OK, I say "new" because I am almost certain that this wasn't there before... I just installed the Alpha 2 release after realizing that my Alpha 1 installation had expired. As I opened up one of my AS files in the Action Script editor, I noticed that when you single click on a string, it highlights all matching strings in the file. That is pretty cool, and it immediately helped me out when looking for a place where a value was being set in that file.

This is probably and edge case that doesn't come up very often, but today I found myself with the need to remove all messages from my Postfix queue.  I had generated a LOT of emails that were set for outbound delivery to all the users on InstantSpot using Postfix as the mail server on my laptop.  After generating the messages, I realized that the ISP that I was sitting on doesn't allow outbound messages from SMTP servers as a spam prevention method.

We finally called it a night about 4am after flipping the switch to the new InstantSpot. There have been relatively few surprises so far, and the application is just purring along. Due to MUCH heavier caching in almost every nook and cranny of the application, we are using substantially more memory than we were on the old system, as was expected.

In the past 7 months, Aaron and I have completely rewritten InstantSpot from bottom to top.   It was a much more clear and direct path than when we started with the original version in 06.  In fact, we never even planned on networking the sites together in the first place, and adding blogs to them was an afterthought, which is hard to believe in hindsight! Around the beginning of summer 07 we decided to step back and evaluate, which lead to a rewrite of the entire application.

This is one of those blog posts that is really just a mental note for myself in case I ever have to come back and find it again.  Our company has some old legacy client-server applications that are now being required to connect to our new web services.   As part of our development, one of the requirements was to make sure that the applications could reach our web services by way of a proxy server both with and without user authentication.

Last night I gave a presentation to the DFW CFUG on Mach-II.  I spent the first part of the presentation talking about all the new features that have been added in both versions 1.5 and 1.6.   The features we covered were: Mach-II 1.

Last night I gave a presentation to the DFW CFUG on Mach-II.  I spent the first part of the presentation talking about all the new features that have been added in both versions 1.5 and 1.6.   The features we covered were: Mach-II 1.

After hundreds and hundreds of development hours, Aaron and I are on the verge of releasing the completely rewritten InstantSpot to beta this week.  I plan on a more detailed post of the technology later, but in a nutshell, we are releasing it as a Linux/Apache2.2.x/Tomcat/Railo2/Mach-II application.  Until today, we have found only one place that we have had to make a Railo workaround and that was using some pretty fringe functionality doing XMLRPC for desktop blogging.

After hundreds and hundreds of development hours, Aaron and I are on the verge of releasing the completely rewritten InstantSpot to beta this week.  I plan on a more detailed post of the technology later, but in a nutshell, we are releasing it as a Linux/Apache2.2.x/Tomcat/Railo2/Mach-II application.  Until today, we have found only one place that we have had to make a Railo workaround and that was using some pretty fringe functionality doing XMLRPC for desktop blogging.

My oldest son is starting to use his computer more and more as of late.  He has recently discovered the Super Mario Brothers clone SuperTux, and after beating all the levels has started experimenting with the built-in level editor to create his own.   The Google search built into his browser has made it so easy for him to start searching to find answers on doing that, among all his other interests (Webkinz, USB Funkeys, and whatever other commercial just happened to be on TV).