If you're not aware, the FTC is creating a National "Do Not Call" registry. Here's the quote from their website:
Calendar for Implementation of the National "Do Not Call" Registry
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is creating a national "do not call" registry. Soon, the following will occur:
Telephone registration for the National "Do Not Call" Registry will be available to consumers coast-to-coast during July 2003. Online registration will be available nationwide on or around July 1. Telephone registration will open for consumers in states west of the Mississippi River—including Minnesota and Louisiana—on the same date. Telephone registration will be available one week later to the entire country.
In September, telemarketers and other sellers will have access to the registry. They will be required to scrub their call lists against the national "do not call" registry at least once every 90 days.
In October, the FTC and the States will start to enforce the national "do not call" registry provisions of the Amended Telemarketing Sales Rule. Violators are subject to a fine of up to $11,000 per violation. At this point, consumers on the registry should start to get fewer telemarketing calls.
The FTC's implementation schedule for the national "do not call" registry will be updated at www.ftc.gov/donotcall.
I can't wait until I can pick up my phone without having to monitor calls. Unfortunately, I have a feeling Telemarketers are going to find away around this problem. I haven't read the bill, but if it doesn't state so, it should state that before a Telemarketer can operate off a new list, that the list must be purged. I can just see some company opening up a new "business" every 89 days to get around this law if the bill doesn't explicitly state that new lists have to be purged before calling. Either that, or they simply will risk the fine—assuming nobody's going to bother taking them to court (after all not many people have the extra time or money to do this.)
Well, I updated my Photo Album today. I got the picture developed that I took at Salt Fork and converted them to jpegs. I also posted the pictures from my trip to Denver, CO and I posted another set of miscellaneous pictures—which contain pictures of Maddie with her "Buster Collar" on as well as some of my house.
I also moved my Photo Album off of www.pengoworks.com and moved it to blog.pengoworks.com. It made more sense to me to move my "personal items" from the consulting site to my personal site. I'm creating redirects from www.pengoworks.com/photoalbum/ to blog.pengoworks.com/photoalbum so that your bookmarks will work temporarily. If you have my Photo Album page bookmarked, please update your bookmarks.
Well I always forget this, so I figure I'd blog this so I don't spend 30 minutes messing around with the server trying to figure out what I need to get a servlet to execute on a virtual server in IIS5.
In order to get a servlet to run, you need to define your servet in the web.xml (which is in the directory CFusionMX\wwwroot\WEB-INF\.) A typical servlet defintion will look like this:
Well, I bought a Gameboy Advance SP this weekend. I was playing around with one at the store the other day and was really impressed. The GBA now had some really good classic arcade games game packs that where pretty cheap, so I bought the Konami Collector's Series, Namco Museum and I also picked up Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3.
I haven't played around with it enough to give a full review, but I had no problems viewing the backlit TFT screen outside in the sun yesterday while at the campgrounds. There's nothing like playing Rush'n'Attack while sitting in a lawn chair lounging around at the lake on a Sunday. :) I'd like to pick up one of those "eReaders"—there's a ton more classic arcade games for the eReader which are all under $5.
Well I heard some more of the new Spock's Beard album this weekend. I definitely will be placing my order for the new album. The stuff I heard sounded really good. I'm going to miss Neil Morse, but the new stuff did sound good. I'll post more once I get to hear the full album all the way through a few times.
Well, I'm tired as crap this morning. Jenn & I went to Salt Fork State Park yesterday to spend the day at the lake with her parents—and of course we took Maddie with us. We left around 9am and got back just before 10pm.
I was pretty excited about getting Maddie to some water again. The first time she was in water (about 10 weeks ago,) she didn't really care much for it. I think it freaked her out when she couldn't touch the ground anymore. While she did splash around a bit that day, she was very tentative. About two weeks after that, we took her back to Antrim park and she played around in the water with a lot more enthusiasm, but she was still didn't swim—as a matter of fact she'd get out of the water anytime she started getting too deep. Anyway, this had me concerned that I'd have to spend a lot of time with her to coax her into the swimming.
Anyway, we got to the camp ground area around a 11:30—we had a minor detour in Cambridge trying to find a Walmart (or some store we could get some dog treats and a disposable camera.) We sat around for a bit and had some BLTs—my version of a BLT consists of bacon, lettuce and turkey. :) We chatted for a bit and then loaded the canoe up and headed down to the lake around 1pm.
I recently blogged an entry about Microsoft phasing out the standalone version of Internet Explorer. Well, it now appears now that Microsoft is rapidly trying to recant that statement. That doesn't surprise me at all and I even alluded to the fact that they'd probably backpedal away from this announcement in my blog.
"We don't know what's happening," said the [Microsoft] representative. "There are a lot of different options, and it's too early to talk about any of them...Nothing has been decided yet."
Anyway, I'm sure this isn't the last we'll hear about the issue.
Disney/Pixar released a new teaser for a their upcoming film "The Incredibles." I don't know much about the movie, but the trailer looks great and I can't wait for this film to hit theaters next year!
Kung Fu and Vampires—need I say more? Go view the trailer for the new Donnie Yen (director of Blade II) Hong Kong action The Twins Effect.
Mark Hyman, of "The Point" recently posted an article about Peter Jennings personally changing scripts before going on air to provide his own political slant to the stories—even making stories completely unrecognizable.
This is my major concern about the FCC allowing one company to control all the media outlets in an area. I think this could be a really big problem in small markets—where you're much more likely to run into the situation of one company controlling all the news. I don't like the fact that it's possible for an area to receive news that's all slanted one way.
We need diversity in reporting to get the full picture. I believe you need to read multiple views on an event in order to properly evaluate your own stance on it. I don't really mind one company owning all of one type of media outlet (i.e. radio, newspapers, or tv,) but I just see a real potential to misled the public if one company decides to abuse their power by presenting only a single point-of-view of events to the public.
Back in December of 2002, Mark Kruger posted a solution to using SSL over CFHTTP in CFMX when the remote server isn't using a trusted certificate. Since a private certificate is just as secure as a trusted certificate (in terms of encryption,) many corporation may end up using private certificates for some web services. So, if you're having recieving errors trying to connect to a remote server over SSL in CFMX, make sure to read Mark's blog entry.
I can't wait to climb like Spidey! Also, when are they going to come out w/X-Ray glasses that actually work? I sure wish I would have bought one of those Sony HandyCams when I had the chance. :)
Macromedia has publically announced latest release of ColdFusion MX, code-named "Red Sky". Make sure to check out the presentation on their take on what's new. This will be a free update for CFMX users. Here's a quick overview:
Performance/Stability:
Fixes:
Microsoft just made an interesting announcement in regards to Internet Explorer. Apparently, Microsoft has decided to drop the standalone version of Internet Explorer.
I found this quote quite ludicrous:
While IE does conform to most of the W3C's specs, there are still a number of areas where it needs improvement and updating—which don't have anything to do w/the underlying OS."Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," Countryman said. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."
I've got to admit, IE has been my preferred browser over the past 5-6 years or so—basically since IE3 was released. Over the past few years I've felt IE has the best browser on the market, but Gecko's made very good ground over the past year or so. I think the latest Gecko-based browser is a great product and with this announcement, I'm sure I'll find myself using it more and more. I'll probably stick with using Mozilla over NS, just because I find it's a little less bloated. Anyway, if MS sticks to this decision, I think it's probably the death of IE.
My good friend Robi blogged a little story about qForms (my open source JavaScript API) and an experience he had while working on a project a while back. He actually first told me this story a while back—and at the time it really surprised me. I really need to figure out a marketing idea for making some money off the code. I see a little bit of money from donations, but if I could get just a $1 a form (that qForms is implemented on,) that would turn out to be a lot of money—not to mention well worth the $1. Anyway, just thought Robi's story was interesting.