DFWCFUG – Ben Forta Presentation

The DFWCFUG group had Ben Forta speak about the new Cold Fusion 8 (Scorpio) release coming out later this year. Any chance I get to hear Ben speak, I jump at the opportunity. He is pioneer in web development and an excellent ambassador for the ColdFusion product. There are a few new features that caught my interest. Mainly with image manipulation. PHP has been way ahead of CF in this area for a long time! Nice to see they are addressing this. Hopefully we will be able to manipulate all of the image meta data with the new functionality. Especially interested in GPS coordinates embedded in the images. Not sure if that will be in there or not with the Scorpio release. The new Ajax widgets are nice, but Flex all ready has all of the same functionality. The new CFPresentation tag looks very interesting. Anxious to work with that. The biggest interest for me is in the area of PDF manipulation. The current cf pdf functionality is limited and I find myself having to use 3rd party software to create pdfs with the formatting required. It sounds like the new cf pdf functionality (DDX) will be very extensive. Can’t wait to test it out!

Garmin 205 GPS

I just got a Garmin 205 GPS and am anxious to use it on all the local mt bike trails. Currently I only have a portion of the Johnson Branch trail marked. The wrist watch GPS so far has worked flawlessly. No problems with loosing satellite connection. Need to get a helmet cam next to integrate video into the TxTracks.com site. There are many options out there. I am leaning towards a sony CCD version and a SD card video recorder. Hopefully the trails will dry up soon so I can capture some good data & footage!