Pete Freitag was in town this evening demonstrating the capability of the cfimage tag to the Albany ColdFusion User Group. It was a good talk and covered many of the great new features available through this tag as well as Pete’s Image Effects CFC.

One of the features that I was drawn to is the ability to create captcha images. This stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and is used to prevent spammers from auto-submitting to forms such as comment sections of blogs.

Personally I find spam to be hilarious and captcha to be art. So, due to a fit of self indulgence I give you a dose of in-your-face captcha. It’s the skipslate home page represented entirely in captcha. So just go there!

http://captcha.skipslate.com

I blogged today on the AOL Developer Network about using Flex as a front end to the AOL Pictures CFC I introduced last week. I have to say that I am getting very excited at the capability that not only the CFC offers but the core technology that Adobe is producing for media development.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be working on an update to the AOL Pictures CFC which will enable the result to come back as XML. Instead of crafting a helper service as demonstrated in today’s post, we may simply specify the proper format and be able to work with any/all picture data which comes across.

Today’s AOL blog may be viewed here: http://dev.aol.com/node/616

Having written on my AOL blog today about the release of my AOL Pictures component, I still felt the need to say more. In case you missed the post, you can read it here.

I think this is a pretty important slice of code as it packs some good features with very little effort of the CF developer. Communication with the AOL Pictures API is done through JSON but you’d never know it since this logic is abstracted from the implementation. In addition to this, the component lends itself to be transformed as XML and perhaps fed into a Flex app (check in next week).

I look forward to releasing this to other arenas, perhaps the RIAForge or the Developer Exchange in the coming days. In the meantime, you can download the code here.

I see the word expert thrown around an awful lot these days. Speaking from a technical sense, things change so often that, in my mind, to be an expert is something to be constantly earned and only assigned by others.

As tough as it sounds, I will never give up pursuing expert status, although only for a single skill. It’s the one skill that affects all others. The skill that once mastered, will serve as the gateway to a lifetime of learning and development; listening.

Listening skills enable us to communicate and share experiences with others. Whether they’re experiences to be avoided or pursued, tuning in to the world around you is invaluable.

Listening isn’t about eavesdropping either. It’s about letting someone finish their thought, not to interrupt them even though you know the right answer. To let ideas flow and complete themselves, whether right or wrong, always has the possibility of yielding a new and fantastic path.

So what’s your top skill? Are you an expert?

The ideas I get for articles are almost always a result of either some wild idea I have that I feel the need to prove out or by attempting to find solid, well researched information on a task I wish to complete.

Having easily accessed the Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) using Perl in the past, I wanted to take this same technique into the world of ColdFusion. After running many searches, I was happy to see a number of hits returned. The problem was that the same questions that I had were being asked in these other forums.

As an admin, I used WMI with Perl to generate fantastic reports on all my Windows systems. It was that extra tool that kept my productivity up, freeing me to do other cool things. I do think that the prospect of using WMI from a development perspective is still a little shadowed, thus, I created the WMI.cfc ColdFusion component. This component offers a simplified read-only access to the properties of any or all provider classes. Check out the article on Community MX which includes a set of downloads containing the CFC and all relevant documentation:

Community MX - ColdFusion and WMI

I am very excited to announce that I’ll be blogging on the AOL Developer Network for the next couple of months where I’ll be tasked with showcasing the capabilities of the various AOL APIs using a number of languages and technologies.

I look forward to exposing some folks to the potential that ColdFusion has to offer as well as Perl’s interaction with the AOL APIs, which by the way are incredibly rich.

So check it out, give it a read, leave a comment, and get involved!