Oops!  That's the word from Google today after a "human error" led to malicous warnings from all results returned from a search.  They initially placed the blame on non profit site StopBadware.org, but since have admitted the error was in fact the fault of Google.  Google has proven that everyone does indeed make mistakes!

Read the full details at cnet.com.

I had an urgent request the other day to find all the pages on a site that contained a certain string of text.  The entire website is dynamic, so all the content lives in the database.  I came across an article from MSSQLTIPS.com that showed a nice little stored procedure to search for a string of text in a given table.  It worked like a charm and immediately showed me all my pages that contained the text I was looking for.  You can view the full article here from MSSQLTIPS.com.

A few years ago I was tasked with creating some dynamic PDF files that contained  a couple of barcodes in them.  I started looking around for components or libraries that I could use through ColdFusion to feed the images into CFDOCUMENT.  I stumbled across an open source Java library named Barbecue (clever name!).  Since ColdFusion can call Java libraries with no problem, I gave it a shot. 

In short, this library rocks!  I have been using this library for three years now on a very high traffic site.  On certain days it has created hundreds of thousands of barcode images and has never choked.  If you are needing to generate barcodes I would highly recommend this library.  Below I have provided a little code snippet on how you call this library via ColdFusion.

 ColdFusion | 
 copy code |
?
 
01
<cfscript>
02
         myBarcodeobj = CreateObject("Java", "net.sourceforge.barbecue.Barcode");
03
         myBarcodeFactory = CreateObject("Java", "net.sourceforge.barbecue.BarcodeFactory");
04
         myBarcodeImageHandler = CreateObject("Java", "net.sourceforge.barbecue.BarcodeImageHandler");
05
         myBarcodeobj=myBarcodeFactory.createCode128C(variables.barcodeNumber);
06
         myBarcodeobj.setResolution(100);
07
         myBarcodeobj.setBarWidth(1);
08
         myBarcodeobj.setBarHeight(30);
09
         myBarcodeobj.setDrawingText(false);
10
         Image = myBarcodeImageHandler.getImage(myBarcodeobj);
11
         ImageIO = CreateObject("Java", "javax.imageio.ImageIO");
12
         OutputStream = CreateObject("Java", "java.io.FileOutputStream");
13
         OutputStream.init(variables.imagePath);
14
         ImageIO.write(Image, "jpg", OutputStream);
15
         Image.flush();
16
         OutputStream.close();
17
    </cfscript>

The image below is a shot of the cockpit of the space shuttle. Please, make sure you press the right button! Click the image below for the full size picture.

Late last week I spent a day trying to install ColdFusion 8 Enterprise on a new 64 bit Windows Server 2008 server.  It did not go well at first.  The install itself succeeded, but nothing was working.  When trying to launch the administrator to complete the installation, IIS threw one of the most bizarre error messages I have seen.  After doing a little research the error was trying to tell me that it was having a problem using the ISAPI filter for ColdFusion.  This was due to the fact it was made for IIS 6.  If you have ever noticed, the .dll that parses the ColdFusion requests is named jrun_iis6.dll.

I then came across a blog entry from Jason Holden describing exactly what needed to be done to get everything working.  I uninstalled ColdFusion, and followed the steps from the blog entry.  I then reinstalled ColdFusion and everything was working normally.  In short, IIS 7 must be set up to handle filters made for IIS 6. The only question I have is why hasn't Adobe addressed this in the installation notes?  It sure would have saved me some time!  And kudos to Jason for the tips.

Nathan Mische has announced an update to the ColdFire debugger that includes debugging for the built in cfajax features.  Sounds very cool.  You can download it from RIAForge.

Below is a link to a NY Times piece on how people were using Facebook to voice their sides in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.  Amazing how powerful the Internet is today.

Revolution, Facebook Style via the New York Times

New president Barack Obama has won his fight to continue to use his precious Blackberry device.  Security officials initially ruled he could not use it while in office, but with some handy work from the NSA, they have super charged the security of the device.

Read more from ABC News.