Since FlexBuilder 3 was released last week, I decided to hunt around for the 'free to academics' offer and see if it applies to FlexBuilder 3. Here's where it lives now:

http://www.flexregistration.com/

Interesting things to note:

1. It apparently does apply to staff too (woo!)
2. You can request more than one license if you're using it for a class or a lab. That will be a real time-saver.
3. You have to scan your ID and submit it with the form. Uhh... scan? paper? I don't have a scanner hooked up anywhere, so I took a photo of my ID with the iSight on MacBook Pro and tried that, thumb included free of charge.

The action page tells you to allow a few weeks for processing the request, but mine was approved the next day.... that's service!

I'm really looking forward to CodeMash. The slate of speakers and topics looks fantastic; It's really nice to look at a conference schedule and see a lot of topics that are totally new to me.

One thing I'm curious about is Scala. I've been working with a research group lately on a project using Intelligent Agents, and through that was introduced to the idea of Functional Programming. Somehow I missed seeing this in my undergraduate days, though I remember my peers complaining about Scheme in one of the senior-level computer science courses.

Some of the talks on Groovy and Grails seem interesting, too. The Ruby on Rails movement has certainly sparked some innovation in the Web Development community, and I like seeing those ideas cross-ported into the technologies I have more of an affinity for, such as Java and ColdFusion. Having recently built a somewhat painful full-scale Java application, there may be something useful here.

So I've landed on a new project. We've been asked to port a well-studied scientific algorithm into a Web Service, hoping to link the calculated results into a networked client for visualization (likely Google Earth).

Now, porting the algorithm (from MATLAB) should be relatively straightforward. What I'm unsure about is where to start building the Web Service! I've previously just used ColdFusion for anything that needed to serve a data feed (like sending RSS or feeding a Flash or Flex app), but the requirements from the contracting agency really point to something more portable like Java, Python or Ruby. Since I'm most familiar with Java, and there have been a few articles here and there on Java Web Services, that seemed to be a likely path.

I've read about SOAP, REST, and XML-RPC, and the Apache Axis library. Then I found Axis2, and heard about CXF from a colleague. Can anyone offer any advice as to where to start? Does anyone even build Web Services by hand anymore?

Oh, and Barry... I know I still owe you those 8 things you asked about.

So we got our media for Adobe Creative Suite 3 last week, and I've been fighting with the installs on various systems for the last few days. Some notes from the battlefield:

That popping sound you heard was sudden obsolescence

Adobe Premiere Pro and Soundbooth are only supported on multicore Intel Macs. So much for our "multimedia lab" of 2GHz Dual G5 PowerMacs.

You want how much RAM and disk space?

Be prepared to clean up your hard disks, especially on notebooks -- CS3 Master want's almost 20GB of disk space to install. Web Premium for Windows also complained on our XP systems, which have only 512MB of RAM. I can't really fault them for that, though... XP alone takes that much RAM to function. ;)

Blank Popup Window on Mac Pro Install

I fought with installing Master Collection on my Mac Pro for a few days. The install would get to the end of disc 1 and pop up a blank alert box, mutely asking me to put in the second disc. There were no buttons to click on, and nothing I did could get the install to continue. I had to force-quite the Setup app and clean up my system.

I was eventually able to complete the install by copying the contents of all four discs to a single "payload" folder on my hard disk and running the install from there, as described here.

Turns out the culprit may have been the Safari 3 beta.

Does anyone have any helpful Web sites or suggestions on good books that capture the state-of-the-art of Web site navigation? I'm working on a site with a demonstrably-unusable information architecture, but we can't seem to agree on what we need to do to fix it.

At last! Adobe Apollo, the new cross-platform runtime for building rich internet applications is now available on Adobe Labs:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/

I've been reading and hearing about Apollo for what seems like a year... I'll have to take some of my off-week between classes to give this a test drive by converting some of my Flex 2 applications to Apollo applications.

Wow... ColdFusion MX on the MacPro is fastfastfast. It took a while to get it set up since it isn't technically supported, but wow. WOW I say.

I skimped at least on one step: I didn't recompile mod_jrun on this box. Since I'd gone through that process on the MacBook Pro, I just copied my existing Intel binary .so file to the new machine, and everything seems to be running just fine.

I had to mangle several lines in the config files I copied over from my G5, as the CF files now live in /Applications/JRun4 rather than /Applications/ColdFusionMX due to the recommended multi-server install.

The big drag again was adding our homebrew SSL CA certificate to the system keychain to let our development applications authenticate against Active Directory. I think we should just pony up the cash and get a verified certificate this year.

Anyone Want To Beta Test Scorpio?

Since he asked so nicely, how could I possibly say no?

Here are my slides from my Lightning Talk on TortoiseSVN from today's PSU Web Developers' Lunch:

Quick and Dirty Change Tracking with TortoiseSVN

The last slide has several links to additional resources.

If you want the longer version, here's my full 60-minute slide set from the Penn State Web 2006 Conference:

Web File Version Control with Subversion

The slides are in S5 format -- an open slide show system based entirely in Web Standards: XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

I came across an amazing fact today. In a blog entry about how to do cross-browser testing on Windows with multiple versions of Internet Explorer, I found a note that Virtual PC for Windows is now free. Sounds like a good deal to me.

I've been using VPC for IE 5/5.5 testing for a while now -- Win2k Pro and Server run great in a VM. Hopefully, more people will be willing to test their sites in more than just the browser they themselves use.

I haven't seen any indication of a generally free Macintosh version, but since I'll soon have all Intel-based Macs, I'll just be running Parallels Desktop.