So I'm sure by now you've seen the new Microsoft commercials featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. The one commercial I've seen aired about 10 times during the opening day of the American football season (which was today). Quite frankly, I'm not sure what to take from it. It seemed more like a 30 second episode of Seinfeld ("the show about nothing") than a spot for Windows or Microsoft technologies. Perhaps I just answered my own question...

I've been using Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac since its release sometime around the date of the MacWorld convention. This software epitomizes everything bad about applications that are released before they're ready for prime-time. For the first couple of days, it seemed as though it was working just fine. Then, I started trying to open documents attached to email messages. Two out of every three attempts to do so would lock up my entire Mac system (particularly when the attached document was an Excel file) forcing me to use the power button to reboot the system. I've been using a MacBook Pro for approximately 8 months now and MS Office is the ONLY application that has ever caused my system to behave in this manner and, believe me, I've downloaded and tested ALOT of shareware and open source software for the Mac. It truly bothers me that a company like Microsoft can release and actually demand money for an application that is clearly substandard.

I just installed SP1 for Office 2008 and I'm hoping the application will stabilize a bit. I'm not holding my breath, though. I suppose anything Mac will be treated like a red-headed step child by Microsoft so I should have expected no more than what I received.

I've been using a Mac PowerBook now for about 6 months. I love most things about it. The one thing that consistently frustrates me, however, is the ability to integrate stand-alone Macs into Windows networks. And, as one might expect, Microsoft and Apple point the finger at one another saying the other is to blame. I've had various levels of success getting my Mac to talk to a Windows Active Directory. Printing works great, domain login works great, resource enumeration works great (most of the time), but that's where it turns ugly. Accessing Windows file shares is essentially a hit or miss proposition. If you've got administrative access to the network and you're able to map an administrative share to a server (C$ on a remote resource, for example) this will generally work well. But....how many of your users have administrative access? The answer to that should be a VERY low number. Accessing conventional Windows shares is problematic. I can generally map the share, view volume contents, and even open files to which I have access. The problem comes when you try to save or copy files to the share. I've seen at least a half dozen strange and inconsistent error messages that all end with the same result.....a 0KB file "ghost" on the share. I've literally spent about 12 hours in total researching and attempting to employ various fixes to the problem with mixed results. Today, I downloaded a product from Thursby software called "DAVE". It has promise. It immediately fixed some of the major problems I was having with file transfers and saving to shares, but it seems to have broken some networking functionality that was working. I'm going to continue to evaluate this product and I'll let you know how it goes.

Back in the mid-to-late 70's, I can remember as a kid what soaring gas prices did to the country. I lived in California at the time where we were used to paying about 75 cents a gallon when, it seems like overnight, prices shot up to $1.25 a gallon. Auto parts and hardware stores actually ran out of supplies of locking gas caps and the local news frequently ran spots on how to avoid having gas siphoned from your fuel tank. I think we're going to be seeing a very similar situation between now and the end of summer, and possibly beyond that. I've heard that some oil companies are expecting prices approaching $5 a gallon over the next few months. God help us all when/if that happens. It's going to have a domino affect like nothing this country has ever seen. It's certainly affected my life already.

Up until this weekend, I proudly drove a Ford F150 pickup truck with a Triton 5.4 Liter V-8 engine. I got about 17.5 miles per gallon (I could literally watch the fuel gauge move as I drove it). Given that I commute about 640 miles per week, my gasoline bills were getting a bit out of hand. It was not uncommon for me to put about $160 in the tank EVERY WEEK. I'm sorry.....that's just insane. I'm now the proud owner of a Toyota Prius and my guess is there will be a rush on (and shortage of) these vehicles, and cars like it, very soon. As it stands now, I had to visit 3 dealerships to even find a new Prius on the lot. Most dealers appear to be backordered for 3 to 4 months and have actually started waiting lists. While I was negotiating the deal for my Prius (don't waste your time dickering....dealers know they can get full price for these cars right now and they won't budge a penny) I heard at least a half dozen phone calls come in asking if the dealer had any Prius's on the lot. If you do a lot of driving and you have an opportunity to get your hands on a hybrid, you might want to jump on the chance sooner rather than later.

My wife and I together make a pretty decent living. It's not that I couldn't afford the money I was putting in my tank every week, it's just that it made no sense to do so any longer (I'm a cheapskate at heart). I have to ask myself, though, how is the average working guy who might only make $12 to $15 an hour able to afford to fill up his tank every week? Keep your eyes open on this one, folks. I think it's going to get ugly.

I heard several weeks ago (during MacWorld, I believe) that VMWare would be releasing a version of VMWare Fusion that would allow you to run virtual Mac OS X server images. I think they even demonstrated an early version that was actually running OS X server at their booth at MacWorld. I haven't seen or heard a word about it since, not even on the VMWare site. Has this idea been abandoned? I'm anxious to evaluate the Mac server platform and this solution would allow me to do so without spending a small fortune on equipment. If you know anything about this, please leave me a comment.

Those of us who work in the world of corporate IT all have amusing (or befuddling) anticdotes about the users we support. I'd like to share one. The company for which I work recently updated its corporate logo as a part of a rebranding effort. I sent out instructions detailing the steps required to incorporate the new logo within an email signature block. One of the steps was to "copy the text portion of my signature so that a consistent font, layout, and color scheme" could be applied to all employee email signatures. The next step of the instructions was to "change the name, phone numbers, and address to your own information". I guess that last step wasn't so clear because over the last few days, I've received several (dozen??) email messages with my own address, phone, and mobile number published in the signature block. I may have to change my extension and possibly move to another state.

Seriously....The title of this blog entry sounds a bit harsh and it truly is only a joke. The folks we support every day are not paid to be the computer experts and, in every sense of the term, they are our paying customers. I will, however, be more careful the next time I send out instructions. Live and learn....

I'm probably the laziest programmer on the face of the planet. As such, I am habitually looking for shortcuts and the fastest ways to accomplish things within the scope of all that I consider "acceptable" programming practices (a shockingly lax set of self-imposed development guidelines). For this reason, I spent the better part of the day customizing some Illudium PU-36 Code Generator templates to produce CRUD components for Flex development. Why would I do this, you ask? Because the ColdFusion Application wizards are not supported on the Mac platform and I spend at least 30% of my coding time writing the CFC interfaces needed by my Flex applications. The templates essentially create the same type of CFC files that the Windows version of Flex Builder generates. The resulting components are nearly identical to the default components that Illudium supports "out of the box" with a couple of exceptions. They have been slightly modified to support Flex RemoteObject calls. The code also instantiates objects in a slightly different way so that Flex can run everything through the Service CFC that Illudium creates. If you've used the CF application wizards on the Windows version of Flex Builder, the Illudium generated version is very similar (but better, I think) to the components created by it.

The enclosed zip file contains a folder that you should copy to your xsl\projects folder at the root of your Illudium directory. A new Template type entitled "FlexRemoting" should appear in the drop down box when you run Illudium. Point Illudium to your database table, choose the FlexRemoting template type, enter your dot notation to the CFCs (as they will be referred to in the RemoteObject function in Flex) and click the "Generate" button. Four files will be created (Bean, DAO, Gateway, and Service). Once you save these to the appropriate folder in your Flex project directory, open the Service CFC file and go to the bottom of the file. Find the function named "initCRUD" and replace the DSN place holder with the actual DSN you'll want to call with your components. Then, simply point your Flex RemoteObject (get, create, save, delete) functions to the appropriate function in the Service CFC.

Illudium appears to be a great tool and it has the potential to save substantial time when coding Flex applications if you, like me, don't have access to the full suite of ColdFusion extensions within Flex Builder. The FlexRemoting templates are my first attempt at customizing Illudium since I've only been working with it for about a day. If you have any recommendations as to how the templates could be improved, I'd love to hear them.

I'm fairly new to Flex development so, naturally, I search for the most complicated way to complete simple tasks. The intranet based application on which I'm currently working has a relatively simple security model and the application includes a system logout button. For the longest time I've been searching for a method to reset the application when a user clicks the logout button because, invariably, the user will leave that window open and attempt to use it to log in at some point in the future. In my experience, logging in to an application in which you've simply changed the view state (back to the "login" view state, for example) takes the user directly back to where they were when they clicked the logout button. Any changes to the user security profile or the data with which they're working will not be reflected in this scenario. Also, if you happened to have deployed a recompiled version of the application between the time the user logs out and the next time they log in, they'll be using the old version of your app. The simple solution to this problem was so simple, I was unable to find it. It was hiding in plain site. All that needs to be done when the user clicks the logout button is to use the navigateToURL function with a window parameter of "_self". The whole application is reloaded and everything starts fresh (assuming the URL didn't change sometime between logoff and logon).

As for the "version" problem I described above, this could actually be checked by storing the version number of the Flex app in the application code itself and then comparing that value to a current_version value stored in the application's database somewhere. If the two values disagree, you could present an error message telling the user they needed to "upgrade" prior to running the application. Although less important in the web paradigm, this might be handy when running Flex apps on user desktops using AIR.

If this makes no sense or is so painfully obvious that you think I should give up programming forever, please drop me a note and/or post a better way to do what I've described.

Apple, for reasons unknown to me, elected to remove NetInfo Manager from OS X Leopard. I used to use this tool to map computer netbios names to private IP addresses because I work from multiple offices (on different subnets) with VMWare images of Windows 2003 servers used for development. Fortunately, there is a fairly simple workaround that works pretty well and very much like the LMHOSTS method utilized in the Windows environment. There are a couple of tricks to get it to work, however, because you're working with system level files that are hidden by the OS. First, select "Go To Folder..." from the "Go" menu in Finder. Enter "/private" in the dialog box and click "Go". Find the "etc" folder, right-click it and select "Get Info". At the bottom of the Info screen is a small lock icon. Click the lock and enter your password (this assumes that the user ID you're logged in with has administrative privileges on the system). Enter your password when prompted and click "OK". Click the + symbol at the bottom of the Info screen and select your user name from the "User or Group" dialog box. Once you have your name added, make sure that you have Read and Write access to the etc folder. Open the etc folder and repeat these steps for the "hosts" file. Open the hosts file and create an IP mapping to the server you want to resolve. You'll first enter the system's IP address, hit the Tab key, then type the name you want to be resolved. Save the file and you're good to go. I created an Alias to the hosts file and keep it in my Dock for quick access. You can place several entries to the same netbios name in this file and comment them out (using a single "#" sign) or uncomment them as necessary to accommodate different networks. As per usual, be very careful working with hidden system files as you can render your system unbootable if you screw something up.

It's easy to win when you cheat. 'nuff said...