new Bolt IDE, but there was almost nothing about ColdFusion at all.

Alchemy was a bit interesting, if not odd. It allows C and C++ programmers to compile their code to Flash for client side execution. There was also a mention of the company Ensemble that creates plugins to allow Visual Studio developers to work with Flex.

My first session after lunch was ColdFusion Powered AIR. It was a bit dry and it didn't really introduce anything that wasn't covered in other sessions earlier in the week. However, it was nice to see the FaultHandler in action, and we used the Flex Builder debugger. I had trouble determining where the Flex ended and where the AIR began, which I think is a problem with the curricula. I suspect that the drag-and-drop from the Desktop to the application window was the main "AIR" feature that we were playing with.

The next session was about architecting ColdFusion for scalability. Consider I did a full day lab on it on Sunday and a few other sessions, it was a bit boring. However, Brandon Purcell did a fantastic job - I would have avoided all the other sessions and taken Brandon's instead. It was a very well-rounded session. I liked hearing about HAProxy, Nagios, Cloud Computing and the 'jrunx.kernel.jrun' class, and it was nice hearing that our work infrastructure is quite appropriate.

My last regular session was put on by Steve at Figleaf, and it covered ColdFusion, Ajax, Spry and jQuery. It was very intense, but informative. I'm still not completely sure why anyone would encourage developers to overload their pages with so many different libraries and JS references, but it made for an interesting presentation.

We hit the Sneak Peak and Max Awards - some amazing technologies were presented (check www.adobe.com/go/keynote). Again, nothing ColdFusion related. Funny enough, one of the CF engineers presented a way to run ActionScript server-side. I was left vaguely with the feeling that CF was being "phased out", replacing with Flex, wizards and ActionScript. Oh well.

The customer appreciation event was a huge party - Adobe rented both the California Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum. It was intense. Buses took everyone to the Golden Gate Park, and we were served food and entertained inside museums! Jay and I took in the Planetarium, wildlife exhibits, African performers, contortionists, a retro arcade and more. Both facilities are amazing.

Aside from the lack of ColdFusion announcements, we also felt a bit disappointed after meeting some of our ColdFusion "heroes". We'll see - I'm sure it was an even longer week for them. Otherwise, we met a bunch of amazing people, many of them within the education world. Good to meet you all!!!

So another long day. We have a tight timeline tomorrow, and we're concerned we won't even make it to the airport in time - we'll figure something out!

The winning mobile entry was called Succubus Vertigo. Too funny.

Dude, the guy handing out the awards is drunk. Funny enough, so is Jay. Kidding.

Decent day of sessions, now sitting in Max Award ceremon with beer in hand. Woot.

Great lab by Simon, learned a couple new things to take back. Wish we had more time to cover things like returning errors from server...

Flex lesson by Simon Slooten (simonslooten.com) - great presenter.

Raced to the other Marriott, grabbed a quick walnut muffin and coffee and run to my ColdFusion Flex lab.

Adobe Max - San Fran - Day Two

The first full day of Adobe Max - it was great. Another sunny day, and this time the conference was mostly in the spacious and well-equiped Moscone center.

The breakfast was great - little cheese and sausage English muffins. Sat around and waited for the keynote to start (see www.adobe.com/go/keynote).

The keynote was great. They highlighted Cloud Computing, Social Computing and Device vs Desktop. During the Cloud Computer exercise, Maria Schriver came out with Ann Lewnes from Adobe and talked about their educational project for California Legacy Trails. A component of this project allowed teachers to create curriculum based on the content on the site, including quizes. For students, they could enter a drag-and-drop enabled AIR interface and put together photo essays.

At one point, Maria said that she felt like she was at a Star Trek conference - ouch!

We saw a wonderful sample app called Tour De Flex that highlighted many of the UI elements in a nice resource for documentation.

Steve Fisher came out and gave us a tour of the new Salesforce. He was very enthusiastic, especially about the AppExchange program, but there wasn't too much that was immediately exciting. One app was a conference tool that allowed administrators to manage conference sessions and drag-and-drop sessions onto the calendar. He defined 'The Enterprise Cloud' as cloud computing with: a full stack, access to relational databases, workflow engines, a robust security model and 24-7 uptime.

The Social computing phase of the speech was neat, with Adobe releasing Cokomo - a hosted service that allowed many users to collaborate in Flex. It included shared cursors, video conferencing and more. He made a special distinction that there was NO screen sharing - it was 'co-navigating', ensuring that data that was sensitive on one side would not be seen on the other.

Adobe also release Adobe Wave, a nice hosted solution for receiving desktop notifications from any web service. This could be handy for SerebraConnect and similar outsourcing services.

As expected, the Mobile and Device computing part of the speech was amazing - Windows Mobile screwed up the presenter several times, and the iPhone was never mentioned by name. Google Android was showcased, and looked wonderful. Andy Rubin from Google came out and agreed with Kevin Lynch that the progress was impressive.

My sessions for the day were extensive - I had a lab about using LifeCycle DS with ColdFusion to create messenging applications. One great use for this is to update the client on progress on long-running requests. The DataService and ArrayCollection functions are amazing.

Kevin Hoyt at Adobe revealed to us that the company Stax.net has been chosen to help Adobe get ColdFusion into the cloud sitting on top of the Amazon EC2 system. Amazing stuff.

In the afternoon I had a session on Deploying CF for Large Scale Environments. This session didn't interest me much, but I enjoyed hearing more about EAR and CAR deployment and the upcoming special licensing in Adobe for virtual servers and disaster recovery. The speaker pointed out some great tools at www.charlesproxy.com and adaptj.com for working with stack traces.

Jay and I then attended an Unconference about YSlow. We knew much that was contained in the talk, but there were some great points made. Brian Meloche talked about conbine.cfc (yay us, we were ahead of the curve!) and optimizing HTTP requests by moving image/asset requests to a different domain that is not cookie enabled.

We had a great dinner in the Pavillion, taking in all the sponsors and vendors, and went back later to meet the CF team and talk about CFML language development and the new CFML committee that is aiming for an 'open' CFML language.

Night, very tired

Wow. CF and LifeCycle lab - chat client in under 50 lines of code with Flex. Moving onto CF gateways.

Exciting speech by Salesforce. Adobe also intro'ed Cokomo for online collab and Adobe Wave for receiving desktop alerts - SerebraConnect

Kevin brought our Maria Shriver to discuss the technology behind the California Trails education project. Really cool.

Adobe Keynote started, really glossy. Great wrap around screen, loud music, excited people.

Got to the Moscone center for breakfast and the opening. Great facility and food!

Adobe Max - San Fran - Day One

Very busy day, long lab. Very informative, but not exactly what I expected. The conference seems to be well attended. Sat behind a really nice guy from a major US University - got to hear about some of the bureaucracy and process in a large educational institution.

Afterwards, Jay and I tried to find a good steak house, and ended up at JohnsGrill. Amazing place with live Jazz music and a theme revolving around Sam Spade from the Maltese falcon.

The lab was on Building High Performance apps by Figleaf. Great case studies, taking into account their customers like NIST and the National Park service. It didn't touch on security or actually building apps.

Some tips from our friends at Figleaf

• Shoot for CF page executation time of under 100ms
• Use 64-bit processors - they rock, especially on Linux
• To avoid JVM memory issues, consider deploying on JBoss
• Upgrade to JVM 1.6_10
  
• Use OpenSTA for load testing
• Check out SeeFusion for testing if the built-in tools aren't working
• FusionCube has a tool called 'Scope Enhancer' that sounds very useful
  
• Multi-processor machines are great, especially if there may be long running requests
• Remember that every JVM version change results in different optimization
• Remove IIS application pooling for the CFIDE directory
• The major scalability issue is usually garbage collection
• Disable the 'Save Class Files' setting - can result in too many class files
• Disable the setting 'CFC Type checks' in production to speed it up
• Consider using 'Cache web server paths', remember that this setting is set on an instance-by-instance basis
  

They suggest installing the multi-server install using the JRun built-in server, and then deploy a couple instances and bind them to IIS. We discussed the basic inner workings of JVM - eden, tenured and perm gen spaces. We talked about JVM settings like -xmsMemSize, HeadDump settings. The server monitoring tools are great, but add a lot of overhead when Memory Tracking is on.

There are issues with session replication in CF 8. Sticky sessions with instance clustering work great. Figleaf suggests considering writing session vars to DB using OnRequestEnd, basically replicating the sessions yourself.

Interesting, but not exactly what I expected.

Still going in the lab, a bit overtime. Touching on caching and cf_accelerate as well as cfthread. Good stuff to stay for, I suppose.

Delving into the built-in CF monitoring tools, pretty handy. Already knew about all the JRun log files though from a couple weeks back...

Need to check out using Scope Enhancer for monitoring JVM settings and memory usage: http://ping.fm/ML2FQ

Moving into tweaking JVM and datasource connections. Hope to hear about lots here.

Getting to the meat of the lab, instances and load testing. Great lunch, meeting other people in education and e-learning.

Never used nbtstat -R before to flush DNS after changing HOSTS for local development. Cool.

Need to read up on CF distributed mode a bit, although we normally use other techniques: http://ping.fm/OcPdk

Talking about clustering... lots of procs, lots of mem, use 64-bit, consider JBoss for good mem usage. Multiple instances are neat.

Just sitting down after break in first lab. Going well, nothing mindblowing. Great info about instances, odd things w session replication.

Amazing day. Missed The Rock, but walked everywhere, took a great Bay cruise, rode streetcars and trolleys and ate seafood. Woot!

Adobe Max - San Fran - Day Zero

Wow, what a great, and long, day leading up to Adobe Max.

San Francisco - what a beautiful city. We got off the plane and made the long trek to the hotel. The city was surprisingly quiet for ten in the morning, but the weather was clear, sunny and warm.

We took trolleys to Fisherman's Wharf, but missed the ferry to Alcatraz. Grabbed a nice seafood lunch with a nice view and then walked down the waterfront, all the way to some historical park and beach. Along the way we found a place offering Bay cruises. It was amazing - long busy boat ride under the Golden Gate bridge and a boat tour around Alcatraz island. A cheezy but really informative audio track played the whole way.

We took a cable car through the city back to Market Street, and wandered around Union Square. The atmosphere once the evening hit was WAY more what we would've expected - a total buzz, people of all sorts everywhere!

We took the opportunity to see the new Bond movie in a very luxurious theatre. Then back to the hotel for a nice Goat Cheese salad. What a great day - looking very forward to the conference!

Made it to San Fran! Nice hotel, not where the conf is, but close. City is pretty nice, weather is awesome.

J didn't make it past customs, whisked away screaming. Oh well, I got throught.

At airport, long drawn out check in, but incident free. Grabbed a cold drink, waiting.

Being driven around in rush hour by J&R chatting with GPa. Happy Friday!

Prepping for trip to Adobe Max in San Fran. This'll be great, lots of important sessions.

Got on the bust today with a large group of asian kids on a field trip. They're from my old high school. Sigh, I feel a bit old.

Long day of bug fixes at work. Sick about hearing about US election.