If you're still on the fence about whether you are going to CFUnited 2009 now would be a good time to make up your mind. Early bird pricing ends today after which the 3 and 4 day package prices will go up by $100 and the Saturday only package price will go up by $50. Register now to lock in the better deal!

If for some reason you aren't sure if CFUnited is for you I recommend checking out the schedule which lists all the topics and speakers. I'd be willing to bet there are lots of ColdFusion, Flex, and AIR sessions you would enjoy.

Comment spam on my blog has increased immensely over the last four to six weeks. I'm getting, on average, 150 spam comments per week. In order to help combat the scum of the earth I have implemented both Akismet and Project Honeypot by way of activating these two features in CFFormProtect (which ships with BlogCFC).

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I've blogged about the OmniFocus task management application before and today I want to talk about a small but very useful feature: creating tasks via e-mail. As much as I dislike e-mail it is hard to exist or do business today without it. No matter where you are, at the office, home, or on the road e-mail is sure to follow. If you always looking at it wouldn't it be nice if you could create OmniFocus tasks from any e-mail client? After all, using this method would certainly fall under the category of getting things out of your head and into your trusted system.

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When the iPhone 3.0 software was announced earlier this year I was excited to hear about the Find My iPhone feature. I've been a MobileMe subscriber since it launched alongside the original iPhone and the prospect of finding my iPhone if it were lost was intriguing.

In order to use the feature you first turn enable it on your iPhone, which must be running iPhone software version 3.0. To do this, go to the Settings screen and tap Mail, Contacts, and Calendars. Ensure Fetch New Data is set to Push. Next, access your MobileMe account in the same settings screen and make sure Find My iPhone is turned on.

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Tomorrow morning the 615Flex group (Nashville Flex User Group) is hosting a Flex/Flash Camp with six speakers giving one hour talks. I'll be giving a presentation on integrating BlazeDS, Flex/AIR, with a little ColdFusion mixed in for fun. After giving an overview of the technology behind BlazeDS and how BlazeDS messaging works I'll dive into the construction of an application in real-time. The app will demonstrate the use of BlazeDS messaging from a browser application to remote AIR clients. Registration for the event is closed but given its a free event I'd be willing to bet we'd find a place for you if you want to come out. More info is here.

Just a quick reminder to anyone in the Tennessee, Alabama, or Kentucky area... the Nashville stop on the 2009 Adobe ColdFusion User Group tour is tomorrow. That's about 26 hours from now. So, stop what you are doing make plans to attend the event and head over to the NCFUG site to RSVP for the event. Everyone that RSVPs (and shows up of course) will be entered into the drawings for a copy of the next version of ColdFusion, a TimBuk2 laptop bag, Amazon gift cards, and more! Plus, each person that shows up will get stickers, a ColdFusion tour shirt and (yes there's more) an audio CD copy of Dave Ramsey's High Performance Achievement! Wow, how could you not come?

I hope to see you there! More info and RSVP details are here.

This is just a quick post to remind everyone of the user group tour showcasing the next release of ColdFusion. The Nashville ColdFusion User Group is proud to host this event again and we're planning on a great turn out. Greg Wilson from Adobe will be speaking on Thursday, June 18 at 7:00pm (next week!). We're going to have food/drink and a few thousand dollars worth of awesome giveaways!

So, if you love ColdFusion or you're just interested in what Adobe has created in the next version of ColdFusion, please head over to the Nashville CF User Group Web site and register for this special event. Only registered attendees will be eligible for the giveaways. I, and the rest of the user group hope to see YOU there!!

I've had long hair for the better part of 15 years; it's been part of who I am for a long time. But, I decided I needed a change recently so I secretly scheduled an appointment with my stylist. I say secretly because I wanted to surprise my wife with the new cut. The four braids of hair I cut off were just long enough to send to Locks of Love, so they'll be mailed soon. To chronicle the experience I took before and after photos and shot some video. Click any photo thumbnail below to launch a fullscreen photo browser or play the time lapsed video. What do you think of the new "do?!" Note: All photos and video were edited using only Adobe CS4 products.

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Andy Matthews delivered a nice presentation last night on integrating jQuery and HTML to create Adobe AIR applications. He showed several examples including how to use AIR's file system API, how to create and deploy SQLite databases, what a .air file is and what's inside them, how to access remote resources such as ColdFusion components, and how to use Aptana to create, build, and deploy a complete HTML-based AIR application. Oh, and did I mention he built an entire AIR photo slideshow app, start to finish, in 8 minutes?

If you are at all interested in HTML-based AIR applications you should check out this hour and fourteen minute presentation.

View the Adobe Connect presentation now!
http://mmusergroup.adobe.acrobat.com/p99669686/

Tonight, the Nashville ColdFusion User Group is having our May meeting and the topic is jQuery and AIR: Desktop Development for the Front End Designer. Nashville's own Andy Matthews is giving this presentation which is the same one he gave recently at the cf.Objective() conference. If you missed the conference, you have a second chance to hear Andy's talk.

Folks local to Nashville are encouraged to attend in person (and RSVP here) while remote attendees can join via Adobe Connect (http://mmusergroup.adobe.acrobat.com/ncfug/). Full details of this meeting are on the NCFUG site.

I've been adding photographs and screenshots to my blog posts for years using simply image tags. I've grown tired of the lack of full screen images and always worrying if the 520px images are even useful. And I've seen all the snazzy imaging tools out there giving users a better interaction with photos on Web sites. This weekend I decided to look into adding Lightbox to BlogCFC and wound up with Slimbox, a visual clone of Lightbox. The major difference between the two is Slimbox is super lightweight and very customizable.

To see Slimbox in action click the photo of my son below. If you want to add Slimbox to your installation of BlogCFC here's how to do it.

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Canon recently announced an issue with their Powershot G10 cameras where horizontal banding was found in some captured images. The service notice states occurrences of the problem are rare but I've found the flaws in several of my images (example below). Fortunately, Canon is offering to repair all affected cameras for free and they've made it pretty easy to determine if your G10 is one of them. Hit this link for all the details.

A second service notice was also announced but is much more difficult to replicate since it only occurs in RAW mode with the ISO set to 1600. This issue can be corrected on your own by loading new firmware but be sure and hit this link first to see if your G10 is affected.

Canon has sample images showing the flaws from the two service notices, but here's one of my images showing the horizotonal banding defect. Click the image to see a full screen version.



Thanks to Engadget for covering this issue.

Did you know any member of an Adobe user group can get 20% off all products sold in the Adobe store? This promotion has been running for a little while and has been extended through May 31, 2009. If you are a member of a user group and want to make use of this offer simply contact your user group manager for details. Or, you can also contact me using the Contact Blog Owner link in the footer. The 20% discount will be applied to one online order and can only be used one time per member. Thanks to Adobe for making this offer available!

I have an application using an ExtJS grid that doesn't work quite right in Safari 3 and 4. I'm hoping someone reading this might know what's going on. Oddly, I can't replicate this behavior in any of the example grids on the ExtJS Web site (example 1, example 2). The big difference in their example versus my application is their examples have scrolling inside the grid whereas my app has scrolling inside the browser window itself. If you want to help me figure this out, watch the short screencast I recorded which demonstrates the problem.