Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

By now most in the CF world (who are connected to community news, at least) should have heard that today is the last day Adobe will be offering a release of CF 9 including Verity, and CF8 at all. I offer here a little more news on that, but more important I offer how you can still find and get those downloads if you want them, even when no longer listed as links on the site. They're now no longer easy to find.

(And I have updated the entry as of Aug 3, 2012, and all below still applies, unless stricken out.)

First, as for what's changing, it's that Adobe has to "pull from the shelves" any releases of CF that include Verity. But while many have been asserting that CF9 was going away, that's not true. And even CF8 can be obtained formally under certain conditions.

But I also offer here some ways you may be able to get these files even if Adobe no longer offers links to them.

But let's tackle a few points of common misinformation this week.

[....Continue Reading....]

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

As for my talks, I'll be presenting my two cf.Objective() talks. Here are links for the description and my bio for each, but note that SIGNUP is done on the main page above:

• Hidden gems in ColdFusion 10 (Tuesday June 5, 2012 9:00 AM US/Pacific)
• What's new and different about ColdFusion 10 on Tomcat (Wednesday, June 6, 2012 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific)

These talks went very well both at cf.objective() and at the week-long CF10/Scotch on the Road tour where I presented them last week in 5 cities in Europe, so the talks are also well-practiced!

That said, I may tweak their look/feel or add new content before next week (indeed, I have tweaked the content considerably since the conference and did so also as the week progressed last week, adding new discoveries at each new city as I had so much time to explore during the trip.)

Please note the following points which I'm sure some would want to ask:

• The times offered (above and on the site) are US PACIFIC time. Adjust your calendar entries accordingly!
• You DO have to register (for free) at that first URL, to get the info for joining in on each Connect meeting
• Yes, the meetings will be recorded (although many enjoy participating in the live talks so that they can get questions answered during or after the session). I'll offer a link here (and/or as a new entry) when the recordings are posted.

Finally, If you want to an easy URL to offer for that is http://adobe.com/go/cfdeveloperweek, and note that the hashtag for it is #CFDevWeek.

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

• Hidden Gems in ColdFusion 10
• What's New and Different About ColdFusion 10 on Tomcat

These were offered recently at cf.objective() and the SOTR/CF10 European Tour events, as I had announced a couple of weeks ago.

These are just PDFs of the slides for now, no recordings. But as those who have seen me talk before know, I tend to offer a lot of detail in my slides, so that they do stand well alone (against the modern fashion of slides that are mostly just pictures).

Sure, I could do more pictures and offer slide notes. It's not that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, just that it takes a lot more patience! :-) I may modify these presentations that way, in fact, for future presentations of them. In fact, I will be blogging shortly about the next planned presentation of them for the Adobe CF 10 Developer Week coming up in June.

BTW, apologies to any folks from the two events who had looked for the PDF for the Tomcat talk previously. Somehow I had failed to offer a link to the PDF on the presentations page, even though I was updating and uploading new variations of it both before and after the events. Darn.

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Such folks may be using the CFIMAGE action="resize" tag, or the imageResize() or ImageScaleToFit() functions to do resizing. (Or they may be also processing images using ImageRotate, ImageShear, or ImageTranslate, though the defaults for those are not problematic like the resize/scale tag/function processing).

The "problem" (if this is the cause of a slow page) is due to a default "interpolation" setting for CFIMAGE resizing, imageResize, and ImageScaletoFit. The default may not perform well at all. The good news is that the value is configurable, and you can test to compare quality/performance of difference values, as will explained below. There are still some other things to consider also. (If you're currently using CFIMAGE to do resizing, jump to the last section of this entry to see an example of code switching from the "slow" approach to the faster one. But really, you ought to read the rest of this entry to understand what's being proposed.)

While I offer all the info here for your consideration, if you need help implementing the solution, or better understanding how to find and resolve these or other problems affecting your CF server performance, see more on my CF server troubleshooting consulting services.

[....Continue Reading....]

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Along with a few other speakers, we'll present sessions in Munich (May 21), Zurich (May 22), Paris (May 23), Brussels (May 24), and Amsterdam (May 25). See the tour dates page for details on the locations and agenda for each city.

Pretty sweet! :-) I always love going to Europe, and this will be my first time in Paris and Brussels. I'm certainly grateful to have been invited. I'll leave cf.objective on Saturday afternoon to fly right to Munich. Sadly, my wife couldn't join me (for reasons that I'll explain in a moment.)

Some may know the Scotch on the Rocks event has traditionally taken place in Edinburgh (where I had the pleasure to speak previously). And the "Scotch on the road" moniker has been used before when it's happened in another city or cities.

Hitting the road in a tour bus!

[....Continue Reading....]

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

First, I'm giving two different sessions on Thursday and Friday:

• Hidden Gems in ColdFusion 10
• What's New and Different About ColdFusion 10 on Tomcat

See the links above for details on each talk. And as always, I'll post these talks (after presenting them) on my presentations page.

Then, on Thursday evening I'm giving a Lightning Round talk. Last year I did one on "Lies, Damned Lies, and Request Timeouts". This year, I will again do a CF-centric talk--someone has to talk about something other than beer, love, and other heartwarming or life-expanding talks. :-) This year, it will be "10 Things That Plague Most CF Servers, with Solutions". Yep, even in 6 minutes, I hope to share some surprises that many miss, but which I see daily in helping people in my CF server troubleshooting consulting services.

I'll be posting the presentation for that as well, but it will have additional detail (in terms of resources to learn more) on each topic.

Looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones. Please come say hello, and be gentle with me if I may not make an immediate connection of face to name. :-) With the blessing of attending and speaking at so many conferences comes the curse of meeting lots of people, only briefly, and often only once (or once in a great while!)

Finally, I'll note I am also presenting the first two talks above again next week, in a 5-city European tour. More on that here: Speaking May 21-25 in 5-day European #ColdFusion Road Tour, Scotch on the Road.

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I want to highlight a few of those things, to save folks having to dig around.

You can see for yourself the comparisons in at least a couple of places:

• Product Comparison (Standard vs Enterprise, in HTML format)
• ColdFusion 10 Feature improvement history (CF 8, 9, and 10, in PDF format)

What's new in CF10 but only in Enterprise?

[....Continue Reading....]

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

And if you HAVE heard, you may well have heard from people who (as is often the case) are raising concerns about something they do or don't like, or do or don't see (that they may have expected). I'd like to address a couple of those points briefly, along with sharing the general announcement.

For more, see all the goodness at the coldfusion.com web site. (And yes, if you didn't know it, that's a nice easy-to-use domain name that redirects to the main Adobe CF page.) There you'll find lots of content about what's new, including videos on various pages (some of which include yours truly).

What's new? Lots more than you may think

[....Continue Reading....]