Recently I've been dealing quite a bit with ColdFusion from an infrastructure point of view -- clustering, monitoring, system tuning etc. One particular thing I (and I know of at least some others) have found missing was an easy to use and realistic way of figuring out how much memory a particular ColdFusion variable really uses.

Social networks of various kinds have been one of the great Internet success stories of the last few years. Facebook, probably the premier example, boasts of having more than 350 million members worldwide. Even a broken-down old crock like me has a Facebook page, and it has been fun to reconnect with some old friends I haven't seen in many years.

The Honda CR-Z has not even landed in showrooms, and already we are hearing rumors about a new, bigger hybrid sports coupe in Japan. At a recent chance meeting, a Honda insider revealed that company is busy working on a next generation hybrid sports coupe that will dwarf the all-new CR-Z in performance.

Pledge Music, a Direct to Fan music company, has signed a deal with UK punk group Underground Heroes to "offer fans the chance to be part of the making and release of their brand new album, alongside a wide range of exciting premium incentives which include unprecedented access to the band & exclusive merchandise."

As you're writing your content or joining in conversations via social media, are you aware of who might be reading, observing and taking notice? Many of the corporate blogs and personas I see in social media are transparent, but perhaps a little too forward. It's important to keep in mind that the primary audience isn't your entire audience online.

I spent the last couple of days attending a "results-based writing" course hosted by my university. The main aim was to learn some things about writing concisely for scientific papers and finding a good structure for my thesis. However, the lessons are applicable to all many kinds of writing.

Social Media tools suck. On the one hand, it's kind of nice that interoperation is possible at all, but on the other it's a silly chain with many unnecessary points of fail.

I found out about Freebase Gridworks through a post by Jon Udell. In the Freebase blog post, they quote the announcement from the mailing list. The important bits: "We at Metaweb strongly believe that Freebase can be helpful not only as a giant repository of heavily curated and interconnected data but also as a way to help people cleanup and integrate their own datasets by aligning their data with a shared substrate."

I recently came across a website, DNA 11, whose catchphrase is There is Only One Original. It sounds absurd but this is how it works. DNA 11 sends you a mouth swab that you use to collect epithelial cells from the inside of your cheek. You then mail these back to the company and they conduct a gel electrophoresis run of your genes. The results of this (the black and white bands often seen on CSI and the like) are then photographed professionally and digitally coloured.

Today this blog explores three topics in the field of recycling, disposal and robotics design. I have started with the most transparent first, then explored the environmental issues required when compacting rubbish in business and finally developed the topic of paper.

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