After a long summer hiatus the UKCFUG is back with a new website and a new look – and more importantly a meeting scheduled on 6th November at 7pm at the Design UK offices. More details are available at http://www.ukcfug.org – Mango powered too!

The guys are putting some serious effort behind the CFUG this year and with the increased profile of ColdFusion in the Adobe line up isn’t it time you checked out the CFUG? Also, you can join the Facebook UKCFUG group to keep updated.

At some point in the coming months I’m going to be giving a presentation on “Virtualising the Data Centre” and what it means for a developer and some of the really cool things it lets you do.

My iPod Touch (soon to become an iPhone tomorrow) is almost perfect – it now does everything I need it to do – but one thing I really want is ‘Smart Playlists’.

I know we build Smart Playlists in iTunes. For example – I have a list that is of my unlistened podcasts. When I listen to a podcast the play count gets increased and it disappears from the list (IN ITUNES!). It would seem pretty simple to then allow the play list on the iPod to be a little more intelligent and match what iTunes does and not show items that don’t now match the rule so my rule is truly ‘smart’ and is only of my unlistened podcasts.

Is that asking too much Apple?

At the moment when you do a search you get results formatted by Google, Google does have the Google Custom Search Engine product which allows you to restrict results to certain sites and the ability to (partly) customise how the results look but if you don’t want ads displayed you have to pay anything from $100 per year (depending on search volume).

A post here suggests that Google might be about to offer RSS feeds of search results. This will be great news – we should now be able to (license permitting) format the results to look just like our own sites so the fact the results are coming from Google is almost transparent – I imagine there’s going to be some restrictions and ‘powered by google’ logos required etc but on the whole this could be big – particularly if you want to get results into something other than a webpage! eg for those vanity Google searches of your own name straight into your RSS reader! :)

A new feature currently in Gmail Labs prevents those accidental emails that you really didn’t mean to send either late at night or perhaps after a little too much liquor by giving you a mathematical challenge to complete to verify your state of mind…it’s description from the Gmail labs page (settings > labs in gmail)

Google strives to make the world's information useful. Mail you send late night on the weekends may be useful but you may regret it the next morning. Solve some simple math problems and you're good to go. Otherwise, get a good night's sleep and try again in the morning. After enabling this feature, you can adjust the schedule in the "General" settings page.

More info on the Gmail blog

Last week Amazon announced that it will be offering Windows based EC2 instances as well as Microsoft SQL server instances later this fall (incidentally I had to look up when ‘fall’ is – apparently it starts 23 September). Their press release obviously talks about hosting ASP.NET applications but it will be interesting to see how other application platforms will behave – obviously now with a Windows license involved there’s going to be additional cost involved but Microsoft have a Windows license aimed squarely at Virtualisation (Microsoft Windows Datacenter edition) which like Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise permits unlimited virtual instances. Of further note will be how Amazon commission new Windows instances given it’s fussy-ness for unique identifiers for machines etc.

To find out more go to aws.amazon.com/windows

So on the 12th September, Marie and I tied the knot and started out our married life. We held the ceremony near to our home town of Guildford, UK – of course in traditional fashion the bride was late (15 minutes) but other than that the day went without a hitch. We had a great time and hope all our friends did too.

On Sunday we jetted off to Greece for a two week sailing Flotilla around the South Ionian sea. Basically it’s follow my leader with about 12 yachts (32 foot+) – we’re told where to go each day and what time to get in to port by, sail for the day and then we have a siesta before we go out for dinner and the odd drink or too! It was simply amazing and the people we spent the two weeks were so diverse, for example – Amy Winehouse’s former PA, the Global Marketing Manager of Nokia…and of course us!

So now we’re getting back to normal reality and appreciating the finer details of life – like putting toilet paper down the loo (this is a big no no in Greece!).

A while ago I heard Google may be working on a browser, but on arriving in the office this morning I find out that Google Chrome is due to launch today, this moring all I could find was the 'comic book' talking Google Chrome up and highlighting the features it will have. Well now it's landed, I'm writing this post from it - it's a little unconventional bit i think i'm really going to like it, it has so really nice ideas. Available for Windows only at the moment from here

At last there's an RDP client for the iPhone/iPod - it appeared on the app store on 20th August, I've been running it for a while now and it's great. There's a trial version and a paid for version - free version is limited to 10 saved connections and macros (key press recordings when you login to a connection). It's available via the iTunes store or for more info check out http://www.mochasoft.dk/iphone_rdp.htm This now almost completes my iPod - next will be the the whole 'iPhone' bit which i have to wait until 13th October before my current mobile phone contract expires.

We like to stay current :) This is just part of our ‘retro’ collection'!

Yesterday around 300 people attended Flex camp London - not bad considering it was arranged in under 3 weeks. Starting at 2pm through till beer and pizza at 8pm various speakers including our own Nikoas and Neil presented on a wide range of topics from flex & cf through to 'who do you need on your flex team'. Great job Chester for a great afternoon and even more thanks to Academy Class for the 5 day Flex masterclass course I won in the raffle.