In light of the departure of the ColdFusion Weekly podcast (so long Matt and Peter, and thank you!), I have assembled a list of my favorite “shows” or “episodes”. Really, all of the episodes were good and worth hearing. But these episodes were fantastic.

Presented in chronological order:

• v1.5 - IDEs of…April: Came at a perfect time for me, because I had just switched to CFEclipse recently. So it was great confirmation for me and I enjoyed the Eclipse plugin recommendations. This episode is good for anyone still using Dreamweaver or HomeSite.
• v1.6 - Version Control: Also had great timing, because I had already committed myself to exclusively using Subversion but hadn’t yet set up my Subversion server. While you’re at it, check out the follow-up episode on v1.29 - Source Control Revisited. These episodes are a nice way to be introduced to version control for web development.
• v1.10 - Design Pattern Safari: Probably one of the most classic episodes and a must-hear. All about design patterns like beans, DAOs, etc.
• v2.01 - Rise of the Virtual Machines: Discussion of virtualization technology on both Macs and Windows. Great discussion, because I think this is an important technology for web developers; I am a big proponent of virtualization.
• v2.02 - Cryptology and Security: This was very interesting because of the information that was discussed regarding encryption, hashing, and salt.
• v2.15 - Mark Mandel on Transfer: Very good consideration of the popular ORM, Transfer.
• v2.27 - Selenium: Discussion on testing your apps on the client side with Selenium.
• v3.06 - Open Source BlueDragon: Discussion with Vince Bonfanti about BlueDragon going open source.

I will miss Matt’s Vista rants. :-)  Thanks to both of you for all of your hard work.

If you’re hankering for a podcast to listen to, Brian Meloche is picking up where Matt and Peter left off with a new podcast called CFConversations. W00T!

Recently at work, we in IT were puzzled when a fellow employee called to report that the iTunes Store would not load on iTunes for computers on our network. The problem occurred only on our network and was not Mac or Windows specific.

Fiddler came to the rescue. Fiddler is a freeware tool that logs and allows you to inspect all HTTP traffic between your computer and the network (and thus Internet). I first heard about it at a conference when learning how to debug Ajax applications. It was especially useful when doing so with IE since there was no Firebug for IE (ahem, this is before the days of Firebug Lite and other such tools). I never really looked at it closely because, well, why do that when you could use Firebug and Firefox?

Well, it came in handy for this problem. The HTTP traffic between iTunes and the iTunes Store is less apparent since it is behind Apple’s veil of the iTunes interface. Fiddler revealed the exact domain names and in fact full URLs that were being requested, as well as the returned results. It was immediately apparent that our Barracuda Web Filter was blocking the request, so iTunes just reported that it could not connect to the iTunes Store. When we white-listed the requested domain, everything began functioning fine.

Everything had been working fine with iTunes in the past. But Barracuda updates its black list automatically. So when Barracuda apparently added certain iTunes Store domain names into its black list, namely phobos.apple.com, our hardware eventually updated its lists and began blocking iTunes Store traffic on our network.

Lesson #1: Beware the pitfalls of subscription services like Barracuda’s. They have their benefits, but they certainly can catch you unawares. Lesson #2: Use Fiddler. It is great for a lot more than web development debugging. It’s a convenient early stage network debugging tool. Lesson #3: Don’t discount the supposed dross at conferences that you think doesn’t apply to you. Perhaps years after you hear about something, you might finally come to have a need for it.

You’ll get display server issues if you try to install Ubuntu v7.10 in Parallels. But the Parallels Tools CD does have drivers to fix those problems. This blog post, Ubuntu 7.10 Install Guide, helps you get past the display server issues long enough to get the OS installed, and then gives instructions on how to get the Parallels Tools installed.

It worked great. Instructions were very clear and the process was mildly simple.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to review a handful of web content management systems for the community college where I work, and I will be blogging my reviews here in a series called “CMS Roundup“. This review will cover mainly ColdFusion solutions, since that is my love and specialty, but a few non-CF packages may sneak their way into the mix.

Scale. I will be reviewing open source, entry level, and mid-market packages, which places the price range from free to $150,000. Enterprise-level solutions in the $200,000 to 7-digit numbers will not be considered because they are ridiculously out of our price range.

Weighted features. There are some features that I will be particularly interested in. The system has to be very easy for a non-technical user to understand. The developer should be able to set up various templates and security for different site areas. The marketing department should be able to enforce page approval and workflow to ensure the accuracy, consistency, and propriety of the content. Easy integration with existing external applications should be simple as well. These are just some of the features that will be considered; the strengths and weaknesses specific to each CMS will be reviewed as well. And I’m sure I’ll get a feeling for more desirable features as I progress through the reviews.

The players. My list of CMS’s for consideration is a fluid one, so please make recommendations while I’m in the middle of this process. The open source ColdFusion players are FarCry, Gerobase, and Katapult; commercial ColdFusion players are CommonSpot, ShadoCMS, HotBanana, and Savvy. I’ll look at a couple non-CF contenders, like Estrada and CrownPeak in the commercial space and Plone, Joomla, and Drupal in the open source space.

Likely, this journey will end with a summary of strengths and weaknesses of all CMS’s, including winners in each category, and of course, the name of the CMS that ultimately earned a new customer.

The game is afoot.