So, why should you be careful about this? Because the Leopard upgrade kindly blows away your /home directory. Yup. There goes my ColdFusion install, there goes my Eclipse install and all my projects.

Backups? Fortunately, yes, I had a backup. Not a very up-to-date one, I'll admit (and I did toy with the idea of backing up my entire HD before upgrading to Leopard).

Fortunately, everything is under SVN so I just pulled out my old backup (and put it in /Developer this time) and then ran svn update on everything.

Other than that minor(!) trauma, the upgrade to Leopard seems to have gone well. I think.

Watch this space for more Leopard experiences.

Oh, and after all I've said about not upgrading early, why did I finally upgrade? Because, finally, everything I use on a day-to-day basis has been updated for Leopard. Or at least close enough to make the pain worthwhile. That and a new VPN client at work that is not compatible with Tiger.

Our first experience was flying back from Denver recently (Oakland hadn't quite got the system up and running for our outbound trip). You know how security lines are at the airport? Imagine this:

Walk up to the CLEAR lane and present your microchipped CLEAR card. A quick biometric identification (retina scan or fingerprint scan) and then you are escorted to the head of the line, ahead of everyone else, with airport staff carrying all of your belongings that need to be scanned. They cut you in right at the metal detector and watch over all your things as they are x-rayed. Then you're on your way.

You can pretty much guarantee less than five minutes in security, regardless of how long the lines are!

It's even true of international security. Jay went off to Hungary this week (to judge a cat show in Bekescsaba) and was able to completely bypass the lines at security.

If you're traveling a lot and want to sign up for this, contact me and I'll send you a referral code that will give you one month free (and I'll get a month free too!).

I received an email from a "Vivek Bhaskar" the other day to my almost brand new Broadchoice email address, offering their services along with pricing. I replied, asking how they obtained my email address since it was so new. Vivek responded that they buy lists from a third party. I told them to remove me from their mailing lists and not to contact me again.

Today, I get the exact same email introducing their "services" and requesting a phone call. I reported the email as spam and added them to my SpamCop blacklist.

Grrr!

For immediate release

On-Demand Services Attract In-Demand Architect

CASTRO VALLEY, Calif. -- Feb. 16, 2008 -- Sean Corfield today announced that he will be joining Broadchoice, Inc. headquartered in San Mateo, California as their Chief Systems Architect and Vice President of Engineering. In this new position, Corfield will oversee the evolution of Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ platform, expanding the capabilities and scaling the on-demand service to meet the ever-increasing customer base. Corfield said "Broadchoice has a really gifted team that has already created a winning service, used by companies such as Cisco. I'm excited to be part of that team and to have the opportunity to really take the platform to a new level." Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ is created and powered by Adobe technologies.

Richard Bennion, Broadchoice Founder & CTO, is a long-time advocate of ColdFusion and has been a pioneer in digital marketing for twenty years. "Bennion's energy and enthusiasm was key in attracting me to this role," said Corfield, "and he and I share an enthusiasm for great experiences created by great technology."

Also joining the Broadchoice team is Luke Kilpatrick, co-manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group (BACFUG) and manager of Fire on the Bay, an Adobe Fireworks User Group serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Kilpatrick brings a wealth of experience in UI development and content management systems to the Broadchoice team. Corfield said "Kilpatrick's a friend of mine and I'm looking forward to having him on my team."

About Sean Corfield
Sean Corfield has been a freelance consultant since leaving the Hosted Services group at Adobe Systems, Inc. in April 2007 and was formerly the Senior Architect for the IT division of Macromedia, Inc. for almost six years. Prior to joining Macromedia, Corfield drove the architecture of a number of high-traffic, high-profile websites for a diverse group of companies after working on the ANSI J16 C++ Standards Committee for eight years and building compilers, interpreters and runtime systems. He is also manager of BACFUG and a frequent speaker at ColdFusion conferences around the world, as well as a contributor to a number of open source ColdFusion projects.

About Broadchoice, Inc.
Broadchoice is the leader in providing on-demand marketing solutions for the enterprise. The Digital Marketing Manager™ platform provides a fully integrated, enterprise application for web content management, enterprise marketing management and channel partner management.

For those who aren't sure, this is intended to be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek announcement but the news is real. I start the new job on Monday, February 18th, and I'm looking forward to hiring some of the best talent to help me grow a very exciting product! Stay tuned!

If you want me to see something and actually respond to it, send it to my corfield.org account (or use the contact form on my blog).

I use Gmail a lot on my iPhone and one of my clients has standardized on Google Mail/Docs for their communications so I'm constantly reading mail and documents on my iPhone. Gmail was OK on the iPhone and Google Docs was bearable but Google Reader was a nightmare. At the weekend, I noticed Gmail suddenly got a lot nicer with a very iPhone-style UI, sliding panels between labels and mail. Great... now what about the other apps?

Tuesday night, I got home from said client's site and eagerly updated my iPhone firmware. The new "location" feature in the Maps application is very sweet (and seems sufficiently accurate for my needs). Then I started reorganizing my home screen. Screens. That's when I noticed that Google had updated most of its apps to be iPhone-friendly. Google Docs makes a great reader now, even for fairly large spreadsheets. Google Reader is a huge improvement!

So now my iPhone has:

• 43actions - a great little GTD (Getting Things Done) task manager
• Calculator
• Calendar
• Clock - with 10 cities
• Maps
• Notes
• Stocks
• Weather

• Google Docs
• Google Mail
• Google Reader
• Belfry Scientific Calculator
• My client's Google Docs
• My client's Google Mail
• ColdFusion 8 QuickDocs
• IMDB - I'm always looking up movies and actors so I need that accessible!

• Mail
• Phone
• Safari
• Settings

• Bejeweled
• Code Breader - a simple take on "Mastermind", a childhood favorite
• InARow touch - aka "Connect 4", another childhood favorite
• Mahjong

• Camera
• iTunes
• iPod
• Photos
• Text
• YouTube

Anyway, a big thank you to Apple and Google (and those games companies) for making my iPhone an even more lovable and addictive little toy!

He talks through six major issues and then summarizes in positive and negative bullet points. It's not a perfect list but I agree with most of it. When I'm hiring, I look for someone who is passionate, programs in their spare time, works on personal side-projects, learns additional technologies "for fun". I want someone who has "strong opinions, weakly held" (which is a toned down version of what is presented on that blog post). Similarly, I hear alarm bells when I am interviewing a developer who views programming as "just a job", only learns new technologies when the company sends them on training courses and only knows one set of technologies. I'm less concerned (than the blog's author) about someone who started programming "late" in life.

As folks who've been interviewed by me know, I don't "quiz" people or set them "clever" tests. I get them talking about their work and their projects. I want to hear passion, I want to hear about problems and how they solved them - and how they dealt with managers (or peers) who didn't see eye to eye with them on solutions.

Are your criteria different?

• Model-Glue (two clients), Mach-II (other client)
• ColdSpring
• Transfer

All three clients are on - or imminently moving to - ColdFusion 8 (as most of my clients have been) so we can take advantage of AJAX, performance, array/struct syntax, enhanced operator syntax, onMissingMethod() - which powers ColdMock - and many other recent enhancements.

These three clients have been keeping me pretty busy - I was even on-site with one of them for three days this week which, as folks who know me will realize, is pretty unusual since I've mostly kept to remote work since I left Adobe. I think they're going to be keeping me busy for at least the first quarter of 2008.

I haven't been blogging much this past two weeks but I've been posting to a few mailing lists, covering decorators (Transfer), dependencies (ColdSpring) and various OO design issues. I've also been writing an article for FAQU which will be in issue 6 (issue 5 is at the printers and should be in readers' hands soon). The article covers the whole "beans + DAO + gateway + service" object stuff, looking at four possible ways to structure your code and examining the pros and cons of each.

I'm also reviewing a new ColdFusion book that is in the works. It's a great introductory book that covers a lot of best practices and focuses on CFCs up front. It's target market means that it probably won't get on most American developers' radars but I think it will be worth tracking down and reading if you're a novice (to ColdFusion).

I'll also be writing a regular column for [name withheld] on my favorite subject: architecture.

As you can tell, 2008 has started off busy and looks likely to stay that way. I think the year will offer me some interesting challenges and some interesting opportunities - and maybe some big changes too.

Smart woman, my wife!

So I just ordered Leopard, a car charger for my iPhone and a 750Gb USB 2.0 HD that I can stick on my Apple BaseStation as a network drive. 750Gb for just $230... amazing... and scary how cheap storage has become...

The question is: can I resist upgrading until all the software I use has been updated?

Whilst not a resolution, I will be embarking on a series of blog postings in the new year that are longer and more in-depth than my regular posts. They will cover a lot of the architectural advice that I find myself giving many of my clients and I will also be covering frameworks in more detail based on requests I've been getting via email over the last year.

I'll also be looking at some anti-patterns that I've been seeing in code that I've reviewed over the last eight months (without identifying anyone, of course!). I hope it will help other avoid these problems in their own code.

I hope folks will find it interesting reading!

So I clicked the "Chat Now" link and got online with Lori. She informed me that the only way to buy these email gift certificates is to fire up iTunes and purchase them from the iTunes Music Store itself. Lori helpfully pointed out "iTunes is free"... So apparently Apple think that if you're buying music for someone, you'll download and install iTunes in order to do so. I can't say I'm very impressed with this change.

Consulting is my full-time business now - I recently stepped down from my CTO role at Scazu - so expect to see the red crab cards being handed out at user groups and conferences.

I hadn't been running Vista for a few days so, Monday morning, needing to do client work that involves SQL Server, I fire up the virtual machine and VMware tells me an update is available. Cool! I've been waiting for the 1.1 fixes!

I download the new image and shutdown Vista (wondering "how can an operating system take so long to boot up and shut down?") and then shutdown VMware and run the installer. It says VMware is still running. Hmm. The installation guide says if you hit this problem, look in the VMware Help (why can't you put the hint in the installation guide?). So I fire up VMware, fire up Help and it says sometimes a vmware-vmx process doesn't quit and you should use the Mac Activity Monitor to kill it. OK. Shutdown VMware. Open Mac Activity Monitor, find the vmware process and kill it. Run the installer. Success. I get to upgrade VMware.

Fire up VMware, boot Vista (wait...).

Upgrade the VMware tools. Reboot (more waiting...).

Up comes Vista and now it wants to update Windows with some important updates. OK. Wait for a bit. Reboot (more waiting...).

Up comes Vista and now... Argh! Apple wants to update Safari, iTunes and QuickTime. OK. Safari updates fast enough but iTunes / QuickTime takes forever. Guess what? Yup, reboot time. Sigh...

Up comes Vista again and now I can get on with some work. It only took about 90 minutes from start to finish. Who'd have known that between VMware, Microsoft and Apple (to be fair: mostly Microsoft), I'd lose the first hour and a half of my week? Vista had been up and running happily for about two weeks since I last rebooted it (so, to be fair, this makes Vista the most stable version of Windows I've ever used!).

I work through the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon until about 3pm my machine pretty much grinds to a halt. WTF? Oh, Microsoft wants to update Vista again! This time the updates are so important that Microsoft goes ahead and reboots my machine for me. Thanx Bill! Yeah, it sat there with a little count down warning that it was going to reboot but, hey, I normally keep Windows minimized and work on the Mac, right?

So Vista has now been up for 17 minutes. Do you think Bill would pay if I sent him an invoice for my lost time?

My first two albums? David Bowie's "Live At The Tower Philadelphia" (aka "David Live") and Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon". A recent iTunes gift certificate bought me a pristine copy of "David Live" which is still a thrilling album over thirty later.

"Scientific and Engineering Programming in C++" was a landmark book that introduced powerful techniques based on templates. When we (ANSI Standards Committee) were trying to redefine the language rules around name lookup as regards the friend keyword, we were forced to preserve the examples in that book because they had passed into common usage, even though we really wanted to restrict how the friend keyword worked. We did, eventually, come up with suitable rules.

Watching "Chuck" tonight (we recorded it from Monday) brought that whole committee experience back to life for me!

So why did I not pre-order Leopard and rush to install it?

[More]

• view:timeline - displays a graph indicating the number of results by date so you can track trends, e.g., coldfusion view:timeline
• view:map - displays a map highlighting top search results, e.g., sean corfield view:map
• view:info - displays additional ways to highlight parts of the results based on dates, measurements, locations and images, e.g., sean corfield view:info (then select "Locations")

In addition, from the experimental page you can choose keyboard shortcuts (to navigate your search results) or left-hand / right-hand search menus (they're slightly different).

You can choose to "join" one of the experiments which makes it your default Google results format (assuming you're logged in). I picked the left-hand context menus which seem to be richer.

I've already posted the raw notes I took in the sessions which were pretty much just a brain dump of what the presenters were saying without much of my own commentary. In general, the sessions were extremely good. My goal was to learn a lot about AIR and some useful stuff about Flex and the conference met that goal perfectly. The AIR sessions were great and covered a lot of ground, with plenty of information about the file APIs and using SQLite, the embedded database. There was also a fairly good balance between Flex and AJAX in the AIR sessions (some presenters actually showed the same functionality in both Flex and AJAX side-by-side). The two Flex sessions that I attended - both led by Joe Berkovitz - were really good with a lot of practical information about designing and building large Flex applications.

What about the other aspects of the conference? The size of the conference (around 1,000 people I think) meant that all the sessions were together on one floor and all the food / community / vendors were together on another floor. That meant you didn't have to rush between sessions and you had a chance to network in the hallways between sessions. The session rooms were rarely completely packed so you always got a seat. It was nice and relaxed. It was much better than Chicago in that respect.

The food, however, was a serious disappointment. Tapas-style food was fun and interesting on Monday lunchtime but it was the same sort of thing at the reception on Monday night, at lunchtime on Tuesday, at the special event Tuesday evening and at lunch on Wednesday. Nothing was labeled so if you had allergies or just plain ol' don't like certain things, well, you were pretty screwed. And if you didn't like / don't eat fish, you went pretty hungry. I eat pretty much anything but I lost a few pounds this week because not much appealed to me on Tuesday (either at lunch or at the special event) and on Wednesday I completely skipped lunch. The most charitable thing I can say about the special event was that the jazz band was pretty good. Like Chicago, the event was in the conference center and was just food and drink (and they ran out of beer apparently - I stuck to wine). The Chicago event was $100 for guests and since I couldn't imagine what would be so special it could be worth that much money, my wife & I skipped the guest pass. From what I heard, we made the right choice. The Barcelona event was $75 for the guest pass and, with hindsight, we probably wouldn't bothered with that either. Come on Adobe, do something special next year in San Francisco - or at least don't charge guests such outrageous amounts.

Apart from the food - and Tuesday evening's event - everything else about the conference was really enjoyable. It was great to finally meet so many European community members - there was a large British contingent, as well as folks from every part of mainland Europe. Barcelona itself is a beautiful city with great public transport and is also an interesting city to walk around. The beach was really nice (so I'm told) and the hotel restaurant was really good (at the Vincci Maritimo), although the relaxed European approach to schedule meant that they opened when they were ready, not when the posted hours said they would open.

Of the two MAX events, Barcelona was by far the better experience in many ways. It'll be interesting to see what Adobe do next year since both events will likely be even bigger...

One other thought (added later): whilst it was great for speakers that they were in one of the nearest hotels to the event (as was the case in Chicago), there seemed to be no networking in the speaker hotel: folks did not congregate in the bar in the evening. The hotel was amazing quiet in the evenings. That was also true to some extent in Chicago. The bar was more of a networking location in Chicago but still you only got to network with other speakers instead of a broader range of attendees. I suspect this will be less of an issue in San Francisco since everyone should be staying within walking distance of the Moscone Center but it's something to think about.

Sean Corfield is the architect behind large-scale, high-availability websites for companies such as Macromedia, Toshiba, Oracle, Toyota and Thomas Cook. He is currently a freelance developer and CTO of Scazu, Inc., a health and wellness social network. His passion for standards and software engineering led him to work on the C++ Standards Committee for eight years. He is a frequent speaker on software design within the ColdFusion community, at user groups and conferences across the world.

Yes, I do consulting! Contact me about consulting!

Most of what I've been doing so far is architectural in nature - either auditing existing systems and making recommendations or assisting in the architecture and design of new systems - but I've also done some mentoring and I do actually build systems (in ColdFusion and Java primarily but I'll be adding Flex soon). While I've been working hard on getting the Scazu site out there I've focused on short-term, part-time work but now that Scazu has launched in Alpha, more time is freeing up so I can look at larger projects as well.

I've been happily running VMware Fusion for the last few days with Vista up pretty much continuously (14 hours, 21 minutes uptime currently) and I'm pleasantly surprised to report that I'm not hating Vista (I'm not loving it either but I'm definitely not hating it - even with UAC enabled!).

However, I still have Parallels installed (with my heavily tweaked install of Vista to try to eke some performance out of it) and that means that SmartSelect is active where you right-click on a Mac file and you can Open With... a Windows application fairly transparently. I just accidentally opened a PDF with Adobe Reader 8.1 - on Vista under Parallels! It took several minutes to stabilize but, sure enough, I now had two copies of Vista running side-by-side as well as all my Mac apps. Yikes!

I must get around to switching SmartSelect off or I'm going to do that again by accident. I'll probably keep Parallels around to see if they improve enough that I'll want to switch back to it but, right now, VMware Fusion is definitely my first choice for running Vista. Now, if they can just implement support for DirectX 9...

Eric Steven Raymond's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way may come across as rude and elitist but it contains a lot of useful information about getting your problems solved effectively (and if you think it really is rude or elitist then you may be one of the people he insists doesn't "get it").

Compared to how the ColdFusion community behave (at least, in general), the Unix community is much less tolerant of laziness and "stupidity" but I expect we all recognize certain people or certain questions in ESR's article.

I know I have certainly answered questions with a link to a Google search or to a LiveDocs page (when all I have done is copy'n'pasted the user's question into Google and found the user's answer).

Underlying the basic advice is an important sentiment. Well, several important sentiments. Don't assume the problem is the software (and that applies especially to open source projects that the authors have poured their soul into). Don't assume you are entitled to an answer. Don't ask a question you haven't at least tried to answer on your own - read ESR's article if that makes you in the least bit indignant!

I make myself available on lists and IM for questions. I try very hard to be polite and tolerant and patient when I'm fielding a constant stream of questions. Sometimes I don't succeed but if you read that article you should get a sense of why I might sometimes be a bit sharper in my reply than you would like!

I went a long, long time before I added a wishlist to my blog (and I've stated several times very publicly that I will never, ever add paid advertising to my site). That said, an iTunes gift certificate makes me much, much, much more tolerant and patient and much more inclined to answer questions that I may think you haven't tried hard enough to answer yourself!

Anyway, read the article - if it offends you, read it again. Once it stops offending you, absorb all the hints and tips on how to get answers faster - and then look at the various mailing lists and forums you're on and you'll see why some posters are ignored (if they're lucky) or answered with rude retorts.

Newbies are always welcome, "lusers" are not (read ESR's article for commentary on that).

My wife is away in Kelso, WA judging a cat show so I'm home alone, kitten-sitting. We had three new kittens on Tuesday. If you're on Facebook, I uploaded five pictures into a "Kittens" album on my profile page.

So I'll probably spend my birthday doing one of the things I enjoy most: coding :)

I'm in room 401 if anyone needs to contact me, or you can use my SkypeIn number: (904) 302-SEAN (forwarded to my cell phone... which I actually remembered this time!).

Apparently the shared server was being brought to its knees by unusual traffic to my site (it wasn't clear exactly what - only that my site was bringing the server down again every time they tried to restart it). I'm fairly certain it was a spambot attack, possibly combined with one or more search engines trying to index my site.

They wanted to move me to a better plan where I'd be more isolated from other users - understandable - and, to be honest, both Lou Honick and Neil Heuer at HostMySite have been trying to get me to move to a VPS for a while, partly because they want me to see how it performs and write about my experience I suspect.

I said I was happy on shared hosting but the tech on the phone said they really wanted to move me so I told them to do whatever they felt was necessary. They said it would take several hours - to build out a new VPS and copy everything from my old site. Sure enough, throughout the afternoon, I received a steady stream of emails as parts of the infrastructure were brought up.

Once I noticed the site was actually working again, I started to explore the new site admin console and see exactly what they were offering.

The VPS uses the Virtuozzo Power Panel which allows you to SSH into the server (via a Java applet in a browser window) and also has a lot of system monitoring and management features. My initial impression is that it's very good. I'll write up more detailed notes in the next few days I expect.

There were a couple of lingering glitches that I noticed and when I pinged support again, they called me - on my home phone - and walked me through everything I needed to know about the new setup and resolved the issues I had.

I've always had very good experiences with HostMySite but today's experience was above and beyond the call of duty.

Oh, yes, I bought Vista Ultimate to run on Parallels. More on that in due course but, compared to Windows XP, it's dog slow and constantly chewing up CPU.

It was a somewhat odd feeling walking out of those doors for the last time as an employee. It's been an interesting (and sometimes wild) ride over the last seven years and I'm going to miss the people, the enthusiasm and the great way the company treats all its employees. If you get a chance to work at Adobe, I'd highly recommend them.

I'll be back in the Adobe building as a visitor on the 24th, when Ben Forta brings the Scorpio roadshow to San Francisco. Don't forget to RSVP on the BACFUG website for that must-see event!

And moving forward I will become a customer of Adobe. By pure coincidence, I bumped into a long-time colleague in the enterprise sales division this morning and let him know I was leaving but that I would be contacting him in due course to buy some ColdFusion Enterprise licenses.

So, see you at BACFUG, see you at cf.Objective() and see you at CFUNITED!

Hmm, I smell tables... but that's what you get for a very old BlogCFC version converted into Fusebox 4.1 (originally) I guess.

In theory I could have migrated it to a personal plan and I wanted to migrate it onto my wife's existing plan. However, after spending three hours on the phone, between myself, my wife and the company that manages Adobe's cell phones, we were unable to persuade Cingular to migrate the number to any acceptable combination of plans. Cell phone companies really don't seemed to have learned about customer service yet, it seems.

Also, remember that my adobe.com email address will be switched off after Thursday and you'll need to reach me via this domain (there's a "Contact me!" link in the right hand column on my blog).

(Posting to coldfusion category only because I know a lot of CFers don't read the non-CF categories on my blog but might still want to know how to contact me!)

After digging around on the Apple store, I eventually found the right page. So I updated my "wishlist" link. Hopefully no one will complain now...

(click for bigger image)

On April 5th, I leave Adobe for new ventures and new challenges. I will be taking on a new role as CTO of a local startup, Scazu Inc., which will be offering interesting new ways of interacting within the sphere of the health and wellness industry (ColdFusion-powered, of course). I will also be available for consulting work, two to three days a week - something that my full-time job at Macromedia / Adobe kept me too busy to entertain.

Macromedia (and Adobe) has been very good to me - I've made a lot of friends over the years and I love the technology. Now it is time to depart the mothership and scratch that seven year itch.

I hope to be even more active in the community than in the past, evangelizing the technologies that keep us all in business and - now my time is more flexible - helping others be successful with those technologies.

What do folks use for time tracking that's unobtrusive and fits in with our busy lives as developers?

Unpack the MBP, plug it in, connect an ethernet cable, power up. The whole welcome experience is just so beautiful and warm and fuzzy that you instantly feel good - Apple have this so right!

Do you want to migrate files from another Mac? Yes. Connect the FireWite cable, restart the other Mac and hold down the T key. Continue. Transferring files. Time passes.

Up comes the new system, fully configured to exactly match the old system. Wow! That was easy. 60Gb+ of files and settings migrated without manual intervention.

It's not quite perfect. Apollo didn't migrate so I had to reinstall that. MySQL didn't migrate either so I just copied /usr/local manually from the old laptop. iCal crashed when it was opened. Odd. Ran a Software Update (to 10.4.9 plus a bunch of other stuff). iCal works just fine now. Parallels wouldn't start either so I had to reinstall that but all my VMs and settings were still intact. Everything else seems to be running just fine.

A very pleasant experience - thank you Apple!

If you visit my bookstore now, you'll just get my recommendations, without any incentives on my part, and links to Amazon. Enjoy!

I think it's very interesting to see projects like this switching from proprietary architectures that are locked into a single operating system to a de facto cross-platform standard - that is based on an open source virtual machine - as a way to not only reach other platforms but also, according to the buzz around Astra, to improve performance.

Creating a desktop client like this also validates Adobe's approach with Apollo, bringing Flash (and HTML) applications to the desktop in an integrated, cross-platform manner. It's not clear how Trillian is achieving their desktop presence - details are very sketchy right now - but this would be an ideal use case for Apollo and should seed this concept in a lot of minds.

We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The issue you described should now be resolved.

However, please be advised that we have received reports regarding unsolicited messages sent from your account.

In the meantime you can reach me via sean.anthony.corfield (at gmail dot com) for Gtalk. But, as usual, personal emails should always go to my corfield.org, never to the Gmail accounts which I use purely for mailing lists.

Hi all, We have been investigating these disables and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. Be advised that we received reports regarding unsolicited messages sent from many of the accounts that were disabled. We are investigating accounts in accordance with Gmail's Program Policies and your account may remain disabled or be re- enabled as a result. Gmail's Program Policies (http://mail.google.com/gmail/help/ program_policies.html) prohibit the use of Gmail accounts for sending unsolicited messages, or spam.

What is really frustrating is that you can't even get through their Contact Us form without all sorts of information from your original Gmail invite. Since that came to me a couple of computers ago, I no longer have that data.

• 44 years old.
• Married for 7 years, no children (but lots of cats!).
• Drives a 2005 Toyota Prius, gold.
• Bought a house five and a half years ago, "ranch" style on a quarter acre... of suburbia. Decorations are non-existent (unless you count cat trees).
• Loves Macs (a Macaholic since the early 90's). Hates Windows with a vengeance.
• Thinks the Oscars are a waste of time because fun stuff like Over The Hedge never wins.
• Into Heroes, Medium and CSI and tries hard to hate Dancing With The Stars but still watches it.
• Likes snowboarding, but since he moved close enough to the mountains that he could go any weekend, hasn't been snowboarding even once!
• Food? Sushi, curry (hard to find good curry in America).
• Music? Still loves The Fall but thinks most modern music is rubbish.
• Doesn't get videogames or video websites at all. Occasionally gets sucked into a Sudoku website.

Any comments on the blog will have to wait for approval until I get back.

There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful.

Eno's latest project is 77 Million Paintings and you can read about the man and his art in his profile on Apple's website. [via John Nack]

Recommendations: Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy); Music For Films (volume 1); The Drop.

After the Mitsubishi commercial, I was keen to retrieve some of my Fall albums from the UK (I left my 2,000 CD collection behind when I moved over to California). I brought back just under 20 Fall CDs. It was a tough choice (I left about 30 behind for future visits). I've just ripped them into iTunes... 18 hours, 1Gb. Of course I've been playing a few of the tracks as I imported them... I really do love this band!

Happy Thanksgiving (in advance!).

The latest Mitsubishi Outlander commercial "Out-..." uses a driving piece of music that had me sitting bolt upright going "Omigod! It can't be!!! That's The Fall!!!"... A bit of 'net research revealed that it is indeed The Fall - "Blindness" from "Fall Heads Roll", released late last year.

I've been a major fan of The Fall since their first utterings in the late 70's ("Live At The Witch Trials" and "Dragnet") and I've seen them live countless times (including one extremely dodgy performance at Dingwalls in Camden). They are, in my opinion, the most groundbreaking band of the last few decades although their output over the last few years has mostly been a steady stream of re-issued bootleg recordings (of extremely variable quality) that span their career.

So I rushed over to iTunes and bought "Fall Heads Roll". Only to find that the track listing is a little confused. Fortunately, Amazon has the correct track listing so I was easily able to rename the errant tracks in iTunes (right-click, Get Info, select the Info tab and update the track name). It's a great album!

"Blindness" (track 7, despite iTunes' insistence this is track 2 - which is actually "Pacifying Joint") is a storming track with hints of "Chicago, Now!" from "Extricate" ("Do you work hard?"). I'm really pleased to hear this on TV commercial!

While I was there (in the iTunes store), I saw another recent album by The Fall that I didn't yet own ("Real New Fall Album") so that had to go in the cart too...

If you've never heard of The Fall (now-deceased British DJ John Peel's favorite band), you owe it to yourself to check them out...

Jay Bangle (USA) aura la charge de juger les bengals participant à cette spéciale. Mrs Bangle est une spécialiste de cette race qu'elle élève depuis 1994.

You should vote "no" apparently because... wait for it... this proposed law is... full of... WORDS. Yes, that's the main complaint in the latest television ad. The proposition is full of "legally-binding words".

Shock! Horror! A proposed law is made up of words and it would be legally binding. I never knew that about laws. Wow!

To be honest, 87 isn't the only victim of this sort of stupidity. Almost all of the propositions on the ballot next week have suffered from incredibly dumb, insulting television ads both pro and con.

Jay & I spent many hours on the drive up to Portland last weekend going over the analysts' reviews of the propositions and deciding how we are going to vote. I'm mostly against bond measures, for example, because California is already way to deep in debt... but the Federal matching propositions are less disturbing. Some of the propositions are a slam dunk (85, requiring teens to notify parents about pregnancy is a resounding "no" - it would put some teens in a much worse position with violent / abusive parents; 86, raising the cost of tobacco is a resounding "yes" - I don't care where the extra tax goes if the increased cost helps stop people smoking) but others are really hard to call. We had to read the actual wording of the proposed laws on a couple of propositions to be able to form any opinion at all!

And Prop 87? It's a great idea but a terribly flawed proposition. I want greener energy and less dependence on foreign oil... but I want a much better thought out law to help that happen. 87 is a badly thought out proposition.

I think a lot of enterprise-level corporates will be very wary of IE7 because they typically have applications that are Win/IE specific and/or have browser plugins and I'll bet money that many of those will break horribly in IE7.

I recently received a slew of sp*m that is a blend of technical terms and random nonsense but this one entry I kept around because... well... I think it reads like poetry...

I'm putting behind a More... link so you only have to read it if you want to...

[More]

I think it's reasonable, though, to make a number of assumptions: (a) Sean is probably in regular communication with the CFMX development team; (b) Sean probably knows which features are in and which are not in Scorpio (CF8); and, (c) while I believe Sean's opinion's are sincerely held, I doubt he'd ever say anything publicly that knowingly contradicts the official Adobe position (what employee of any company would?).

NOTE: This my personal blog, and the opinions and statements voiced here are my own.

• a. Yes, I am in fairly regular communication with the ColdFusion development team I guess. I forward them questions from customers. I occasionally file enhancement requests. I ask their opinion on something that I'm trying to do if I can't get it to work right. That's definitely a benefit of being an Adobe employee.
• b. No, I don't know much about what features are or are not in Scorpio. I know some, obviously, but nowhere near as much as Vince assumes. I'm not part of the ColdFusion team so I'm just another ColdFusion developer for the most part. If the product doesn't have feature X, then I can't use feature X - just like anyone else. Having said that, I do get to participate in the prerelease programs so I get as much insight as those other prerelease program participants. And occasionally - very, very occasionally - someone on the ColdFusion team might share a tidbit of information about a feature coming in a later build cycle. All-in-all tho', if it's not a completed, QA'd product feature, I can't use it in a production system - I'm a realist as well