OK, now I'm ticked! WTF is it with CFers that they think they have to mess about determining what the path separator is on every platform? In a pathetic attempt to be cross-platform, I see all sorts of convoluted code that tries to strip characters out of paths or check the O/S version in an attempt to establish whether \ or / is the right thing to use. Word up CFers: / always works. We're using Java now and / works on Windows. Yes, really. / works on Windows, Mac and Unix.

varScoper, an essential tool for all ColdFusion developers that use CFCs, has just been updated tonight. If you're using it, you'll want to download this update to take advantage of the improvements in this release. If you're not using varScoper... WTF? Are you crazy? Are you not using CFCs? varScoper is an absolutely essential tool for you. Did I say essential?

Some sound bite interviews with speakers about what they're looking forward to at CFUNITED this year. Open BlueDragon gets several mentions as the "hot topic" for various speakers. And we're all looking forward to beer. Except Sandy who prefers red wine.

Read all about it in the multimedia news release on PR Newswire. Broadchoice Delivers First On-Demand Web Platform to Build Corporate Communities and Increase Marketing Effectiveness New Broadchoice Web Platform Integrates Social Networking, Web Content, Marketing Campaigns, and Dynamic Analytics for $1 per Registered User. Everything my team have been working on for the last six months is a reality. We're live. Web sites powered by Broadchoice, powered by ColdFusion 8.0.1 on 64-bit Linux.

Mark has just announce the second Release Candidate build of Transfer ORM 1.0. He's been holding back on this until Broadchoice confirmed that a particularly stack overflow error in the cache discard was fixed. We confirmed that today for him, after extensive testing - both human and automated. As many of you know - especially those who attended cf.Objective() - we hired Alagad to have Mike Brunt perform extensive load testing on our system, built with Model-Glue 2, ColdSpring and Transfer.

If you're an IRC fan, there are two channels on chat.freenode.net: #openbd for discussion of the OpenBD project and #cfml-lang for discussion of CFML itself. Why freenode instead of dal.net (home of #coldfusion etc)? Well, freenode is home to #ruby, #rubyonrails, #groovy as well as all the Smalltalk and Haskell channels. Given the nature of OpenBD, it seemed more appropriate to put the channels on freenode.

If you're on 64-bit Linux and you're using RewriteRule in Apache, you probably need this Culmulative Hot Fix for ColdFusion 8.0.1. I hit this during testing and it was a blocker for Broadchoice to move from 32-bit Linux to 64-bit Linux (bug 71362). There are also four other bug fixes in this hot fix so check out the Tech Note. Anyone else running ColdFusion 8.0.1 in production on 64-bit Linux or are we the first company to do so (on our twelve-server cluster)?

The OpenBD website now has a blog where the latest project news will be posted by members of the steering committee. It has already been aggregated by feed-squirrel.

SixSigns have published a VMWare image containing Open BlueDragon on Tomcat with MySQL preconfigured for folks to download and play with. It will run on the free VMWare Player as well as VMWare Fusion for Mac OS X. It's a good way to get started with Open BlueDragon without needing to change your existing development environment.

The CFDevCon 2008 website just launched with details about the location and an initial list of speakers and topics. September 25-26, Brighton, UK. As you can see, no topic is listed for me yet. My talk (or talks, perhaps) at CFDevCon 2008 will be brand new so if you catch me at Scotch on the Rocks, you'll still get all new content in Brighton, later in the year. With that in mind, what would you like to hear me talk about?