Well, I discovered TODAY that YESTERDAY had been declared "How I Got Started In ColdFusion Day" - so as is often the case, I'm a day late.

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A recent story on CBS News reveals that photo copiers can be loaded with secrets. While below is a link to the story, the thrust of it is this. Nearly all copy machines built since 2002 have a hard drive on them, much like your personal computer. Copies of hundreds or thousands of the documents copied on the machines resides on these hard drives. Thus, if financial documents, medical documents, highly proprietary information or such have been copied on the machine, and the copier is disposed of (trashed or sold) whoever controls the copier also now controls all that info!

Read below - another case where we are victims of our own desire for convenience!

http://tinyurl.com/y3mwyco

It's been an interesting few weeks of noteworthy events. It started with the Republican, Scott Brown, winning the Senate seat that had been almost the personal property of Teddy and the Kennedys. Follow that up with the terrible magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti on January 12, the currently ongoing domination of the US in the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (current count 36), and now the 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile. What does it all mean?

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Once upon a time, folks who had ruined their life, generally screwed things up or just wanted to get away and start over, could up and move to a new town and voila - new life. Those days are gone my friend, thanks to the Internet and, specifically, social networking. The advent of Web 2.0 with all of it's interactivity, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, rss feeds, shopping and all that goes with it, means that most folks have left a trail that will live virtually, forever (every pun intended). User names and passwords on shopping sites means that even if you move from New York to California, they remember you. That is, unless you change them all. And how many folks really want to, or will take the time to do all that? Face it, if you shop Amazon, even if you appear in a new location, they'll greet you with your purchasing history and a collection of items they know you'll like! Wait, I thought this was a new start?

OK - I'll make a new Facebook. Wait, I need to add a lot of my old friends, because I don't have any here! And those old friends will probably forget to remove my old profile from their list of 600 friends and some of thim will make more than one reference to my old personality. Busted! And Oh - and with sites like "Whitepages.com" - if I get a new phone, it's just a matter of days . . .

While you can put in a huge amount of effort to cover your tracks, fact is most folks won't put in the effort, and even those who are willing, aren't aware of all of the places they are identified, tracked and tagged. So face it. Now, more than ever, your best bet is to take your time, and do your life right the first time. The Biblical saying "be sure your sins will find you out" is now something that even non-believers must believe in!

Publishing mogul Tim O'Reilly posted a commentary on 10/25/09 about the White House's move to open source Drupal for their content management system (CMS). It's an interesting article in which he makes the following statement near the bottom which reads:

"Features that would have cost millions of dollars and years of development to add will now be rolled into the scope of current contracts."

The it's intended context, that open source is significantly better and cheaper than commercial applications, the above comment, coming from someone like Tim O'Reilly surprises me. Why? Because it's false! Does Tim think that the Drupal community, or open source communities in general, are the only ones that shares code and applications? It's no secret that I am a huge ColdFusion supporter. Maybe there is an upfront cost to the ColdFusion stack, but anyone who has worked in the environment will tell you that the savings in development time, especially on an enterprise scope project such as the Whitehouse.com website, will quickly recover the up front cost, and from that point on, it's pure savings.

Some may argue that the savings, in the case of the President's website, is in the fact that others, not White House programmers, write the code. Well, let's see. The White House employed prime contractor General Dynamics Information Systems, Drupal specialists Phase 2 and Acquia, hosting provider Terremark, and CDN-supplier Akamai, in order to pull this off. That had to have taken an economic stimulus package all it's own. Oh, and Tim O'Reilly has stock in Acquia (a fact that to his credit, he properly disclose in his article).

Please understand. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Tim O'Reilly. I also know that I'm basically a nobody in the IT world. I have no bone other than with the general mindset that open source is the answer to all the world's IT woes - it just ain't true. And I have never seen a cost analysis that proves, in the enterprise, it is a long term cost savings. What you save in software licensing fees, you will quickly eat up in deployment and development fees. And the maintenance is often much more painful than with some commercial products. (Just ask any Java developer when Java goes from, say Java 4 to Java 5). Many commercial products (such as ColdFusion) have a nearly pain free and almost 100% backward compatible upgrade path. Can you say SAVINGS?

There is a time and place for any solutions - otherwise, they would not really be a solution at all. I wish the White House all the best with their Drupal deployment.

Tim O'Reilly's article: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/whitehouse-switch-drupal-opensource.html