ColdFusion 8 - Scorpio

If you're wondering about what some of the specific new capabilities that ColdFusion 8, Scorpio, will be giving developers Ben Forta's blog has a nice peak. Scorpio will open up some of the settings on a per application level instead of the current situation where to try to do so, you need to run separate instances of the CF application server. This should make it easier for developers working on applications where different users have different features available to them.

Goldman Sachs Pulls Out Of Real Salt Lake Deal

As reported by the Deseret News, Goldman Sachs real estate investment arm Whitehall has pulled out of it's deal with Real Salt Lake. For their investment, they were going to own 50% of SCP Worldwide's Real Salt Lake. Typically these investment funds put their money into a project with a 3-5 year time horizon. Whitehall has over $30 billion in real estate investments and recently purchased the John Hancock tower in Chicago for over $300 million. What happened that caused Whitehall to pull out at the last minute?

Chelsea FC On YouTube

I noticed the Guardian recently announced a deal with Chelsea FC to show news clips and archived footage on YouTube. It'll be co-branded and have it's own section. Could this be the sort of thing soccer fans in the States have been waiting for to keep tabs on their favorite team? As it is now they get some news from internet news sites and even less from channels like Fox Soccer Channel Gol TV, and Setanta. And if they want to watch a game from 5 years ago? Well, they're lucky if it's on DVD.

Could the next move be for YouTube to provide paid programming featuring current games?

US Oil Demand Drops Sharply During A Period Of Good Economic Growth

Oil prices usually decline when there is a recession because demand drops. What's interesting is that in the US real GDP growth for 2005 was 3.6% and 2006's will likely turn out to be about the same. Yet use of oil in the US dropped 27% in 2006.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8MOESLG0.htm

In the U.S. -- still the world's largest energy consuming nation -- residual fuel oil deliveries experienced the steepest decline, falling nearly 27 percent to 673,000 barrels per day as industrial and electric utility facilities made major shifts to natural gas, the report said. Jet fuel demand declined by 2.8 percent to 1.6 million barrels a day, as airlines conserved fuel as best they could.

Browser Archive

If you create web applications, one thing that can be handy is having different browsers for testing. Evolt.org has a wonderful browser archive. So if you're looking for an old version of Internet Explorer or Chimera this is the place. Please make sure to drop them a lil' donation.

Scanning Plates

I couldn't find it but I've seen where Los Angeles was trying out some equipment on police squad cars that would automatically can license plates. The software looks to see if there are any warrant hits, etc for the cars owner. So it didn't surprise me to see that San Francisco was using the same technology to hunt down people with too many outstanding parking tickets.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/27/BAGRON6E411.DTL

MySpace's Blog Technology

Does anyone know much about MySpace's blog technology? What are they running it on for servers? For coding? I'm curious since that component of MySpace seems to be where I have the most problems. I have quite a few errors but more often it has times when it runs incredibly slow and times out.

Bad, Bad H-P

I thought I'd follow up yesterday's post scolding Yahoo for their sketchy if not nefarious actions with their IM update with a scolding of HP today. I already wasn't happy with them in regrads to my notebook computer I got 2 years ago. I had some bad experiences with their customer support due to their inability to communicate simple things with me such as not informing me that they were going to schedule a UPS pick-up time for the computer, let alone asking me if that would work for me.

I logged onto their online store because none of the stores in my area carry the 135W power supply that I need for my laptop. It was annoying that when rejecting my credit card they gave me an order number and told me to call their 888 number & customer service could give me no more detail than "bank rejected it; call your bank" when actually in double checking it I used the wrong experation date. But that can happen anywhere these days.

H-P's big no,no was the option for having them send you the email equivalent of the sunday insert for Hewlitt-Packard. It was a minor bad that they defaulted to checking yes for that. But what was extra bad and down right slimey was when I hoped into my account to edit it, they defaulted to checking it yet again! I had unchecked it originally and it had properly saved all my other preferences except that one. Come on H-P, show your customers respect. If I told you no the first time, don't try to sneak one past me.

Bad, Bad Yahoo Messenger

I'm using Yahoo Messenger for IM at my current contract. It gets to send out quick messages to folks and works well. Our Exchange servers are 2/3 a continent away and email can sometimes take 5+ minutes to be sent. This morning when I logged in I was prompted by Yahoo to update it. Not a problem. the new version has a smaller footprint and the upgrade went smoothly. But they violated a couple cardinal laws, at least in the eyes of many people. They automatically changed my default browsers homepage to their own. And they added the Yahoo toolbar. I can understand doing this if my settings were that I was already using them. But I wasn't. I associate actions like this with seedy types. You know the websites that you stumble across when you mistype a URL; the ones that ask or even attempt without asking to change your homepage. Is this a sign of how desperate Yahoo is for our business?