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I have been out of it for the past days with all these hurricanes, and well Wilma pretty much ravaged south florida.

Anyways, I just found out that Ubuntu has release "Breezy Badger" 5.10. I have been using this distro for a long time now and it is incredible. So this will be an upgrade night.

You can download the new Ubuntu from here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/

Below are just some of the new features this incredible Linux Distribution has to offer.

On the Desktop

* GNOME 2.12.1

* OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta 2

* X.org 6.8.2 with wider hardware support

* An enhanced tool for easily installing new applications (see "Add Applications" on the Applications menu)

* A new tool which makes it easy to install support for multiple languages (Language Selector)

* Editable GNOME menus

* Applications are now linked into the Launchpad infrastructure (new entries on the Help menus for translation and support)

* Support for writing audio CDs (Serpentine)

* Graphical startup process with progress bar (USplash)

* New documentation (Ubuntu 5.10 Quick Tour and Ubuntu 5.10 FAQ Guide)

* Language packs with updates from the Rosetta translation platform, part of Launchpad.net, which makes contributing translations easy for everybody in any language.

On the Server

* Kernel support for cluster filesystems (OCFS2 and GFS)

* Plone 2.1 & Zope 2.8.1

* PHP5

* Support for automatic storage allocation into LVM volumes

* Built-in thin client functionality produced in cooperation with the LTSP project

* Simple NFS root setup with automatic hardware detection through initramfs-tools

* Support for up to 4 gigabytes of RAM by default on 32-bit architectures

Hardware Support Improvements

* Linux 2.6.12.6 with many updated drivers from third parties

* Further enhancements to laptop support (hot keys, and working suspend/resume on more models)

* HP all-in-one printer/scanner devices are supported out of the box

* Bluetooth input devices (such as keyboards and mice) are supported out of the box

* Multiple audio devices are handled more gracefully (and one can easily select the default device)

* 64-bit PowerPC kernel available

Installation

* A new OEM mode to simplify the process of preinstalling Ubuntu on computers for resale or redistribution

* Automatically makes existing hard drive partitions available to the desktop

* Simple "dual boot" configuration with automatic resizing of an existing installed OS

* The second stage of the installation now has a progress bar

"Under the hood"

* GCC 4.0.1

* glibc 2.3.5

* New early userspace infrastructure based on initramfs-tools

* More modular X.org packaging

* Python 2.4.2

As always, Ubuntu includes the very best of the 100% free/libre application software world, and each new release incorporates countless new features and bugfixes from the global development community.

I found this great Wiki article on the Ubuntu wiki that I wanted to share to all those folks that need a whitepaper on how to upgrade Ubuntu to the latest release. I have not yet implemented it, but I will surely do and let you know how it goes.

Ubuntu Wiki Upgrade Whitepaper

I have also attached the whitepaper in PDF format for your convenience.

Let me know how your upgrades go?

I have been recently using flash forms in several different locations of my new Textus Coldfusion framework which I have been developing for work. I will soon be placing entries about Textus, to give you an insight into this simple but powerful coldfusion framework.

Anyways, I have been implementing a backup system on Textus and decided to use flash forms to populate a cftree with the backups directory contents. Then from here I can open/delete files. What seemed strange was all these errors I kept receiving, that seemed totally out of place, since my code was straightforward. These were the errors:

Illegal usage of actionscript org.apache.oro.text.regex.Perl5Pattern@1e3621b.

The following actionscript commands are not allowed: "import, new, delete, createChild, loadmovie, duplicateMovieClip, AttachMovie, registerclass, createTextField, __proto__, uiobjectdescriptor, createclassobject, createemptyobject, createchildatdepth, createchildren, createclasschildatdepth, createobject, createchild, webservice, httpservice, remoteobject".

Ubuntu has done it again!!

It has won the UK Linux & Open Source Best Distribution award.

Best Linux/Open Source Distribution

Winner - Ubuntu - Canonical

Finalists:

Debian - Debian

Fedora - RedHat

I have been using Ubuntu for about a year now and it has been an incredible ride. It is the first distribution that I have real admiration for, well FEDORA too. But this distribution really has their stuff together. Give it a try, its free!!

Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support.

Ubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the "enterprise edition", we make our very best work available to everyone on the same Free terms.

Ubuntu comes with full commercial support from hundreds of companies around the world. Ubuntu is released regularly and predictably; a new release is made every six months. Each release is supported with free security updates and fixes for at least 18 months.

Ubuntu includes the very best in translations and accessibility infrastructure (the Rosetta system) that the Free Software community has to offer, to make Ubuntu usable by as many people as possible. We collaborate as widely as possible on bug fixing and code sharing.

Ubuntu is entirely committed to the principles of free software development; we encourage people to use free and open source software, improve it and pass it on.

I just recently started developing apps with XML config files. However, I wanted to start using XSD schema's to validate the XML.

Where to start?? well, google of course. I found one of the best sites for simple "How To's" in all types of tutorials.

The site is www.w3schools.com and it has several tutorials that are easy to follow and comprehensive. Here is the link to the XSD How To

http://www.w3schools.com/schema/schema_howto.asp

Today was the much expected release of MySQL 5.0 Release candidate. I had previously installed the beta on my Ubuntu "hoary" linux distro and it has been running incredibly smooth. However, I had never done a MySQL upgrade and turned to Google for some help.

I could not find a single article on it, actually I looked for 5 minutes and grew desperate. So I decided to tinker around. My beta install is on /opt/mysql_5.0_beta with a symbolic link on /usr/local/mysql. I had installed the database according to the installation directions.

I unpacked the release candidate to /opt/mysql-standard-5.0.13 and copied over all my data folder from my beta install. I then had to do a:

I finally have made my complete move for CF development to eclipse. Yesterday, while I was installing a fresh copy of eclipse, I realized the new updated download of ftp and web-dav support.

Eclipse's support for FTP has been moderate of some sorts, but it seems that now they got it.

I finished my installation of CFEclipse, connected to my dev server and started working.

This is a great development platform for true developers.

Eclipse

CFEclipse

Every wonder a nice, quick and easy way of getting your Operating System's file separator character??

Well, I have several times. Thanks to our collaborator Ariel Gonzalez, and his java expertise. We take a look at the java.lang.System class and its getProperty() Method.

There are several useful properties that you can get from this class, some of them are listed below:

Well, yet another storm is approaching South Florida and panic mode has just started. I am at the office doing complete database and application backups and getting ready to go home and panic.

I truly hope this time, the electricity does not go out and no major damages occur. And they just finished fixing my roof last week.

Rita is coming...

This snippet utilizes the power of java to create an execution sleep timer. There are various applications for this snippet, but the purpose of the snippet is to provide you with a mechanism of making the coldfusion thread sleep for a period of time. Please be careful when setting the timer variable since it might just lock the execution thread.

I have also included a copy-paste snippet of my actual CFC function.

The snippet is actually very simple: