nil desperandum

Originally the only Antivirus software I would ever recommend was Norton AntiVirus, because it was the best that there was. Mind you there weren't really that many competitive products out there at the time. Now we've got anti-worm, anti-spyware, firewalls and anti-virus software all built in to one "security center". I really really really don't like Norton Security. It gets into all of your network and computer settings, interfering all over the place. The "user friendly" controls are not user friendly if you aren't a computer novice! You try to do anything with the Norton firewall out of the ordinary, its nearly guaranteed to fail. Once its installed on your system there is no way to remove it. Oh yes! It has an uninstaller, but it does not remove everything. It leaves bits of itself embedded in your OS, causing problems with any new firewall software you might chose to use or just with normal networking setting. Thats not the worst of it though!! I've just updated Norton on my in-laws PC (because I wasn't there to stop them buying it again). You know what it asked me to do before it would install???!!!???!! It told me that it was incompatible with Microsoft Anti-Spyware and Spybot S&D and they must be uninstalled!!! What???!! Incompatible with probably the best Anti-spyware software available!!! What a load of tosh!! By the way, I am actually talking about the Microsoft Anti-spyware, when I say probably the best. Ole Bill made a good purchase buying Giant. :) So anyway, not best impressed with Norton, even less than I already was! Don't buy it!! Get yourself PCCillin instead!

Next Monday (20th March), Ben Forta will be in London giving a talk for the UK ColdFusion User Group on Flex 2 for ColdFusion Developers, including the Flex Builder 2 and the new ColdFusion and Flex integration. You need to register for this event on the UKCFUG website.

When I was at Concept Personnel last week, Gillian, the young lady I met up with to talk about my CV and what kinds of job I would like to apply for, mentioned Matt Cutts when we were talking about SEO stuff. The name was familliar but I've never been and read his blog. If you don't know who Matt Cutts is, he's an employee of Google who blogs about all sorts of stuff including SEO and Google products. I found an interesting little blog which made me realise that you can use keyboard shortcuts in GMail Personally, I've got a mouse grafted to the palm of my hand, but its nice to know that if I wanted to I could access, reply and send google mail using keyboard short cuts. This is a neat trick with event listening with AJAX.

On Wednesday 8th March the BSI published PAS 78 (Publically Available Specification No. 78) which is a guide to web accessibility for web designers. The PAS 78 is available for as a PDF from here for £30 ex VAT and P+P, so not exactly publically available or particularly accessible!! Nice going guys!

For quite some time now I've been using MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/) as my database of choice for building web applications on top of. Why? Well the server software and the GUIs are free. Its a million times better than using MS Access. Its stable (for the most part) and generally accepted in the web development community as a good solution. Until recently though I've been having problems using the latest MySQL J Connector with CFMX. I would always get a "Connection Failed" error. This has meant that I've been stuck with the 3.1.10 J Connector, which while they work are less than ideal. Well recently I found out how to get the latest J Connector (3.1.12 at time of 'print') to allow connections! If you try connecting using the latest connector with a JRun install of CF, then you get a completely different error regarding a Log4 error. A friend of mine Tim Blair had had this problem and found solution to this, so I thought I'd give his solution a try on my bog-standard Professional Server installation of CFMX 7. It turns out that there isn't actually a connection problem at all! The actual problem is some kind of clash between CFMX/Jrun and the logger in the newer connector. Its the same problem that Tim was encountering, just not giving sufficient or correct information in the error! So whats the solution you ask? Simple, the solution is to add "logger=com.mysql.jdbc.log.StandardLogger" to the end of the connection string. This tells the J Connector to use the standard logger rather than the Log4 log class. For example : jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mydatabase?logger=com.mysql.jdbc.log.StandardLogger Other useful additions to the connection string are useUnicode=true and characterEncoding=UTF8 for internationalisation, giving you : jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mydatabase?logger=com.mysql.jdbc.log.StandardLogger&useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF8 One thing to note : Don't use the connection string box in the datasource form as this doesn't work for "other" type datasources.