March 19, 2024   

Recent Blog Entries


Amazon Security Policies Lax?
November 4, 2012
This may be nothing, but I thought it was worth blogging in case anyone thought otherwise.

I read a lot of books. A few months ago some stuff changed at work where I thought it would be easier to listen to audio books. So I re-enabled my old Audible account. Audible was recently purchased by Amazon, so after I logged in they wanted to merge my Audible account with my Amazon account. The process was pretty painless and I was on my way listening to some audio books.

A few months pass and I realize I'm just not listening to enough books to justify the account type I purchased (I now had way too many credits built up). So I logged into their site and learned that I could put my account on hiatus for a few months (meaning, I won't get billed, nor will I receive any new credits. But I'll be able to use my account and existing credits to purchase audio books). There was no option to do it in the settings screen though. After starting up a chat session with a representative I learned that only a representative could do it for me. Okay, works for me.

All they need to do is verify some security settings. What were those? My Amazon login (email address), my name, and my billing address. Yes, sir. That was it. That's all the info you need to start modifying someone's Amazon account info.

At this point I was very upset with the representative (sorry, Jessica. I know it's not your fault. I should have been nicer) and let her know how upsetting this was. I then asked her if she could update my credit card info, billing, or password. After a short pause she assured me that she could only update my Audible membership plan. Was she just telling me what I wanted to hear, or covering up a very large issue... I don't know (yet). I'm tempted to try again tomorrow with another representative and see if they can update any of those other fields of data.

But here's my question to anyone who cares: Even if they can only update my Audible membership data, is that not a valid reason to complain? I mean, this is Amazon. I get that they purchased this company and that it takes time to change policies, code, and [unfortunately] staff when you do a takeover, but hasn't it been long enough that Amazon would have taken care of any account security concerns before merging Audible's accounts with Amazon's accounts?

Perhaps I'm just getting upset over nothing and this is all just a moot learning experience.

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CF Dev Week 2012 Videos
June 13, 2012
Last week Adobe ran the ColdFusion Developer Week 2012. I was honored to be asked to give my presentation on Scheduling Services in ColdFusion 10 (which I had made some slight improvements from my previous talk on it at cf.objective() based on audience feedback).

You can now see the video as well as all the videos from last week on their website at http://www.adobe.com/go/cfdevweek.

Update: You can download the sample files from GitHub: https://github.com/jeffcoughlin/preso_cf10scheduler

For my own convenience, I have made a copy of the recording and cleaned up the audio a little and posted it on Vimeo. Enjoy :) https://vimeo.com/43959682.

Preso: Scheduling Services in ColdFusion 10 from Jeff Coughlin on Vimeo.

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cfObjective 2012 Presentation: Scheduling Services in ColdFusion 10
May 29, 2012
About a week ago I gave my presentation at cf.Objective() 2012 on the scheduling services in ColdFusion 10 (details). As promised here are my presentation slides and code samples.

https://github.com/jeffcoughlin/preso_cf10scheduler

A special thanks to Guust Nieuwenhuis for giving me a couple tips to consolidate some ideas into simpler demos (he had done a similar presentation and deserves credit for some concepts used here) and also Sean Coyne for some jQuery assistance when I thought I'd run into a brick wall :).

Thank you to all who attended my session on Saturday morning (especially after two days of intense sessions).

I'll be giving this presentation again next Friday at the Adobe ColdFusion Developer Week 2012 (http://adobe.ly/cfdevweek2012). This is a remote session that you can watch for free and ask questions. If interested, please signup on that page (I believe registration is required).

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FarCry Solr Pro Plugin
April 5, 2012
We've launched a new FarCry plugin called FarCry Solr Pro. It's got a ton of features (too many to list here).

Go checkout the plugin's website for more info and download links: https://jeffcoughlin.github.io/farcrysolrpro/

Special thanks to the private beta testers over the past month.

Dev team includes:
Sean Coyne and Jeff Coughlin

Minimum requirements are:

  • ColdFusion 9, Railo 3.3
  • FarCry 6.2, 6.1.4, 6.0.19
  • Solr 3.5 (optionally included)

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Adobe MAX 2011 CF Unconference Presenation: Advanced Solr - Going Beyond the Basics of cfsearch
October 3, 2011
For those who attended my session on Monday and wanted to download the sample code, you can download it here (2.4MB zip file).

The code is ready to go (requires CF9 or better if you want to run it out of the box without having to download Solr on your own). Make sure to glance at the readme.txt file before you start. It also has some troubleshooting tips in case you can't get the code running right away.

I've separated each of the samples into include files (demo1.cfm, demo2.cfm, etc) to make it easy to follow. And I've also included a ton of really helpful notes at the top of each demo file that walks you through exactly what I discussed in my session.

I gave this same session at CF.Objective() 2011 earlier this year. So for those who already downloaded that code there isn't anything new for you (sorry). But I did update the live session with more helpful specifics based on feedback from CF.Objective().

Download and enjoy!

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