JohnBs personal blog

No I’m not talking about the game (which is awesome by the way!) but Farcry the Cold Fusion content management system.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time investigating Farcry following a number of conversations about CF CMS systems.

It takes a while to get used to but so far i’ve found it really cool and pretty easy to manage once you get a handle on it. On Windows it installed like a breeze but for some unknown reason i struggled to get it running on Linux/mySQL. I have a test site up and running now based on a live site i manage, i’ll post back when it’s nearing completition.

Gmail is causing a right stir over here in Europe.

The Data Protection act is the next item to be the thorn in Gmails side. It basically means that any person can request to see what information a company holds on them and the company in question*HAS* to reveal that information. People are also worried that if you’re unable to permanently delete an email.

A US sentator is also describing the service as “an invasion of pricacy”…

the saga rolls on….here

I’ve been using Firefox as my default browser now for weeks and frankly hardly ever have to fire up IE these days (except the odd Windows update etc). I’ve got a number of cool extensions installed, tabbed browsing, HTTP headers and now bookmark syncing - this FTP’s my bookmarks up to my website and then on my home computer i can tell it to download the bookmarks, so my work laptop and home computer can use the same bookmarks - pretty neat!

Plugin here

Before it’s even launched squeaky clean Google’s new Gmail service might have to be renamed. It turns out Gmail is a research product owned by a London based company ‘The Market Age’.

Read more here

It’s an on going battle, Google have the internet search market cornered and MS have the local desktop search cornered (funny that). MS are pushing the ’searchability’ of Longhorn and the features that will offer.

Interestingly enough, I’ve just read in ZDnet that MS are planning to

“introduce a news-aggregation service for Weblogs and to develop a social-networking product”

MSN has recently introduced a new search toolbar for the browser and a ‘news search’ - sounding a little familiar?

In addition, apprently MS are planning to develop ‘natural language processing alogorithms’ - hmm, i thought ‘English Query’ already existed as an MS bolt on for SQL server.

I booked airline flights on Friday and the tickets turned up on Saturday! Now if only all online shops where that efficient!!!

that’s what Google’s new service Gmail will offer you. It’s not publically available yet but you can read more about the service at https://gmail.google.com/.

Whether or not the live public version will give you the same features but the plan is to give each user 1000Mb of space, that’s a whole 1Gb of email! No wonder they claim you won’t need to delete email (if you’re a typical user ). They’ll spam filter your messages too, all this in return for a little bit of advertising. If it can be half as good as Google’s search engine then it’s going to certainly something to watch out for!

Read this article next.

I’ve booked my flights over to Washington DC in September for the Fusebox Conference so i hope to see you all there!!!

Flying from London Gatwick to Washington DC, National Airport via Cincinnati for a mere £211 that’s a mere $390 to hop the pond for a weekend!

Since i *HAVE* to stay at the venue I’ve reserved a room at the Doubletree hotel, if you book Friday, Saturday, Sunday you’ll get the Sunday night free so you’ll only pay $129 per night (plus taxes) - the discount will be applied when you check-in!

See you all there and keep a look out at the conference site, here

i’ve just changed my local install of CF over to the JRun4 version so i can start playing with Flex. I figured i’d follow the instructions here to configure Flex and CF to work together but i’ve given up. I’m new to have to mess with JRun4 configs etc, perhaps that’s where i went wrong. But i followed the documentation as linked above but could i get it to work? Could i heck, my CF works fine but if i try to access a .mxml file it prompts to download even though i added the .mxml mapping to be processed by the JRun engine on IIS.

Has anyone else experienced similar problems, i’d like to hear of your experiences plugging the two together…and also any other non MM resources that might discuss the subject.

Firefox (gotta love it!) just alerted me a change on one of my bookmarked entries. MM have updated tech article 18807 - updating JDBC drivers, 100% CPU issues etc.

Read the arcticle here