Developers moving from Windows to Firefox!

I know, you're thinking to yourself, "What a stupid headline. You don't move from Windows to use Firefox, for most people, you NEED Windows to run Firefox". Well, that's the same thought I had when I read this:
SYS-CON to Relaunch CFDJ as Silverlight Developer's Journal @ COLDFUSION DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL

The part about moving from ColdFusion to Silverlight or Flex just doesn't make sense to me. Even if I were to do a lot more work with Flex, I still in all likelihood need to interact with a server somewhere. So, for the record Sys-con, I will be using Flex WITH ColdFusion for the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, considering the amount of "in your face" advertising on the sys-con site, I think I finally know where the "con" part of the company name comes from.

OT: I never thought I'd feel sorry for the shark

So, you think sharks are dangerous? Depends on what you are, I guess.

Noob issue with MySql and CF

Ok, here's a dumb one. If you create a datetime column in MySql with an entry of '0000-00-00 00:00:00', the db driver that ships with cf will not be able to read the value and will throw an error: Cannot convert value '0000-00-00 00:00:00' from column xx to TIMESTAMP. It will even bomb the "view table" option in the rds tools for eclipse.

All you have to do is use a valid date and everything works fine. So, if you are like me and you avoid nulls like the plague, make sure you have a dummy date in the default column and not just zeros.

Opening the Flash Player's Source Code

Interesting thoughts about opening the source for the flash player. Personally, I think the only thing that Adobe gains by opening source is a boost to reputation and proof that there isn't any unethical activity going on in the player. The community gets to act as the watchdog. If they do this, I think they need to keep a firm control on the actual product releases and the direction of the open source initiative. Having a hundred slightly different flash player plugins floating around doesn't make sense.

The other thing to keep in mind is that opening the source doesn't necessarily grant any particular license to use the code. It will be interesting to see where things end up on that front.

Mike Nimer's Blog: Bye bye -services!

Mike Nimer's Blog: Bye bye -services!

This is really just a bookmark for my own personal use. Mike Nimer explains how to make your flex applications a little more portable.

Dave finds debugging info in live sites.

Nice post on discovering debugging code left in your flex app. You probably don't want to do that if you know about it. LINK

Viewing Flex Generated Actionscript

Ben Forta has an interesting post on his blog about adding a compiler directive to flex to get it to retain the .as files that are generated with the swf of your project is compiled. I can't wait to try that out. I but there is a lot you can learn by looking at the code that the mxml creates.