Patrick scared a lot of people (including me) in his last post when he stated that 5etdemi.com was going away. :) If you’re were worried, then don’t be. 5 1/2 is not going anywhere. I’ll be keeping it, and the invaluable posts Patrick has made over the years, online for the foreseeable future. - Aral

Well I’ve fully made the transition to grad student and will be closing the site once the domain expires, which is in May. My new email is patrick DOT mineault AT gmail DOT com, and I’m on Facebook if you ever need me.

P.S. I can furnish FTP details and a MySQL dump if someone wants to mirror the blog archives. Email above.

A long time acquaintance, Wade Arnold, has stepped up to replace me as lead of amfphp. I have full confidence in Wade, who is very knowledgeable of the engine and has a large team of in-house developers to back him up. He has already worked on enhancements to the 1.9 version, which are going to be included in the 2.0; you will be able to know that authentication is back, in particular. I will post a new message as soon as there’s a new release, or a development blog pops up. If you want to help him out, or show your support, your best bet is to contact him on the amfphp general list.

As for myself, I am starting a M.Sc. in neuroscience in January at McGill; I will be working at the Christopher Pack lab at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Needless to say, I had an awesome time working there over the summer. One of the highlights was meeting David Hubel, Nobel Prize in Physiology 1981, who visited from Boston (Chris went to Harvard, where Hubel works). Hubel (and Wiesel, his colleague) discovered all the basics of the visual cortex of mammals; they were the first to even record from an electrode there. As an aspiring researcher, meeting Hubel was like, I don’t know, meeting Jordan, Gretzky, Zidane or Beckham for a sports fan… ie, fuggawesome. Research is where it’s at for me… I’m working with some really motivated, really smart people. The MNI is such an incredibly cool place to be, such rich history in research. Anyways, add together the time it takes to do research, plus the decent stipend I’m going to get, plus the fact that Flash is a bit of a bore compared to, say, Matlab: I don’t have either the time, the need, nor the motivation to do Flash anymore. I don’t want amfphp to die, however, and with Wade in command, I am certain this won’t happen. Long live amfphp!

Thanks to Thibault Imbert, the amfphp site is now available at amf-php.org. Please googlebomb the new site by making a link (for example, in you blog roll) to the new site with the link title “amfphp” or “amfphp - Flash remoting for PHP” so it will take the top spot on Google in the next few days. This way, new users will find the correct site on Google. I am also trying to contact the owners of amfphp.com and amfphp.net. As far as amfphp.org goes, however, Justin Watkins sent me an email and the renewal payment went through but RegisterFly didn’t do the renewal, and it is unlikely that it will do so. I believe we will have to wait for the domain to finish the grace period and buy it through an auction… sucks, I know.

Unfortunately I’ve had some serious issues trying to get amfphp.org back up and running. It appears that the domain was registered through RegisterFly.com, which is undergoing some serious legal issues, with threats of being closed down by ICANN, due to a corporate mismanagement scandal. You can read the gist of it here. Unfortunately it appears the domain is entirely in the hands of RegisterFly.com and was not resold through eNom. Now it’s impossible to call RegisterFly’s customer service, and I don’t have access to the account so that I can transfer it. I am practically 100% sure that the domain was registered by Justin Watkins, if anybody knows his whereabouts, there is still a tiny chance that we can transfer the domain to another place, but we need to find the auth code for that and that requires logging into the account to which I don’t have the password. My email is pm AT 5etdemi DOT com. If we can’t get a hold of Justin by the end of the week we’ll have to figure something else out. Unfortunately amfphp.com and amfphp.net are already registered elsewhere. In the meantime you can reach the site through amfphp.sourceforge.net.