This time we are bigger and brighter, with workshops and a swish venue not to mention the back drop of Sydney itself! Treat yourself to an essential junket from the office, mix with other gurus and pontificate to the great unwashed. Oh the life of a conference speaker.
It's the date you've all been waiting for I'm sure ;) MXDU 2006 is going ahead on 2nd-3rd March 2006, again at the spectacular StarCity Sydney. Oh and a workshop day on the 1st March. Set your dates and book your calendars. Little more to tell the public than the date at this stage -- call for papers due out later in the week with more detail.
We're currently canning 40% of all our email as SPAM. Having tried a lot of different solutions we've settled on Mailguard, an externally hosted mail cleaner that handles viruses, corporate wide email policies and SPAM.
Daemonite, Daniela Carelli, is the star of a foot stomping romp here in Sydney this week. If you're a Flamenco aficionado (and even if you're not), there will be plenty to clap your hands and stomp your feet about. Daniela's Flamenco Women Productions presents "Cuadro Flamenco" - a professional Flamenco dance production, showcasing this amazing art form at its best.
Google Maps have implemented some of the Keyhole technology they recently acquired. Very exciting to see how mapping technology is evolving -- can't wait till they start mapping the Antipodes.
Talk about a slow news day... the most exciting piece of journalism out of the Australian IT press this week appears to be an expired trial edition of ColdFusion on a Government web site. I mean seriously...
The keynotes at MXDU 2005 were treated to another pair of fabulous animated intro sequences from Nectarine. Minty's team worked up some magic in the spirit of the Incredibles. The intros have been modified for the web and doctored to protect the innocent.
Can't help blurting about Google Maps -- its a beautiful implementation of a mapping solution. Combined with their recent acquisition of Keyhole, the mind boggles as to what sort of solutions they'll be unleashing next.
Looks like MXDU got a great little write up in Builder.com today. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to see our little conference beginning to make its mark.
Ongoing ramblings on last year's junket to Taipei. It's all in the present ala The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. More photos due to popular demand. Cameos from Chafic, MikeD, Gary Grossman, the Tarbels and Mark Blair.
Reminiscing about my trip over to MAX Taipei in November -- just a few snippets of gossip about the trip, the entrails, and the Macromedians I met along the way. This was Day Zero of the conference.
It's fabulous to see community power at work. The Mozilla Foundation have taken out a double page spread in the New York Times to promote my favourite web browser, Firefox. I only wish I knew about the project earlier so I could have been part of this marvellous idea.
Just a quick note to remind everyone that the MXDU 2005 call for papers closes 8-October-2004 (this coming Friday).
We have nailed the dates for the third Asia-Pacific MX Developers Conference, MX DownUnder 2005. Start working on the boss to book that much needed antipodean junket.
Looks like Macromedia will be hiring nearly 200 people with C, C++ and Java skills for the facility in Chennai, scheduled to be ready by September'04.
Here's the final installment of the awesome Nectarine animation triology. The original was supposed to go down on day two -- but it was just so good it had to open the show. So Nectarine put this day-two marvel together just a week before MXDU.
We've finally given into the huge demands for the keynote intro's to be published uncensored on the web. It's taken a little while to get the file size down to a respectable level, and we've had to change the odd little thing here and there to scrimp and save on file size for delivery over the web -- but it will bring back memories.
For those of you that saw the MXDU keynote intro animations, you know this guys are pure talent. Looks like Nectarine have whipped up another little episode to say farewell. They're a shy bunch and offered a *bleeped* version -- but listening to Bek swear like an old sea dog was just too delightful! So I settled for warning only.
Oscar Trelles has just overhauled the look of his great flash blog. I especially like the cleaner lines, groovy flash photo-header and the little "where in the world" indicator. I'm sure its all in preparation for his impending escapade to Sydney, Australia.
Marc Garrett of since1968 has released an interview on my least hated, favourite developer Nick Bradbury. Nick and I enoy an intimate relationship -- well ok, so I've been using Homesite, TopStyle and recently FeedDemon daily for years.
Bob's doing the rounds downunder. Great opportunity to see Macromedias top accessibility expert in person coming up across the sun-burnt country. Macromedia is hosting a series of free seminars in captital cities.
There's been an incredible response to the "Aura" templates developed by our own Ben Bishop. Web design blogs the world over have been discussing the Aura release. Daemonite was one of the testing grounds for the "look" which has been released under Creative Commons.
Fresh from the resounding success that was MXDU 2003, we are raring to go for MXDU 2004. If you have something new and revolutionary, some tricks of the trade to share, want to help your fellow developers - be they beginners or old hands, or just pure passion for MX, don't miss your chance to take part in MXDU 2004.
So you were a top Web Developer, once, many years ago, until the "correction". Now nobody cares and you are shunned in public, much as lepers were in the fifteenth century. Your modern-day equivalent of the chiming bell and vile burbling exclamations of "Unclean! Unclean!" is the obnoxious ringtone on your expensive mobile.
Daemonite has had a face lift. Was excited to see how many people actually noticed so it appears we have the odd reader here and there. Full credit for the design goes to Ben Bishop, a relatively new Daemonite, who whipped up the design whilst recuperating from some dreaded lurgy. It's XHTML compliant, with CSS layout and looks spiffy in most browsers -- let us know if you are having trouble with the new look and feel.
Microsoft of all peoples have a great little Xbox site with a furry little companion, snuffling and shuffling about the screen providing navigation. Well worth checking in on this running rodent for some novel flash navigation.
Juggernauts can move slowly -- the power is in the momentum. Great article on "Using Mozilla in testing and debugging web sites".
Continuing on the topic of blog spamming I've decided to put together a collection of the sorts of comments that we get from spammers on our blog, just in case you're ever short of imagination when you're trying to contribute a "nice" comment to someone else's posting.
Interesting comment on one of my postings today, apparently from the famous porn star Jenna Jameson, with a link back to a porn site. Unless I'm mistaken this is yet another example of blog spamming that others have previously mentioned.
Well I'd hoped to blog a bunch of things for MXDU live -- but with all the mayhem, last minute changes and running around there was no time! So I'm sitting in bed with one of these flashy Apple G4 Laptops blogging away over the Airport, reflecting on the conference that was.
New Atlanta makes a CF5 compliant engine that lets you distribute CF applications as unfettered WAR/EAR or compiled binaries on J2EE. If you want to impress your friends with your very own .NET application written in CF, it doesn't look like you'll have to wait long.
Open Web Application Security Project released a great summary of typical web application vulnerabilities. For many this "top ten" will be stating the obvious, but nevertheless it is a great check list for dev teams to sign off on prior to going live. What's more, take the time to download the PDF report.
Michael Gunn pointed me in the direction of this nifty blogging tool: hollowcube.com - talk: update your blog via AIM using BloggerBot. Thought I might point out that MoveableType can make use of any "blogger" interface 'cos its cool and has a bunch of programming interfaces for just such a thing :) XML-RPC: Simple cross-platform distributed computing, based on the standards of the Internet.
Searching for a link to the MoveableType bookmarklet I stumbled across this fabulous little treasure trove of useful bookmarklets for web development.
Just launched an all CSS design for our new web site (http://www.daemon.com.au/) only to discover an annoying rendering issue under IE browsers. If the CSS style sheet is not in the browsers cache it decides to render the page in unadorned text first before applying the style sheet.
There is a rather esoteric setting in sql server called autoclose, which on desktop edition defaults to 'on'. This may lead to very slow response times in the SQL Enterprise Manager. The fix is not obvious. Once we toggled our dev server the increase in response time was marvellous.
A cool little code snippet popped up in the Neo beta forums. It's an undocumented attribute of CFDUMP in CF5+...
