Since I came back blogging, I've been noticing an enormous increase on my spam logs. And they generally focus on the comment form.

I was trying to analyse what was really going on, and found that the spammers are now much smarter then some months ago, when a simple captcha would stop them.

I don't know about all the versions, but the blogCFC I'm actually using is 5.51 (yeah, I've been extremely lazy busy on the last months to upgrade), and the captcha normally generates 2-3 characters, hence the number of spammers.

I then thought of making some changes to it, so it'd generate a bigger number of characters. On a second thought, I realized that it would be just a matter of time, for the bloody spammers to figure that out.

Looking for a possible solution, I found this very elegant plug-in developed by Jax.

It basically uses a service called "Project Honeypot".

A short description from their website:

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

Jax then had the excellent idea of not reinventing the wheel, but use the service, and create a nice plug-in to be used with BlogCFC.

It's known to work with version 5.9.001 upwards, but as I was still too lazy busy to upgrade, I decided to give it a shot, and it worked first time.

For the number of comments on his original post, I guess not many people know about this plug-in, so if like me, you're having problems with spam on your blog, try this plug-in and see what happens. The logging table seems very happy and productive right now.

Update:

The SpamStop's pod on the bottom right doesn't seem to be updating as it should, but that's fine, at least still have no spam comments

I've been following closely all the comments and blog posts from the guys at CFUnited 08.

I've managed to compile a list with all the new functionalities announced yesterday 18/06/08 for the ColdFusion 9 (codename Centaur).

This is still work in progress, and I'm still scavenging into all the blogs and twitter posts to amend my list, but here are the key points I've go so far.

ColdFusion 9 will:

• have hibernate running native;
• have implicit get/set methods in CFC's;
• have new LOCAL scope in functions;
• give you the possibility to create CFC's in cfscript (more on that later);
• have a 100% free enterprise edition for students and educators;

So far, I've been really impressed by all the points here, as some of them are really ticking items on my complaint's list.

It seems that Adobe is still interested in ColdFusion (contrary to what some people think), and are really investing on it (the free editions for students tells it by itself)

One of my main complaints about ColdFusion was that it wouldn't let you use OO properly (I've mentioned this hundreds of times), and now, it seems to be being addressed in a very gentle way.

Well keep an eye here to read more about the new functionalities for CF9

Well, I know it's been a real long time since my last post here (dating over a year...).

In fact I've been just involved in lots of other projects lazy and didn't really have time to update.

As some of you may know, I've been working for the EU Commission for over a year now, and for some reason, the firewall blocked my blog (note that I still didn't post pics from naked chicks or stuff), and I simply let it be. Till yesterday when I found out that my blog has been massively attacked by bloody spammers, and was fully packed with nasty URL's. Maybe this is the reason why it was blocked by the firewall in first instance.

I did a good clean-up on it, and now it should be OK.

There's some stuff I want to post here later, so stay tuned for some exciting stuff about the new ColdFusion version (codename Centaur)

As usual Raymond Camden is always trying to make our lives easier with his free tools.

Now it's time for a ColdFusion version of Firebug. For those who don't know, Firebug is a very handy FireFox extension for debugging Ajax and DOM. And this one will be used for ColdFusion.

Check it out

Thanks Ray!!!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention Adam Podolnick on the original post. He worked on the Firefox side. Thanks Adam

Looks like some of the major bugs on version 1.3 have been fixed.

Check it out.

I might be a bit late here, but I found this really interesting for the CF community. It's the Smith Project

From the website:

Smith is a freeware, cross-platform ColdFusion engine, written entirely in Java. Running on the top of Java Runtime Environment and Java Servlet Container, it can be virtually deployed on any operating system and work with any web server. Smith represents lightweight, yet reliable alternative to the existing ColdFusion servers

Here are lists for:
The tags
The Functions

Anybody actually using this server? If so, can you post your review here?

So it seems that Pablo Varando is inovating once more. Now it's time to provide free ColdFusion hosting.

The website is still under construction, but if you have a look at the home, you can see some very interesting features that will e provided really for free.

The free websites will have some kind of adds, but it's still worth in case you don't use your website for commercial purposes. Just a brief description of features enabled for FREE in this service:

• 1GB Hard Disk Space
• 5GB Bandwidth (Monthly data)
• 1 MS SQL Database
• ColdFusion MX 7.1 (Enterprise License)
• Unlimited Email Accounts

Looks very good to me! What about you?

Following the post started by Tim, here's my profile:

[More]

In case you haven't heard about this, Adobe is "recruiting" Beta Testers for ColdFusion 8 Beta Release.

If you're still not part of the beta program, this is your chance.

Yes, I wanna be a ColsFusion 8 beta tester!

So, we just upgraded one of our servers to version 7.0.2. Everything was working fine, except for some stored procedures being called by tag.

What was wrong?

Basically, the versions before 7.0.2 didn't bother if the contents of the attribute dbvarname were being sent using an "@" before or not.

It means the something like:

Will become:

Apparently nothing changes, unless you have a look at the attribute dbvarname, and you'll see that an "@" was added before the variable name.

The way to fix it?

Very easy, just use your favorite IDE and replace using regular expression.

Search for: dbvarname="([^@])

Replace for: dbvarname="@\1

And it's done! The regExp says for itself as it's looking for something starting with the string dbvarname and that doesn't contain an "@" at the beginning. Then it replaces the result for the string dbvarname="@ and the variable name.

Hope it helps someone.

Early today I was looking for some Christmas presents and found a very nice Binary Watch.

I was wondering who uses this kind of stuff, but I'm sure somebody uses. Imagine yourself in a club when that hot chick comes to you asking what time is it. Would you show that nerd piece on your wrist?

On the other hand a ColdFusion Clock would be very nice. So when the hot chick comes to you with that question, you could use your blackberry to say the time.

Nahh... The time is already on your blackberry, but... Well, it was a nice exercise at least.

And then some crappy HTML to display the clock

And here's the example.

Hope you like it!