John Dowell responds to the question of whether MXNA is down on cf-talk: [quote] Yes, server crash, just as Mike & Christian boarded the afternoon plane from Anaheim to SF. When they deboard we're trying some remote fixups. With luck we'll be back in an hour, but without luck it may take a few hours. Request: If you've got a weblog, can you help spread the word? I'm voiceless because I'm hosted on the same server. Thanks! jd [/quote] So check back later tonight!

I downloaded the flexbuilder 2 alpha on monday and in my free time here and there I have been playing around with it. Some quick observations: I LOVE that its built on eclipse, it works much better than the old flexbuilder. It has a microscopic memory footprint! Almost to the point that I think something is wrong. Memory usage has been as low as 424 K (!) and I have only seen it as high as 1.5 megs! crazy low. Its not screaming fast, but for its small footprint its fast enough. The new flex stuff is great. Havent messed with any as3 stuff yet (dont know if I will know when I do), but the things like viewstates are going to rock! The ability to build the swfs automatically on save, man, that is just rocking my socks off. And with this talk of the cf to flex bridge stuff, it really has never been a better time to be a cf developer. Ive got a feeling the best is yet to come.

Christian Cantrell just posted a few minutes ago about how google has released an RSS Reader! This is great news! I have been looking around at different rss readers lately like feeddemon and others but now I dont have to! Plus, I am looking at using rss for lots of other things in some of my applications and the only thing thats been holding me back is the fact that there really isnt that many of my potential audience for some of these applications that have an rss reader. No worries no more! Its not perfect yet though by any means. It takes a second to get used to and im getting a few javascript errors. But for a just released beta, its awesome for my purposes. This is a great thing for me, but a very bad thing for some rss reader applications im afraid! Update: It seems to be going pretty slow right now. The only thing I can figure is that there is just a ton of people trying to access it. But when it does finally refresh, it also doesn't seem to be pulling updates from the rss files very quickly. It will be interesting to see how this works in a day or two. Also, as Christian pointed out, it supposedly uses flash to play podcast enclosures. I would really like to test this out, does anyone have a podcast rss feed handy? I can't figure out how to get the url for mine out of iTunes... Update 2: It has gotten even slower unfortunately. I think this is a great idea, but its getting close to useless at the moment. Also, I keep reading that it is available from labs.google.com although I dont see it anywhere... am I dreaming? Expect a follow up post this weekend on my thoughts on where google is going in the near future.

If you have a dell poweredge 1750, you may have noticed that the fans are extremely loud! Ours here at a clients site was driving some people crazy and the more we thought about it, the more we even started to wonder if something was wrong. A quick google search came to the rescue though: To quiet the fans down, use the extra power supply and plug in an extra power cord to the server. Give it a few seconds and you will actually be able to hear yourself think again! I just hope someone else out there googling at their wits end finds this and it helps them as well!

I started today for the first time evaluating model-glue mainly for a client that I am consulting for now. They like frameworks and we have done some work in fusebox with them so far, but we wanted to evaluate some other options. As far as frameworks go in general, I share a lot of the same feelings as Simon Horwith, although its hard to explain exactly what it is I dislike about them. I think for me it is the fact that for me I feel like frameworks often get in my way and force me to do things that don't really help my app function *better* or *faster* although thats a different discussion that has already been run in the ground I think. But starting out earlier today I downloaded model-glue, printed off the quick start guide and dug in. I plan on blogging my thoughts and feelings along the way. So for the first day impressions, this is what I've got. Immediately I got the impression that model-glue is quite a bit more flexible than fusebox in several ways. I *love* the viewstack and thinking in more of an event driven, object oriented way. OO in fusebox seems clumsy through the framework itself, but things feel a lot more natural in mg. Also, I love the debug in the bottom and I love how things don't seem so cached as in fusebox. In mg though you still have an xml file that basically defines the flow of the application, which is one of the main things that im not crazy about in fusebox. Now im no pro at fusebox and definately not model-glue so far, but it just seems like this file will be easy to get disorganized in a hurry without constant maintainence. Overall though I think model-glue is going to be a much more natural fit for me when using a framework and look forward to digging into it more. I still have a lot of questions, like what some of the framework constructs are available to me, and what takes precedence in getting and setting values, but im sure this will come in time. I plan on trying to find a small application that I can develop in model-glue to get the full experience. Also, I do want to mention that although the quickstart guide looks like it needs to be updated for the 1.0 version, it is very well written and explain things in a very concise, easy to read way. I definately think more documentation is needed, but it is a great start. So im looking forward to working with it more and must say that it looks like a very well designed framework from my experiences so far!