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!

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.

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

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.

It autopopulates the return address by looking up your “Me” record in the OS X address book. You may then fill in the destination address by searching for a contact or by manually typing in an address. Very well thought out.

The widget did a great job at getting over typical problem areas, like printer and paper size. Overall, this widget is definitely Ambrosia calibre. And it’s free!

Commercial

• CommonSpot by Paper|Thin.
• ShadoCMS by Straker.
• Hot Banana.
• Savvy Content Management.

Open Source

• BytespringCMS.
• Boomsocket.
• FarCry.
• A few others at Brian Rinaldi’s Open Source CMS page.

Paper|Thin has a whitepaper available for download that discusses how to choose a CMS.

Well, I finally took the time to find out how to do this from the command line. It's simple.

Get the current state of the virtual machine. Is it running or not?

And start it.

There are many other things you can do as well. Just man vmware-cmd.

iStat Pro is cooler than any of the tools they have. Developed as a dashboard widget, iStat Pro displays CPU temperature and fan speed, but also duplicates all the information in Activity Monitor, displaying typical geek Unix system info, like active processes, memory usage, and so on.

All in a dashboard widget, and all for free (donationware)!

On the other hand, I have managed to make an entirely paperless documentation process, but this naturally never included any visually stimulating diagrams to document project logic or organization.

Welcome to Gliffy. It's simply a Flash-based app that covers just the basics of diagramming, and like many apps, it is the absence of feature bloat that makes this app so nice. It allows you to print or save your diagrams in several image formats, or it will even host the file for you so that all you have to do is link to the generated image. The process is pleasantly simple.

It even has some simple revision control. And when you make a new revision by saving the document, any links to the hosted file are automatically updated with the latest version. Nice!

Don't be dissuaded by the pricing page on Gliffy's website! The pricing is just for hosting the app on your own server (which I think is a worthwhile consideration for any business who is serious about documentation). For us poor folk, the Gliffy service on their website is free of charge.

Unfortunately, some of us humans might try so hard to leverage our computer's multitasking abilities that the ultimate bottleneck becomes the limit of our own mental concentration. You're working on a document, but you also have your email client open and perhaps a few tabs on your web browser. Before you know it, you've wasted a significant period of time replying to email or going off on a tangent through the web, when the most important task at hand was just to finish typing up that document.

Enter WriteRoom. It may seem archaic by today's standards to boot up your computer into a word processor program and to only be able to use your computer for that purpose until you finish and boot into another program, but it sure didn't test human self-control and concentration like the systems we have today. WriteRoom duplicates that simple, distraction-free experience, and while you're at it, gives you a bit of nostalgic joy in the process. Sure, you could get a similar affect by opening TextEdit (on the Mac) or Notepad (on Windows), but where's the joy in that experience?

Did you grow up on an Apple ][ using AppleWorks with a green-on-black monochrome monitor? WriteRoom's default scheme duplicates just that environment. Did you have the DOS PC's common white-on-blue? Or can you just not stand anything but black-on-white? Fine, the color scheme is customizable. So is the font, so you don't have to stick with a monospaced font, although it sure adds to the nostalgia.

And the best part is that you don't have to give up the multitasking bit to use WriteRoom. You can run iTunes and download that huge file in the background, but experience a visually simple and uncluttered experience while working on your text document.

WriteRoom is for the Mac only, and the original version is free. A clone called Dark Room was written to respectfully "capture the essence of WriteRoom" for Windows machines, and is also free.

Those solutions are geared to respectively increase convenience. Bootcamp requires an inconvenient reboot. Then virtualization software allows us to boot up Windows without rebooting our Mac, and we can even use Mac apps and Windows apps simultaneously albeit with Windows in an encapsulated environment. Finally, CrossOver aims to take the convenience to the next level by eliminating Windows and enabling Mac OS X to execute Windows apps!

One article at LinuxWorld called CrossOver Office "the best way to do the wrong thing". I contend that CrossOver is the worst way to do the wrong thing. If I have to run a Windows app on my Mac, I certainly want it to run as smoothly as possible, just like the rest of my Mac experience, and I want it to run like the developer intended. Largely, dual-booting and virtualization don't compromise the behavior of the app I'm running. When you run your app with CrossOver, however, you don't know what kind of performance you'll get. Your app may just die; it may run but be full of bugs. The reports coming from the web show that your experience will be very hit-or-miss.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not knocking the WINE project, which is the basis for the CrossOver codebase. A project to port the Windows APIs to another platform, although ambitious, is fascinating and, frankly, perfect as an opensource project. The problem I have is with the attempt to commercialize this technology that is great as a free resource but destined to never deliver a level of quality that befits a commercial product.

Why? There are so many variables and pitfalls to porting an API that the technology will never be able to work for even a large percentage of Windows apps, let alone all or the majority. And the technology can continue to be refined, only to see a Windows upgrade completely shatter the compatibility of future apps, and the development process of tweaking the port starts all over again. And from an opensource perspective, that's fine. That's the strength of an opensource initiative. It's not such a great model for a commercial product.

What would you rather do? Buy CrossOver for $59 and be able to run only a few apps with it, and perhaps with a few bugs at that, or buy Parallels for $79 and be able to run practically all Windows apps with it, nearly bug-free? Of course, the price differential increases if you need to purchase a copy of Windows. Nevertheless, your experience will be infinitely more reliable if you use a virtualization solution like Parallels.

For the tech geek who likes tinkering with new software, this solution is worth a gander, especially while the free public beta is available. However, if you just need to get down to business, I recommend sticking with virtualization.

Aptana's strength, then, from what I can see in some of the screencasts, is that is supports HTML and JavaScript and CSS all in the same editor, providing outline insight and even error detection with all the code intermixed. This seemed pretty nice.

Being that it is still in its infancy, I'm hard-pressed to try it at this time. After all, Eclipse can do most of what Aptana claims to do with various plugins, and much more. The thing, though, is that Aptana is also offered as a plugin for Eclipse itself. I actually just downloaded JSEclipse and the ATF today, but if I find these mediocre, maybe Aptana would be worth a closer look.

Actually, if you do your research (such as referencing Wikipedia's Puyo Puyo entry), you'll see there's a lot of history behind the game. I loved Puyo so much that I actually wrote a very rough Puyo engine in my high school programming class (that should date my Puyo Puyo find to 1996-1997). The engine was only text-oriented at that point, but naturally it could have driven a graphically-oriented game as well. Testifying to how addicting the game is, my friends would even sit and mindlessly play this little text-oriented Puyo clone that I made. I should try to recompile it and make it available for download, because I still have the source code.

Anyway, back on track. A group of developers called iOS wrote a Puyo clone they call FloboPuyo, and it is a great clone. The graphics, music, and attitude of the game are all very well up to par. Please check it out! After all, it's available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, so what possible excuse could you have to not check it out?

This really isn't news, as there have always been alternatives to Virtual PC, even when it was owned by Connectix. There was SoftPC/SoftWindows and RealPC, now defunct; still in existence is the WINE Project, which is technically not an emulator; finally, still alive and well, although limited and/or difficult to use, are DOSBox and MacBOCHS, products of the open source community and Apple's open acceptance of that community.

But now there is GuestPC. Weighing in at $69, it appears to be the cheapest alternative that does not sacrifice ease of use. Compared to Virtual PC's $129 price tag, depending on how well this alternative emulator operates, it just may be a great choice.

Check out the Top 10 Questions About Virtual PC from Microsoft, then scroll down to Question #10, "Does Virtual PC make my Mac more vulnerable to computer viruses?"

Indeed, in the answer, Microsoft openly acknowledges that Mac users are obviously exposed to the same vulnerabilities of a PC while they are running Virtual PC. Obviously--thankfully--these viruses will not be able to operate while any virtual machines running Windows are deactivated, and even if viruses do propagate to a Mac volume (by means of shared folders, for instance), they will not be able to run under the Mac environment. Nevertheless, the door is open for Mac volumes to be littered with virus files if a virtual machine running Windows is infected on Virtual PC. Indeed, this happened to me a few years ago, and it was a pain, because the virtual machine running Windows littered my Mac with virus files.

Microsoft is certainly forced to make such acknowledgments, and it is oh so sweet!

I found out about it here: eWeek: Microsoft Releases Virtual PC 7.

It is very nice to read that Microsoft managed to eek out between 10%-30% more speed in this version, making it an upgrade worth considering. I'm sure the upper end of that percentage range is reserved for G5's, since VPC 7 is now optimized for G5. Nevertheless, any speed improvement is welcome.

This is particularly exciting since Microsoft will be making Virtual PC 7 part of the Microsoft Office Suite, Professional Edition, as indicated in eWeek's article, Office 2004 for Mac Hits Store Shelves.