Check out what the presentation I offered today, "What's Next In CF Zeus?" (PDF of slides), which I presented at CFCamp in Munich.

(I had mentioned last week that I would be presenting this and another presentation, as well as a daylong class. BTW, the daylong class was popular, with 13 students. Great to meet all those who attended.)

I explain in the slides how I gathered the info, from 5 public Adobe Zeus sessions I've seen so far. None of those had yet cataloged ALL features that had been shown in the other sessions. There were certain things mentioned in all 4, but then also each showed things (or in more detail) that the other did not. I enjoyed pulling this all together in this talk.

As I also note in the slides, I was not permitted to show live demos (only Adobe employees can do that), but still the listing of features and brief discussions (including some code) should still be valuable. I also point to the URLs for the 4 currently available recorded public Adobe sessions, which do in fact offer more code and live demos.

I suspect I'll offer the talk soon on the CFMeetup. I may also present them in another form. But until then, enjoy the slides.

Do let me know if it's a useful list for you, or if I left anything out!

Update, Recording: Note that this session was recorded. You can view it here, but note that you must login with an Adobe ID to see it.

And I'm presenting a session tonight, Tuesday September 13, at 7pm Eastern, on "Understanding and Using the ColdFusion Server Monitor".

As many of you know, I'm pretty much a fanatic about the monitor, especially about truly understanding elements of it that many miss. And so in my talk this will not be just a dog and pony show, but I will talk about practical experiences with it, though presented to either those new to it or experienced with it.

Note that the times for all these devweek sessions is shown (on the Adobe site) as being Pacific time, so again mine is at 7pm, not 4pm, Eastern.

And yes, the sessions are being recorded and seem to be made available the next day.

Finally, beware that there is no one URL you can use to join in on all the Connect sessions, nor can you get the Connect session URL by going to the event page (via the first link above). Instead, you must register for each event (free) from that first page, to get each session's Connect URL--and you'll want to do that at least several minutes in advance of any session to have time to register, get the email, login, etc.

See you then.

PS Hey, while we're talking monitoring, note as well that if you've not heard, FusionReactor has come out with its new release 4, which has lots of great additions, especially FREC (or the FR Extensions for CF) which cause FR to grab and log lots of great info that the CF Server Monitor only shows and never logs. I'll be blogging about FR 4 soon, but plenty to see on their site. and FusionAnalytics is also just about to release, really!

I won't be discussing these at this talk, focused solely on the server monitor, but as I always tell folks, each tool has its use and often a single shop can benefit from having both (like I do, as do many of the clients I help with troubleshooting). You can find more from me about FR here in my blog. And I'll have lots more to say about FA and FR4 more soon.

My session will be "CF911 ColdFusion Performance Report 2011", a new talk/concept I've created. Here's the description:

Starting a new tradition, veteran CF troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will present a review of the performance aspects of making various choices when working with ColdFusion, especially in recent version(s) of ColdFusion. Leveraging the important value of real load testing (as opposed to the less accurate conclusions from "large loop" testing), Charlie's annual report will help attendees appreciate the performance-related improvements of new/changed features, as well some older features where choices can make an important impact. Depending on the timing of the release of "CF next", the session may cover its new features, but it will certainly cover some things new in CF 9 and 9.0.1.

As I note there, I hope this may become an annual event which I might present at this and/or other conferences. (It's an idea rooted in a similar presentation made by a former colleague, from my first IT career from 1982-1997, where he presented the annual "Jim Damon model 204 Performance Report".)

About RIACon

As for RIAcon, I hope you're considering it. Phil Nacelli and the folks at AboutWeb have been working hard to put together the conference, which in some minds is kind of picking up where CFUnited left off. It will be a more intimate event, much like CFunited was when it first started.

Indeed, some will recognize that the location for RIAcon is across the street from one of the hotels where CFunited was held in its early years, right next to the Twinbrook Metro station in Rockville, MD.

A Personal Connection to the Hotel Location

Even more of a delight for me personally is that the hotel (The Legacy Hotel) is right on the land that was once the location of Congressional Roller Skating Rink (until the late 70's), where my sister and I (and many friends) spent our teen years pretty much whenever we weren't in school. Yep, I was a skating nerd: dance, figures, freestyle, and more. Here's incriminating evidence!

Here are the details.

First are the two talks:

• Pinpointing and Resolving ColdFusion Performance Issues (see the link for details on the topic)
• More Hidden Gems in CFBuilder and CFBuilder 2 (see the link for details on the topic)

(I had put in just the first talk originally, and then a few weeks ago a slot opened and they asked if I could do the other, which I was happy to offer, as an reprisal/update to my talk from the first release.)

Then for the Lightning Round (or what was originally referred to as the Pecha Kucha), my talk will be:

• Lies, damned lies, and CF request timeouts (in which I'll share in 5 minutes some information that even experienced developers admit having never known)

Finally, for the Birds of a Feather (no page on their site listing them yet), the session I will be leading will be:

• CF911: Share your CF server troubleshooting tips (come share some ideas, or learn from myself and others)

Sense a theme? Yep, other than the CFBuilder talk, the other sessions are all focused on the topic that is now most near and dear to my heart (and livelihood): CF Server Troubleshooting. It's what I do, and more important it's how I feel I can best help the most people.

There's one last aspect of my involvement at the conference that I'll mention: they started a new sponsorship program this year called "Friends of cf.Objective()", and I'll be participating in that. No mention of it yet on their site, but there should be more news at the event.

So hope to see you there, or if you won't be there, I'll post if any of these are recorded, or if not then I would likely record them myself in the future.

It will be held tomorrow (or today, depending on when/where you read this), Wednesday Dec 8 at 12pm US ET (GMT-5). It's an online session, held at:

http://experts.adobeconnect.com/ubercfpanel/

And yes, it will be recorded (by Ray--keep an eye on his blog for more info, if you can't attend.)

To find out more, such as who else is on it, check out Ray's entry with more detail:

http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2010/12/3/Reminder--Uber-Panel-of-ColdFusion-Awesomeness

BTW, for those looking for the subsequent parts to my previously started series on solving memory-related errors, my apologies. I got sidetracked with travel. Will explain when I do part 2, which I hope to get posted very soon.

FusionReactor is one of the leading CF Server Monitor tools, which works not only with CF 6/7/8/9, either Standard or Enterprise, but it also works with Railo, Open BlueDragon, and even BlueDragon JX 7.1. In fact, it works with any J2EE/JEE server or servlet engine.

If you're running a site on any of those platforms and ever have problems of slowness, instability, or any other "curious" problems, or just need to better understand the nature of requests that CF is processing, and how well (or poorly) it's doing it, FusionReactor is a great tool, for the reasons I outline. It's like having x-rays into the app server.

I've written and spoken about the tool quite a bit, and have a FusionReactor blog category here with over a dozen entries here, as well.

• I was a roundtable participant in last week's RiaPodcast episode 2.9 (you can listen there)
• I was co-host on the CFHour() podcast, show #60 a couple of weeks ago (you can listen there)
• I was invited (along with Michael Smith) to be interviewed by Judith Dinowitz of FusionAuthority on the recently announced fact that this would be the last year of CFUnited, which I've spoken at each year. (You can read the interview at the FA link offered.)
• It was announced last week that I'll be hosting a BOF (birds of a feather) session at the CFUnited conference. The session will be "CF911: Server Troubleshooting". More details at the page above.
• It was announced last week as well that I will be giving another session at CFUnited, this one being the Sponsor talk for Intergral (makers of FusionReactor, with whom I partner a lot). The topic is "Continuously Improve CF Code Quality, Server Availability & Application Stability". More details here.
• Finally, more details about my Day 2 keynote at the conference were also announced a couple of weeks ago. The topic will be, "CFCommunity: You're Never Alone". More details at the link offered.

I'm giving a CFUnited keynote (no joke!)

First up, while it won't be that unusual that I'm presenting at this year's CFUnited (I've presented at ever event since it's founding), what is unusual is that I've been asked to give the second (Thursday) keynote!

What an honor, and of course a challenge, as Joe Reinhart set a high bar last year! :-)

While the organizers and I have discussed the topic, they've not yet announced it (though they have announced me as one of the keynote speakers, in addition to Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan from Adobe.)

I was awaiting their announcing the topic before I'd post this, but since I also want to announce the other "unusual" speaking engagement, I figured I'd go ahead and share this now and will post an update on the keynote topic later.

BR Conference 2010, in Rio

The second "unusual" speaking engagement for me is that I've been invited (along with Ben Forta, Ray Camden, Adam Lehman, Terry Ryan, and others) to come down to speak in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the BR Conference 2010, a CF and RIA conference being held Aug 19-21.

I've never been to Rio before (let alone Brazil), and I've long looked forward to visiting anywhere in South America, so this is a real thrill. Of course, being in the southern hemisphere, August will be the "deep into winter" with temps down to the 60's/70's Farenheit. :-) Better bring a jacket! Fortunately, it is in fact the driest month of the year, on average.

I'm of course delighted to have that chance, and as they're planning to cover travel costs for speakers I'm all the more honored and grateful, being selected out of so many fine available speakers in the CF community.

Maybe it didn't hurt that I have contributed to at least one book that's translated into Portuguese. It *was* about using CF to build mobile web apps, after all, albeit 10 years ago! I'm just kidding that there's any connection, of course. :-) The organizer, Francisco Paulino (aka, Tofinha) said he drove his decisions based on popularity of speakers down there.

Fortunately, they will have translators at the event for attendees to understand us yankee presenters.

So that now leaves me only Asia, Africa, and Antartica as continents that I will not yet have visited. If only we could get some CF conferences going in those places! :-)

RIAPodcast

(The RIAPodcast is recorded twice monthly, after the Atlanta Flex and then the Atlanta CF user groups. John then often splits each into two, so it's an approximately weekly podcast.)

CFConversations

While there's naturally a fair bit of overlap between the two (given there are different audiences for each), we still tried to cover slightly different things in each.

Mura Show

We may still have another episode or two in the future to wrap things up, but certainly if you're interested in Mura it's a great start-to-finish presentation of getting a site running under and benefiting in many ways from Mura.

I may have still some more news of interesting participation in other such podcast-style activities to share in the future.

"Using ColdFusion as a Service", with Matt Gifford

Thursday, Apr 15, 12pm US ET (GMT-4)

Meeting description, details, optional RSVP

"Setting up ColdFusion Builder Step Debugging", with Charlie Arehart

Thursday, Apr 15, 6pm US ET (GMT-4)

Meeting description, details, optional RSVP

Please join us in the meeting room, experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup, on the day at the time above. Use the "enter as guest" option offering your name (don't try to log in).

Wondering what time this is in your time zone?

All CFMeetup announcements show the time as US Eastern Time (ET), but they also offer a link (in the announcement pages above) to a page that helps you see the time in your own timezone. If you can't access the meetup.com page above (more on that problem below), you can find the time yourself using the available timeanddate.com site yourself.

Can't access the meetup.com site? You can still join the meeting

The CF Meetup announcements are offered via the commercial third-party hosted site, meetup.com. Since that's been marked by some organizations as a "social networking" site, it may be blocked at your workplace. If you can't see the descriptions (and other details) or use the RSVP mechanism, no worries. There are either of two solutions to get around this.

First, you can just show up on the day at the time above at experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup. Use the "enter as guest" option and offer your name (as even meetup.com members must do), and you're in. No fuss.

Second, if you'd like to be notified of CF Meetup events and/or see the descriptions, there are a few ways you can (or you can tell others how they can) do these. I discuss them in another blog entry.

All meetings are recorded

All CF Meetup meetings are recorded, and the URLs are posted after the meeting at recordings page and also at my UGTV site. Streaming recordings are available immediately, while downloadable (FLV) recordings will take at least an hour or more to become available.

Wish we had meetings at different times?

The normal time of our meetings is either noon or 6pm US ET, depending on the availability of speakers. To be clear, I would be happy to hold a meetup at another time. If you're in a distant timezone and are willing to speak, I'll be happy to hold a meeting at an hour outside our norm. Speaking of which...

Call for speakers

We're always open to and indeed looking for more speakers. The topics can be new stuff, old stuff, beginner stuff, or advanced stuff. It can be a repeat of something you've given before, or it can be your first presentation ever. In a group with over 1900 members, there's an audience for every topic, and none is ever too small (plus, still more watch the recordings).

If you may be interested in speaking or know someone who is (or you may want to suggest someone you think I should ask), check out speak.coldfusionmeetup.com, which is a past blog entry where I answer common questions, or have them get in touch with me.