• TeraTech Keynote – I felt this was kind of slow… but that could just be because it was early, and I was very, very tired. and it was the first session. Anyway, Micheal gave a presentation on best practices, or at least that is what I think it was about. It was a question and answer format, and it seemed the group was still asleep, so there wasn’t much participation.
• Adobe Keynote – Interesting feature sneak peaks for CF 9… I am sure the blog world is already lit-up with details and a thorough analysis…
• RAD OO [Peter Bell] – This was a great session…
• Ajax and CF with Spry [Ray Camden] – Very good session with Ray Camden. I got more out of this in regard to how to use CFCs most efficiently with AJAX than I did with the Spry pieces. I don’t actually remember him going into great detail at all on Spry. He did mention (as he has said on his blog) that he has played with JQuery a bit recently and is liking some of the things he has used.
• OO Best Practices [Hal Helms] – Wow. I really enjoy Hal’s presentations. I always learn a lot in his sessions and this was no exception.
• BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services for CF 8 [Tom Jordahl] – Very good overview of what each product does/does not do…
• BOF – Improving Quality thru Code Reviews and Mentoring [Adam something...] – Great chat session. Lots of open group discussion.

I will go into a greater detail on each of these sessions tomorrow.

Seth Bienek (Manager of the HOUCFUG) and I decided to save a bit of cash and share a Hotel for the trip. Seth saved us a lot of money by finding a great little apartment a couple blocks from the conference for half of what we were going to pay at the conference hotel. Woot! It turned out really well so far; we are actually closer to the conference than the designated conference hotel!

After arriving and getting settled in yesterday, we spent most of the day walking around downtown. The weather was perfect, and it is a great town for sight-seeing. We couldn’t decide on where to eat lunch, so we ended up in a small little place. I forget the name, but the food was okay. For supper, we found Elephant & Castle pub and restaurant. The fish and chips was pretty good, as was my girly drink. I know, I know… I went to a pub and had a mixed drink instead of a pint, what was I thinking? lol.

We also went to MiniMAX last night, but I wrote about that in a separate post.

Ok, time to leave to get breakfast and head out to the conference.

CFUNITED Keynote

• Taratech

• Wiki’s – The future is in apps that allow users to add content and interact…
• Fusebox
• Spiral web & Spiral Dynamics 

 

• Ben Forta & Tim Buntel

• 8 Reasons you want it now

1. Making Apps is easier 
• Eclipse plugins & wizards
• Server Monitor
2. Confidence in production apps
• Server Monitor & API
• Multiple Instances
• Stable & backwards compatible
3. Runs in more places (environments)
4. Happy Users
• Flex & AJAX
• Reporting
• PDF Apps
• On-Demand presos
• Images
5. Secure
• Multiple Admin accounts & RDS
• Strong encryption
6. CFML evolution
• JS operators
• Argument collections
• CFC interfaces
• File handling functions
• Array & Struct creation
• CFC Serialization
7. Plays well with others
• .NET
• Exchange Server
• RSS & ATOM
• LC DS ES (life cycle, etc)
• Flash Media Server
8. Fast!
• Overall performance
• CFCs
• List Functions
• Stats for improvements (see Ben’s notes which make more sense than mine!)
• functionality, improvement
• Structs, double
• Lists, triple
• Switch, triple
• Cfparam, hundred
• Dates, five
• Regex, double
• Isdefined, double
• CFC, tens
• BlogCFC, 1.25
• Adobe.com, 1.25
1. new features like CFTHREAD

CF8 Release date (D8)… SOON

• Flex, Today & Tomorrow
• Examples of FLEX usage
• Yahoo Maps
• Scraplog, Buzzword, Sherwin Williams, adobe cycle tracking, piknic
• Adobe Media Player
• Adobe Premiere Express (video remixer)
• CF 8 Server Monitor
2. Flex going open source
• We can probably look for Flex 3, AIR, CF8 @ MAX
3. AIR
• Html,flash,flex
• Drag & drop
• On/offline
• Local filesystem
• Multi-window
• Local db
• Html rendering
• memory and performance profiling
• Source code refactoring
• JS/AJAX wrappers
• Deep linking – address bar, bookmark

Oh, and a little birdie says that CF8 will have event gateways in the standard edition!

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/06/27/cfunited-07-keynote/feed/ 1 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/06/26/at-cfunited-07/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/06/26/at-cfunited-07/#comments Wed, 27 Jun 2007 03:46:46 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/06/26/at-cfunited-07/ Ok, I just wanted to join the ranks of other bloggers and mention that I arrived in DC today for the CFUNITED conference!

I had a long morning, waking up @ 5am and not arriving at the hotel until 2pm. :(

This evening I met up with a friend, Rick Root, who I first met here @ CFUNITED in ’05.  We seem to get together every year and catch up on our current lives both personally and professionally.  We ended up eating @ P.F. Chang’s.  Great food and great company!  Unfortunately I wasn’t hungry enough to finish the meal… If you know me, you know that means something!  The waiter left a lot to be desired, but the overall experience was a good one. 

Anyway, if you are still reading this far in, I just wanted to say that I plan to blog a note for the major sessions I attend every day while here @ CFUNITED. 

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/06/26/at-cfunited-07/feed/ 0 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/05/15/dallas-parking/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/05/15/dallas-parking/#comments Tue, 15 May 2007 16:15:00 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/05/15/dallas-parking/ I am in Dallas/Fort Worth this week for work. 
Obviously my title indicates that there were “issues” with parking… Keep reading to find out!

We are reporting to an office building downtown that does not have a parking garage, so we found a lot about 6-8 blocks away and parked there @ 6am on Monday.  I checked the sign as I was taking my little ticket from the automated system and the prices seemed decent enough.  We ended up working late and eating downtown @ P.F. Changs.  The meal was excellent.  By the time we were getting back to the parking garage, it was dusk.  As we approached, we noticed that the exit gate was closed with a heavy steel gate.  Not a good sign!  We tried to open the door to the elevators and stairs, but it was locked, too!  So we walked around the building to the entrance ramp and it was open.  One of the other guys was ahead of me and was walking up the ramp when the gate closed behind him.  Five minutes later he was able to drive his vehicle out thanks to someone else in the parking garage using his monthly pass… Appearantly this parking garage locks down after 6pm, and has swipe card access required at the entrance and exit!!!  Luckly we were all able to pile in this other friends vehicle and I was able to retrieve my truck this morning.

You take a look at these pics and be the judge… I call foul!

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/05/15/dallas-parking/feed/ 0 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/11/27/the-casino/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/11/27/the-casino/#comments Mon, 27 Nov 2006 16:52:15 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/11/27/the-casino/ Read on for details about my visit to a Casino in Louisiana this Thanksgiving weekend.

There is an indian reservation casino, Cypress Bayou Casino close to my parents house in Louisiana. So sometimes when we go down for a holiday we try to go for a fun evening. The food is usually great for the price, and the games are fun. On this particular holiday trip, my mom had made up her mind that we were definately going to make time to go to the casino, and my parents were going to pick up the tab on the meal (thanks!!). Those of you that know me, know that I cannot pass up a free meal! So we decided to go Saturday for supper. For many reasons that don’t matter to the story, we wanted to get there by 6 or 7pm, but didn’t end up leaving my parent’s house until 10pm! It was a small group: me, my mom, my sister Rachel and one of her best friends, Mikie.

By the time we were thru the long line at the restaraunt it was after 11pm, and we were starving! Before the meal could be served, we all devoured the crackers on the table. When our main course finally came out, we had eaten so many crackers, we couldn’t finish our plates!

It was almost midnight by the time we made it to the gaming floor. We were determined to have a good time, though, so we all split up and planned to play for a couple of hours. Mikie is a big fan of blackjack and spent most of her time at a blackjack table… The rest of us seemed happy to just play the slot machines. My mom was a fan of the simple three column machines, with one row in play. My sis and I seemed to gravitate to the more complex slots with many rows and many columns…

This actually ended up costing me when i first sat down to play. See… when you sit down at a nickel machine, you really don’t think about how much you are betting… its only $0.05 right???? well… this one machine I sat at had 20 lines in play, and you could bet up to 15x the credit on each line. In hindsight, it was NOT a good idea to hit the max bet button for three plays! $45 dollars and 15 seconds later, I realized my mistake!!!! Oops! Oh well. I started playing with $100 and I bounced up and down between 50 and 100 for a long time. Eventually, inevitably, the money ran out.

Some time around the money running out, we all realized how late it really was, so we started rounding each other up and cashing out. On the way out of the casino, Mikie decided she wanted to try $5 in a progressive slot machine. So instead of just sitting by her and watching, i fished a couple of dollars from my pocket and put them in the machine next to her. I ended up winning $90 on the second try!!! Woot! I cashed it out immediately, but decided to keep playing for a few minutes on another $20 i found at the bottom of my wallet. Of course I lost it all! So I actually ended up only losing about $33 for the night! not too bad! We didn’t get back to my parent’s house until 3:45am. This was a very long night! It was definately worth it, tho! I had a blast! It also reminded me why I am glad I am not close to a casino in Texas; it would be too easy to go in there at least once a week and spend some cash!

Well… I don’t know why I decided to make this a blog post… I mean a) you don’t care, and b) you don’t care! I get it! lol
It is easier for me to write this down as a blog post than it is to write a journal or something… and I am too forgetful. If I don’t write it all down, I start forgetting things. Guess that is a bad sign for things to come later in life! lol

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/11/27/the-casino/feed/ 0 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/05/our-last-day-on-vacation/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/05/our-last-day-on-vacation/#comments Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:40:56 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/05/our-last-day-on-vacation/ Wow, two weeks is both a really, really long time and not nearly long enough.

I have been on “vacation” for two weeks and we are currently driving back to Houston. Don’t worry, I am not driving, Michelle is. It will be good to get back into the rythm of an 8 to 5, I just wish I could have spent more time in Louisiana visiting our friends/family. We got off the plane from DC in New Orleans late on Monday, and Tuesday wash a wash because of the rain. Today I got to spend some time with my sis, so that was cool (hey Rach!)! We were going to eat supper with Michelle’s parents, but they weren’t available, so we packed everything up and got on the road… Actually, Michelle packed everything and I took a much needed nap. I am coming down with something and don’t feel very good. That is why this post is probably hard to read and lacks any significant content.

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/05/our-last-day-on-vacation/feed/ 1 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/happy-4th-of-july/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/happy-4th-of-july/#comments Wed, 05 Jul 2006 03:12:00 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/happy-4th-of-july/ Hope everyone had a great day today!

I had a good day. 
I got to visit a lot with my parents.  The day started out pretty nasty; lots of rain.  Things cleared up a bit after lunch.  My dad and I drove out to his camp in Stephensville.  The day didn’t lend itself to a BBQ, so we only went out to check on things.  I haven’t been there since last year; he tries to go out at least once a week.  Its kind of out in the middle of nowhere, so its a good idea to get out there frequently to make sure everything is still there (and to cut the grass and do some maintenance as needed).  Bonus, I DID get to kill a snake!  Ah, getting back to my roots.

We had planned to drive back to Houston today so I could make it to work tomorrow, but I am too tired to get on the road; so we will be driving back tomorrow afternoon.  I should be posting more later.

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/happy-4th-of-july/feed/ 2 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/interesting-flight/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/interesting-flight/#comments Wed, 05 Jul 2006 03:02:47 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/interesting-flight/ You ever get on a plane and settle in to your seat and hear the captain over the intercom say “we seem to be having a problem with our back door not closing properly, so we will have an airplane mechanic come on board and slam it or something”?  Well… Now I have!

Actually, altho that wierdness delayed us by 30 minutes, the flight was great.  The plane was only about 50% full, so Michelle and I were able to spread out over 3 seats.  I wish all my flights were that comfortable.  After landing, Michelle’s Aunt Shelia and Uncle Ron picked us up at the airport and took us out to eat.  The meal was ok, but it was really great to visit with them.

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