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Google's new feature for Google Maps allows you to get a street-level picture for a particular address, and not just any picture, is a 360 degrees view.  You will notice the new button "Street View" next the  "Traffic" button in the maps, where available.

How are they doing it?  They have a team ofdrivers with multiples cameras attached to the top of their cars to get every angle.

Street View is only available for major roads in Miami, San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, and Denver.  They will be adding more cities soon.

Google Maps

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So far ColdFusion does not have a default driver to connect to a PostgreSQL Database. However you can manually create a connection using a JDBC driver.

1. Download the JDBC driver http://jdbc.postgresql.org/ You need to know what is your JDK version so that you can select the proper driver. To check your JDK version open Terminal and type:
   java --version
   In my case I have "1.4.2", therefore I downloaded JDBC 3 for PostgreSQL 8.1
2. Copy the driver (jar file) to your coldfusion location at:
   [cfRootFolder]/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war/WEB-INF/cfusion/lib
   in my case this was:
   /opt/jrun4/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war/WEB-INF/cfusion/lib
3. Restart ColdFusion:
   cd into /opt/jrun4/bin/ and type:
./jrun -restart


NOTE: for some reason when

I execute this command it my system won't complete the restart process so I had to do a Stop and Start like ./jrun -stop and then ./jrun -start

4. Now go to your ColdFusion admin add a new Data Source of type "Other"
5. Enter your JDBC URL as: jdbc:postgresql://localhost/[your database name]
6. Set Driver Class and Driver Name as: org.postgresql.Driver
7. Enter the user name and password.

   Note: You can use your "postgres" user account. I have instead created a specific account for coldfusion, you can create users through pgAdmin.

8. Submit. You should get an "ok" in the status.

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VirtuaWin is a Linux like Virtual Desktop manager for Windows.  This is one feature that I got used to and use all the time on Linux but was lacking of on Windows.  I have tried other solutions but they were always buggy so I gave up until I tried this one.  I have only been using it for a couple of days but so far is working great.  I was able to customized some shortcuts (i.e. switching from desktops, moving windows from one desktop to another, etc.)

The best part of all is that VirtuaWin is Free (GPL), so give it a try http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/

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I have upgraded my Ubuntu Edgy to the Feisty version.  I was a pretty straight forward process.  If you still have the Edgy version of Ubuntu I encourage you to go ahead and do the upgrade.  I have followed the instructions listed at this post:

http://onlyubuntu.blogspot.com/2007/03/upgrade-ubuntu-610-edgy-eft-to-ubuntu.html

They do a pretty good job explaining how to get this done either via the GUI or Terminal (command line).  Although I usually install my software through the terminal, I opted for the GUI this time because of simplicity.

I have heard people having minor problems during the upgrade but not a single error message on this side.

After the upgrade my apache server would not start.  I had remove the coldfusion connector entries in the httpd.conf file of apache.  You can find this file at /etc/apache2/ .  After this I was able to start apache so all I did was run the JRun connector tool and got my Apache working with CF again.

Connecting Apache 2.2 to Coldfusion JRun Server. 

$cd /opt/jrun/bin
$gksudo ./wsconfig

In the configuration directory field enter:

/etc/apache2

Click on Advanced… and enter the following for "Directory and file of server binary" field:

/usr/sbin/apache2

This should be enough for creating the connection.  Restart your apache server.  For this you can use the great tool Webmin, or via terminal:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

That should do it!

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This is a good article on Form validation in ColdFusion with an Object-Oriented approach.  Form validation is one of those tedious tasks that we, the web developers, have to deal with every day.  This article explains how to deal with basic data validation and business rules validation, how to keep these two separated so that we can move our data validation between applications and avoid the rewriting of this one over and over.

Check it out:

Object-Oriented Form Validation in ColdFusion — For Web developers, form validation is a basic task, and yet one that presents some interesting challenges. Even discounting security issues such as SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting (XSS), form validation is a critical step in your error handling strategy.

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