Ben Nadel is renewing his efforts to learn OOP and is planning to build a simple project in public to help others learn along with him. The real gem about this post is the extended commentary by Brian Kotek and Ben's responses. Brian posts some really solid guidelines on designing well-structured object-oriented systems and the dialog between the parties is very enlightening.

The contest is closed - seven entries came in within 90 minutes! The first correct entry was from David @ TLA Video who wins the year's subscription! I just renewed my annual subscription to Fusion Authority Quarterly Update but because I'm a (fairly) regular author and I'm also on the "staff" (as the Curmudgeon!) I get multiple copies of each issue anyway for promotion purposes.

A couple of years ago, Pete Freitag provided a very brief overview of Apache, GPL, LGPL, BSD and MIT licenses. Today, Grant Skinner has provided a more in-depth discussion of GPL, LGPL, MPL, BSD and MIT (plus a few other options). Worth reading.

First off, I'd like to extend huge congratulations to the team that organized CFUNITED: Liz Frederik and Nafisa Sabu with technical assistance from Elliott Sprehn (and, of course, several on-site folks who man the registration booth and run around making sure everything's OK). Despite all the others, we know the powerhouse behind CFUNITED these last several years is Liz and Nafisa and it wouldn't happen without them.

Sammy Larbi has a great blog post on the value of contributing to open source projects. He cites several famous names - people we know because they contribute to projects we know. This is part of a series of posts from Sammy on "how to save your job" (by improving your skills) and is inspired by Chad Fowler's book (52 ways to save your job). Good reading!

The list of sessions and speakers is available on the MAX site. The site shows 28 ColdFusion sessions (including two pre-event labs). There are just under 200 sessions total so that's a pretty good percentage in my opinion. 34 sessions cover AIR, 54 sessions cover Flex. Compare that to 13 sessions on Dreamweaver and 14 on the flagship Photoshop product and I think we have no reason to complain (but, of course, some folks will).