Hot on the heels of recent SendTracker improvements to how you import and test your campaigns, we just launched another handy new feature in the Create/Send process. You can now update your campaign HTML and CSS directly in the browser, and its already proving to be a huge time saver.

The old process of having to go back to your HTML editor, save the changes, upload the file and then test again has been dramatically improved.

With a single click you can bring up the raw source of your email campaign. We pull all your HTML and CSS into a single, clean document even if your original campaign was spread across multiple files when you imported it. We've also added colour coding to your source so it's easy to scan through the document and find the section you'd like to tweak. Even if you've opted for us to move your CSS inline, we'll still show you the original expanded version so it's easy to update. We'll move everything back inline for you once you've made your changes.

When you combine this new feature with the recent update allowing you to send a quick email preview after import, you have a very simple workflow for making quick updates and previewing them in an email client. Making multiple tweaks to your campaign has never been so easy.

Of course, you can still re-import the complete campaign if you'd like. But, if you want to make quick changes and see the results instantly, this feature is a huge time saver. Because of the changes we needed to make to the importing process, this feature isn't available for any of your older drafts, but will appear for any campaigns you import from now on. We hope you like it.

I just had to share this as it is totally awesome. So many times I could have used this.

The now-familiar release cycle of Adobe's Creative Suite is signalled by two things: the hype and expectation of  those who rely on Adobe's applications and prices that, especially for UK users, seem to soar further into the stratosphere with every new version.

A single new feature, though, has awed the PC Pro office and suddenly made CS5 seem like fantastic value for money. It's been dubbed the Content-Aware Fill, and has been shown off in a YouTube video narrated by Bryan O'Neil-Hughes, a product manager on the Photoshop team.

The dull, businesslike name hides a potentially revolutionary feature: if you're not happy with an item in your picture, select it, delete it, and Photoshop will analyse the surrounding area and plug the gap as if it never existed.

It seems easy to use and incredibly proficient: O'Neil-Hughes used it to remove lens flare, turn patchy and litter-strewn grass into a perfectly manicured lawn. He quickly removed entire trees and let Photoshop stitch together the grass and sky that would take their place. It's a testament to the new tool's proficiency that we couldn't tell that the image had been modified.

He didn't stop there: a simple click removed a dusty track and replaced it with desert, and a panoramic image's clumsy borders were filled out within seconds. Best of all, Photoshop handled these modifications without fuss and quickly delivered picture-perfect results.

Without this feature, making these edits could take hours or, in more complicated cases, even days. The Content-Aware Fill, though, took just seconds and has got us even more excited about the impending release of CS5. We'll have a full review available when the software is released but, for now, this demo should be more than enough to whet your appetite.

I upgraded a CF8 server to CF9 the other day and thought everything had gone fine, but today I received an email from a user saying his Microsoft Access DSN was no longer working.

The error was:

[Macromedia][SequeLink JDBC Driver]TCP/IP error, connection refused

First course of action was to google the error as usual, which turned up nothing useful, so then started my own investigations using a bit of common sense.

I checked the SequeLink ODBC services and they were running, so I tried to restart and they would not.

It was at this point that I noticed all the CF8 services were still running, which was odd, because while CF9 leaves CF8 intact it should disable and stop all the services. This has been the case since CF7 in fact that the previous version is left intact.

Thinking back on my install I remembered CF informing me that it had detected CF8 was installed and had changed a couple of ports for some reason, I thought nothing of it at the time as I presumed it would not cause a problem, but in hindsight I should have known better as whenever CF has ever used alternative ports for anything in the past it has always caused issues.

I also did not stop all the CF8 services prior to installing CF9, as the installer always does this for you anyway, but I guess in this case it did not and thus detected a conflict. So a lesson learned there, always stop all services prior to an upgrade.

So anyway I was sure the problem was with the ODBC service, so the next step was to hunt for the tcp settings, this actually proved to be quite simple in the end.

I first checked the windows service and see where the exe file is located, which pointed me to
D:\ColdFusion9\db\slserver54\bin\swagent.exe "ColdFusion 9 ODBC Agent"
Ah now my memory was starting to clear, this is where the SeqeuLink drivers are.

1. Look for config files that may contain tcp port settings.
   This led me to the following file
   D:\ColdFusion9\db\slserver54\cfg\swandm.ini
2. Now look for TCP port references, which led me the following lines in this file
   ServiceConnectInfo=tcp://LOCALHOST.19999
   ServiceConnectInfo=tcp://LOCALHOST.20000
   
3. I then compared this to the CF8 settings, which showed
   ServiceConnectInfo=tcp://LOCALHOST.19997
   ServiceConnectInfo=tcp://LOCALHOST.19998
   
4. So clearly CF had indeed changed the ports due to a conflict. So I simply set the ports back to 19997 and 19998 in that order, stopped and disabled all the CF8 services, and started the CF9 ODBC services and voila everything was fixed.

So what initially seemed like it was going to be PITA problem actually only me less and 1 hour to resolve, and most of that was spent googling for a solution and finding nothing. Once I actually started my own investigation it actually took less than 30 minutes to diagnose and resolve, sods law.

If you are having some other type of SequeLink ODBC service errors that are not fixed by my solution then the following TechNote may also help you out.
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/188/tn_18800.html

I had recently installed a new BIGGER hard drive in my laptop and used Acronis True Image Home 2010 to copy my old disk to my disk, which works very well by the way and gives you the option to resize the original partition to the new disk size, or keep the original size. Upgrading to bigger disks has always been a PITA, so this is a very easy and cheap solution to that problem.

The other issue was of course connecting up 2 disks to my notebook in order to copy them, for this I used Easy IDE, which allows you to connect any IDE disks to your USB port. the easy IDE worked great for copying my 2.5" IDE notebook drive, however I have since tried to use it to connect up old 3.5" IDE disks and it has not done a very good job of recognising them, maybe they are too old.

I opted to keep the original size and then create a new partition in the free space so that I could install and dual boot windows 7 along side windows XP. meaning I could switch back to XP if I had any compatibility issues.

Well I have been running windows 7 for several weeks now with no issues (this is my 3rd windows 7 upgrade with no issues btw), all my software worked fine, and I don't even need to run a virtual machine any longer as Windows 7 includes a fully featured IIS 7 allowing multiple sites (unlike IIS 6 which allowed 1 site only). This has made a world of difference as my laptop really did slow down considerably when my vmware virtual machine was running. Now I have no slowdown at all, and much less memory/cpu consumption and in general I find that windows 7 runs faster than XP did. I have IIS, Coldfusion, MSSQL services all set to manual and only enable then when I need to use them, this is done via a batch file on my desktop.

So it came time to nuke my XP partition and give the space to windows 7, this is where everything went rather tits up. I used a free tool called Gparted to do my partition deleting and  resizing.

As a result after restarted windows could not boot due to a missing bootmanager, this was no doubt due to the that it was on the deleted partition.

So I then booted off my windows 7 CD, went into System Recovery and used the Startup Repair option to fix this, which re-created the missing bootmanager.

This then allowed windows 7 to boot, however I was greeted with nothing more than an empty blue desktop with a notice in the bottom right corner telling me that my copy of windows 7 was not genuine. No taskbar, no start menu, no desktop icons, nothing.

Like most people I started to curse at this point foreseeing a re-install, but I wasn't giving up without a fight.

The first thing I tried was to get explorer up by pressing  "windows key + R", typing "explorer" and hitting enter. This worked and I got my desktop back, albeit with broken icons. But alas I couldn't run anything, not even open my computer, getting errors about paths not existing.

So I checked task manager "shift+ctrl+esc", chose file-> new task, from where you can actually choose browse and get to my computer. It was here that I noticed my C drive had become a D drive, which was obviously the cause of my problems, as windows clearly could not load properly as it was looking for a C drive.

The solution to this is actually quite simply, a quick registry edit to remove the existing mounted drives will then cause windows to re mount them correctly.

To do this you need to boot windows into safe mode (hit F8 before windows boots to get the boot menu and choose safe mode). From the RUN prompt type "regedit", then check the box "run this command in privileged mode".

Now navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices", and delete the KEYS for the 2 disks which are the wrong way round (C & D in my case).

Now reboot windows normally and hopefully everything will be back to normal and you will also have a genuine copy of windows again.

The problem was most likely caused by deleting partitions outside of windows, what I probably should have done is delete the old partition from within windows first which would have let windows know about it so it would have then re-assigned the drive letters, and then just done the resizing via Gparted.

Hopefully this will help anyone else who may face thei problem and save you from a total re-install.

Technote here : http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/825/cpsid_82536.html

Bizzarely I cannot find any reference to this hotfix or tech note anywhere on the Adobe site, it is not on the below ColdFusion hotfixes or updates pages at the time of writing this, and is not in any of the ColdFusion RSS feeds. So not sure how people are supposed to find out about this. Very poor job Adobe, tut tut.

http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads_updates.html
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402604.html