This news is actually a month old, but I haven't seen anyone else talk about it yet.

Daemon has once again outdone themselves with the release of FarCry Core 5.1. This new version comes with a very large assortment of new features and bug fixes when compared to the previous release of FarCry 5.0 from last June.

With over 200 documented bug fixes and new features, FarCry 5.1 is definitely an upgrade not to be missed. Below are a few I felt deserved mentioning:

• Faster Startup Time: FarCry starts up much faster now (as well as application scope updates) for people using JVM 1.5 or better (if you have CF8, you should be all set). Because CF's createUUID() method is so slow, Rob Rohan replaced it with a third-party java class that creates UUIDs in a fraction of the time.
• Friendly URL Engine Rebuilt: Friendly URLs no longer require a prefix of "/go/" and they are easier to manage. (see the docs for more details on the new Friendly URLs in FarCry 5.1).
• New Admin Toolbar: When logged in and browsing the site, the admin toolbar now sits out of the way at the bottom of the screen. It has better information regarding the primary content on the screen and it even lets you edit content in a modal window while never leaving the page (New!). Consuming very little space it sits in an iframe rather than using javascript to modify the contents of the page. This was important because the previous admin toolbar (which floated on the left of the screen) sometimes made working on a website difficult - not only could you not validate your (x)HTML, but if you had javascript errors on the page you sometimes didn't know if it was because of your code or possibly a conflict with the the admin menu (logging out of FarCry was the only way to get by this issue).
• New Developer API. A new developer API allows developers to access a single object with a library of common methods often used by developers. No longer does a developer have to dig around to find out how to do a custom getDescendants() method or find the default image path or file path. This is still a work in progress and is being updated with new methods, but is a great starting point for developers to look for common actions often needed.
• New Ajax Features in Formtools: When using formtools on the frontend of your website, you can now do things like ajax form submission. Personally I don't like using formtools on the frontend (I like to pick and choose which js libraries to use and customize my own code), but I think a lot of people will find these features useful - just write a couple lines of code and FarCry will build out all of your forms and ajax for you.
• New Pagination Functionality: Okay, this probably shouldn't really be on a list of big features. But I find myself using it more and more on projects because it allows me to conform easily to standards-compliant lists fairly easily with very little code.
• Better Railo and OpenBD Support: Although FarCry's primary concern is to make sure it works on Adobe ColdFusion, support for Railo and OpenBD is an ongoing process. Daemon works with both companies to help make sure that both third-party engines can run as smoothly as possible with new features of FarCry as they come out. Every now and then something will break with a new feature or bug fix, but luckily the community is there to assist in pointing out the error and helping to bug fix.
• New Blog Engine (Plugin): Although it hasn't been officially released as of yet, the current beta of the FarCry Blog plugin is pretty stable and currently is designed for FarCry 5.1+. It technically hasn't changed much since it's first beta release several months ago (with cool features like switching skins in a single click and easy content management), but it's something I strongly suggest checking out if you're in need for a blog engine. You can grab the version built for FarCry 5.1 on the FarCry builds download page (look for the file named nearcry-community-5-1-0.zip).

Daemon is already hard at work on the next release of FarCry Core 5.1.1 which promises to take care of a list of items that were pushed aside temporarily so that version 5.1 could get out the door. Already there have been many updates put into SVN and it looks like we may see a lot more jQuery functionality in the next release (I'm a huge fan of jQuery, so this only makes me happier). I can't wait to see what Daemon has in store for us next.

Daemon has announced the first public beta release of FarCry 5.1.  Along with a plethora of bug fixes, FarCry 5.1 introduces a new Friendly URL sub-system (no more need for /go/) as well as a faster engine under the hood. i18n has been brought back on the scene after a hiatus of a year or so and the new webskin caching system and list views things even easier than before.

One of the most notable features is better OpenBD and Railo support.  Although I don't personally use either (except for testing), I've been hearing great things about them.  Deamon is asking for more community testing with FarCry 5.1 beta on OpenBD and Railo.  So if you have a moment to give it a test run, let them know how it goes.

A new blog engine is planned to be released with FarCry 5.1 when it comes out (you can download the first release candidate of NearCry on Daemon's builds download page).

I am personally running the current beta of FarCry 5.1 in production on a few websites and intranets and it's running quite well. If you get a chance, download the latest bundle (currently titled "farcry-community-5-1-0-BetaB.zip") from the download builds page and let Daemon know what you think.

Last week I was running out of space again in my MacBook Pro. I've gone through this again and again (always running out of space - deleting files or moving them to a separate storage device to get a little more space). I finally decided it was time to upgrade.

Speed has also been an issue. For the last 3 laptops (since 2004) I have always purchased them with 7200 RPM drives. When I purchased this MBP last summer the largest 7200RPM drive they offered was a 160GB drive (with 8MB cache). It's actually a pretty decent Seagate drive.

At the time of this blog post, the largest 7200RPM drive for laptops is 320GB with 16MB cache (or 500GB for 5400RPM). Over the past 5 years I've had a lot of bad luck with 3.5" Western Digital drives (almost all of them have died - poor ventilation in my NAS I guess). But after doing some research I decided to get one of the Western Digital 320GB hard drives (the WD Scorpio Black 320GB drive without free-fall sensor (WD3200BEKT). I made sure not to get the one with the free-fall sensor (built-in shock protection) because there have been multiple reports of people having kernel panics when physically moving the laptop (a conflict between the HD's shock detection and the MBP's head parking technology). Although I could not find any official data (from WD or Apple) to back up this claim, it was enough to make me be more cautious and avoid the possible issue.

The whole process took about 3.5 hours (3 hours to clone the data from my 160GB drive to the 320GB drive, and a half hour to swap the drives).

When I was a PC repair tech and network engineer in the 90's I repaired quite a few laptops. I have to say, they were much more complicated back then than the ones I've taken apart over the past few years (IMO). Apple's was even easier. But I wasn't without help. I found this great walkthrough which saved me a lot of time. If you're considering doing this, let me give you a helpful tip I learned from a tech who trained me back in 1994. Before taking out screws from a laptop, grab an empty egg carton (qty of 12). As you move through each set of screws, use a new compartment in the egg carton (makes things so much easier :) ). Also, make sure you have the correct tools (I was lucky enough to already have precision screw drivers on my workbench - saved me an extra trip to the hardware store).

I also saved a lot of time by purchasing an external hard drive enclosure (I purchased that particular one for other reasons - I have a couple other SATA 2.5 and 3.5 drives I've been meaning to retrieve data from and this will make things much easier. Also, I found that device to be much cheaper on Best Buy, but I've had so much bad experience with Best Buy over the years and great experience with NewEgg that I'll keep going with the better service. I do, however, wish the device had Firewire 800 :) ). I was originally planning to use one of my existing USB external HDDs to clone the data (make an image), and then use the same drive to restore the image back to the new HDD, but I skipped the middle-man by using the enclosure and just moved the data over in one step.

So here's a breakdown of how I replaced the drive (3.5 hours):

1. Researched some hard drives and chose the Western Digital WD3200BEKT drive for it's overall balance of speed and power consumption (speed being the more important factor for me). Suggest: Newegg.com or Amazon.com.
2. Shutdown all programs on my Mac and disconnected from the web (don't want some auto-update running by mistake)
3. Mounted the new drive to the Mac (now in the enclosure unit) and formated it (use "Applications >> Utilities >> Disk Utility". Select the new drive (which shouldn't be formatted yet if new) and choose "Erase" with the default setting of "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)).
4. Used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the data and make the new drive bootable (took 3 hours)
5. Shut down Mac and installed new HDD
6. Booted up Mac with new HDD (it was a slow bootup the first time - see next step)
7. This next part I couldn't find documented anyhere on the web. I just happened to catch some guy talking about it in a forum after having slow bootups from my recent restore.
   • Go into "System Preferences >> Startup Disk", select the new drive, and restart (your bootup will be much faster now).

I'm not sure if this upgrade would void my warranty with Apple (I have Apple Care), but if I have to send my MBP in for repair again in the future, I figure I'll just have to swap out my new HDD with the original before sending the laptop out. It's possible I could have paid Apple a large sum of money to upgrade the drive (note: They don't sell anything larger than 200GB 7200RPM) just to protect my warranty, but after having a bad first experience with an Apple Genius, I'd prefer to just do it the right way myself.

A little over a week ago I blogged about my Mac dieing. I'm happy to say that as of last Friday I am functioning in tip-top-shape.

Because of the holiday weekend I had to wait until Tuesday before receiving Apple's shipping box (the shipping box was really nice and well organized - with good instructions). But I was able to ship it back the same day and I received the repaired MBP three days later on Friday morning.

Apple replaced the logic board and reinstalled the OS.

Now don't be alarmed about the OS reinstall. Once you know a little more you'll understand that that was actually really nice of them. You see, I consider all of my client data on my development machine (my MBP) to be confidential (whether it is, or isn't). So, before I sent the Mac in for repair I mounted the drive on another Mac and formatted the drive 10 times (each time doing a zero out of all the free space). Am I being paranoid? I don't think so. I'm just being mindful of my client's information. Except for maybe some family photos or documents, I don't have anything to hide on my computers (no pr0n, pirated software, etc). However, my development laptop is my office, and everything on it is more important to me than all the physical items in my office workspace. This is why I back up everything daily (I use several secure backup solutions just to be safe... downtime == bad).

So I got the MBP on Friday with a new OS installed (very nice of Apple... especially since it was the latest 10.5, and according to their records I purchased this laptop with 10.4 - I own 10.5, but how would they know). I used one of my latest backups off of a secure image on a usb drive. I booted from the drive and restored the data. One hour later it was as if nothing ever happened (other than the laptop being turned off for a week). My backup software was yelling "No backups for over 7 days!" and I had to download a week's worth of email from IMAP, but this was all expected and took maybe 10 minutes to get back in order.

As it turns out I got hit with the flu last week during all the downtime, and except for a couple small fires (10 minutes of code), I wasn't able to get on my PC anyway to code.

All-in-all I am happy to be up and running. Except for the bad experience with the Apple "Genius" (see my last post), I had a great experience and turnaround with Apple Care and their service people I dealt with.

The other day my primary computer died (my Macbook Pro). I should warn anyone before reading this that this blog post is mostly me venting about my experience during the ordeal, so don't expect to get anything useful out of reading everything here (oh, and my first experience with an Apple "Genius" leads me to believe that they are just plain rude and to be avoided if possible).

For a couple months now I'd randomly get artifacts on the screen and things would get weird. Eventually it got so bad that I would get kernel panics, random particles, vertical lines, and more artifacts. I called Apple about it and was told to just reboot. The first couple of times this seemed to fix it. However this past Thursday when it happened again the screen froze and the internal fans were running at full speed (the machine was really hot).

I forced a shutdown, waited for the computer to cool, and then turned it back on. I could hear the Apple chime, the fans power up, and the HDD doing it's normal boot process, but there was no image on the screen (same result if I added an external monitor).

I tried all of the regular steps (cleared PRAM and SMC, attempted to boot from the install DVD, etc) but no video appeared. I then called Apple tech support who had me repeat the same steps. I was told that the GPU was likely fried (apparently a known defect in all MBPs that have the g84 and g86 chipsets *See link references below) and that the logic board needed to be replaced. Unfortunately this is happening to a lot of MBP and Mac Pro owners who have the nVidia chipsets.

For those interested, my laptop specs are:

• Macbook Pro 3,1 2.4 Ghz Intel chipset
• Purchased June 2007
• 2GB RAM original (I later purchased 4GB RAM)
• 160GB 7200 RPM HDD
• ...and before someone asks, I do play games every now and then which make the laptop (most likely the GPU) run really hot).

From my understanding, when I send in my MBP in for repair I'll just receive a new logic board with the same defective chipset. My default one-year warranty recently ended and for once I'm feeling better about having purchased the $350 Apple Care (Apple's version of extended warranty) since Apple is only handling this on a case-by-case basis (HP and Dell officially recognized this a while back, but to-date Apple has no comment).

The tech support guy was really nice and suggested that I take the laptop down to the local Apple Store for a faster turnaround in replacing the logic board. So I made an appointment for the earliest slot and then headed down to the local Apple store. I explained the situation to the Apple "Genius" who in turn was very rude to me and treated me like I was wasting his time (a whole 5 minutes). He tried resetting the PRAM and SMC and decalred that the machine would have to be sent in for repair. He explained to me that I should take the machine back home, call Apple tech support again, and have them send me a box (for shipping) to have the machine sent in for repair. He said it would be a faster turnaround than having him send the machine out from the Apple store (right...).

So... I called tech support (again) while still in the Apple store (instead of waiting until I got home). I didn't have my case number on me (from the original call) and the tech support person couldn't find it attached to my information, so we had to create a new one -- which meant we had to start all over again (clearing PRAM, etc etc) until he was satisfied (in his defense though I felt he was just doing his job... the guy was actually really nice). We went through some second-tier support (who was also very nice and also confirmed that these nVidia chipsets are failing quite a lot) and got approval to have the machine sent in for repair.

Apple tech support was supposed to send a DHL box to my home (to be received no later than Saturday morning) with instructions on how to return the laptop... Unfortunately it hasn't arrived yet (and it's late Saturday night). I now have a feeling I'll have to wait until Tuesday to send the laptop out for repair due to the holiday weekend (in the US we have a national holiday on Monday where most businesses (including Apple) are closed) so that I can wait an additional estimated 7-10 days to receive the repaired machine (thanks Apple "Genius" (the rude guy) who assured me this process was faster than having it sent out directly from the store on Friday).

Here are some recent articles and discussions about the nVidia chipset problems

• Tom's Hardware article
• Apple's forums (this one discussion has over 500 responses - many with the same issue)
• Softpedia news article
• MacNN article
• Google spreadsheet listing people with this problem
• Similar blog post
• Macrumors has many discussions on this topic. Here's one with over 600 responses

I've heard rumors that the possible September 9, 2008 Apple announcements may include a new MBP (doubtful, but you never know). I wonder then if Apple would be willing to replace defective machines (or logic boards) with something newer... or are we just stuck with these defective chipsets?

Please note that other than this defective chipset problem, I really do like my video card. For the most part it's been really good to me and runs games really well (and I bet I could cook eggs on it with all the heat :) ).

Sorry for the long vent. Here's to hoping that Apple won't send me the same defective chipset :).

Centrasoft recently released their new version of the CF8 Exam Buster to help those interested in studying for the Adobe ColdFusion 8 Certification.

Personally I no desire to take the exam (see my previous post from a couple years ago or Ray Camden's recent comments on the test), but Brian (Centrasoft) always does such an excellent job with his CF Exam Buster that I'd like to compare his product with that of the actual exam (Maybe Adobe should hire him in the future to write their CF exams :) ). So I've got myself a copy of the CF8 Exam Buster and as soon as I have a chance, I'm going to run through it.

Below is a copy of the press release Brian has posted. If you're looking to study for the CF8 exam, definitely consider his product (note: only runs on Windows. I installed it in VMWare Win2k3-64 and it runs great).

CF8 Exam Buster from CentraSoft (http://centrasoft.com)

CF8 Exam Buster is the ultimate testing tool specifically designed to help ColdFusion developers earn their Adobe ColdFusion 8 Certification through the Adobe Certified Professional Program.

CF8 Exam Buster has 384 questions designed to help you prepare for all aspects of the actual ColdFusion 8 certification exam. CF8 Exam Buster allows you to take six different tests, 11 topic tests for your weak areas, and the ability to create random tests.

All 384 questions have explanations and reference URLs to further aid your studies and build your ColdFusion knowledge.

During your test you can save your test in progress, submit comments, bookmark questions, pause your test, and much more. You can control the look and feel of the CF8 Exam Buster application, by setting the fonts, colors, and appearance of many controls, to create a studying environment with which you are comfortable. After your test is scored, you will be shown a comprehensive breakdown of your test results.

There is a DEMO version on the Centrasoft website (http://www.centrasoft.com), which allows you to check out all the features of the program, plus one whole test.

Read what people are saying about the Exam Buster product on our testimonials page (some early CF8 comments are already on there): http://centrasoft.com/cfbtestimonials.cfm

Check out CF8 Exam Buster today! Thanks, Brian Simmons bsimmons@centrasoft.com The ultimate Adobe ColdFusion 8 Certification testing tool: Check out CF8 Exam Buster at: http://centrasoft.com

ColdFusion, and Adobe are registered trademarks of Adobe Corporation. Adobe Corporation in no way endorses or is affiliated with Centrasoft Corporation.

If you were like me and upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 when it was released and used Adobe Acrobat Connect (either Pro or basic version) to give presentations then you were likely not too happy with the random crashes while screen sharing.

I had called Adobe tech support multiple times and was told that they were working on it. Finally in May tech support told me they had a fix for it. Essentially you just need to manually remove the old plugin and it will automatically be upgraded to the new version the next time you attempt to connect to Connect (read the article for full details). This worries me a little... Should I randomly delete these going forward in order to check for a new plugin version?

From that point on it has worked great for me. Unfortunately I had essentially paid for 6 months of an annually-priced product that wouldn't work. I recently renewed my annual license and was told I would not be refunded for the 6 months of the non-usable product. But at least I'm good going forward. I suppose I only have myself to blame. I should probably wait at least a half-year before upgrading to any new OS... what can I say? It's the geek in me :).

Sometime last year I discovered the website Shelfari. At first the site ran slow and didn't have too many features (the site was still fairly new). Then by the end of last year the site made some serious upgrades (to the UI and overall speed). Since then they've consistently added new functionality and the user experience is amazing to say the least.

About a week or two ago I started telling some close friends about the site and I've seen a few of them blog good experiences about it. So I just wanted to give my two thumbs up as well :).

If you read at all and want to look at a really good social networking site based on reading books (as well as somewhere to record all the books you've read), make sure to check it out.

Also feel free to take a look at my bookshelf. I don't have all of my books on there (I can't remember every book I've read), but I've gotten quite a few of the ones I can remember (plus I also read about 1 book a week, so I'm always adding more :) ).

There has been a lot of buzz this week when Daemon announced they were thinking of changing their open source license model from Common Public License 1.0 (CPL) to a dual license with the GNU GPL License v3 (GPL).

I sat with Geoff Bowers, President and CEO of Daemon Internet Consultants, to ask him why they were thinking of changing to a dual license model.

Check out the article on Fusion Authority and see what all the buzz is about.