Wow. Things have been busy and I have been neglecting my blog. I feel bad about that. My blog is so important to me, and things have been keeping me away.

I am a teacher at heart. I love to teach. That is why I blog, that is why I present at conferences, and that is why I am going to grad school. So the fact that I have been unable to blog for a while upsets me greatly. But I want to tell you a little bit about why. This is not about making excuses. This is about what is keeping me busy and what I am learning about. It will also motivate me to blog about these things, and that's the important part.

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I keep forgetting to do this. Sorry :(

I have given three presentations so far this year, and I will have 2 or three more et before the end of the year. Here are the slides for the first three in both Keynote and PDF formats.

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One thing that has always bugged the crap out of me is our inability to add additional resource filters to the navigator view in Eclipse. Specifically, I mean these:

Resource filters are very useful little tools that will hide anything that matches the filter from the navigator view. Which is great for things like .svn folders or any other crap you don't feel like you need distracting you at the moment. Like if you want to hide all the images in a project so that it is not as cluttered. But for some reason, we have never been able to add our own filters. So I can't, for example, hide the stupid Settings.xml file that CFB likes to add to my projects or the .settings folder. Grrrrr!!

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I was talking to Charlie Arehart today after his "Hidden Gems in ColdFusion Builder" presentation at CFUnited 2010 and I mention that, for some reason, ColdFusion Builder has the Adobe AIR packaging features of the application hidden by default. So I thought I would write a post on how to enable them for those that would like to use CFBuilder for developing AIR applications.

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A reader emailed me and asked:

I have a question re asymmetric encryption and the best way to achieve it....

I need to encrypt a CreditCard number on one server and store the encrypted string in a db and then 5 minutes later another server takes the card number off that DB and then needs to decrypt it. Any suggestions gratefully received :)

After an e-mail exchange we determined that we were NOT just talking about using SSL between ColdFusion and the DB and we determined that using a symmetric algorithm would not be acceptable to the credit card service. So it seems that this user really did need asymmetric encryption in his application.

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A few weeks ago my buddy Pete Freitag posted his ideas for improving security for CF10 (link) (or whatever they call the next version of ColdFusion). I thought it would be a good idea to post my own ideas.

It's not that I disagree with any of Pete's ideas, I think they are great, I just thought a few more might be good, and I think some of my priorities might be different.

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Some of you may have noticed I have been quiet on my blog this summer, but I assure you, it is only temporary. I have been busy with grad school, family, instituting a lifestyle change to allow me to get healthy, and finding a new job.

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In my last few posts we talked a lot about substitution ciphers, but I hinted at transposition ciphers and promised to follow up with a post, so here it is.

Transposition Ciphers

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This last weekend I attended, and spoke at, NCDevCon 2010 in Raleigh, NC. As expected, NCDevCon was a great conference put on by an amazing crew of dedicated volunteers.

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Right now I am on my way to NCDevCon (Yay for free inflight internet!!).

If you are going to be at the conference this weekend, please do not hesitate to introduce yourself. One of the main reasons I go to conferences is to meet others.

On Saturday I will be speaking about Security in Adobe AIR applications. I will point out that this session is targeted toward experienced AIR developers (either Flex or HTML JS).

Anyway, I am looking forward to the conference. Last year's CFinNC was amazing, and I am positive that this year will be just as good.