So I'm working on this project right now that requires me to connect to an old JD Edwards system running on a DB2/AS400 platform. For the past two days I've been ripping my hair out trying to figure out why certain tables/columns returned from the JDBC driver (called JT400) are in Binary format. Come to find out that a lot of older AS400 systems use a data format called EBCDIC, which is basically a alternate to ASCII that's built for easy compatibility with punchcards. Yes, you read that right - PUNCHCARDS.

Basically, everything I expected to be a varChar was coming back from the AS400 JDBC Driver as a Binary/ByteArray object in CFMX. I looked high and low for an explanation and finally found the JDBC configuration options for the JT400 Driver. Looks like there is a connect string option that tells the JDBC driver to convert the binary types into varChar!

Once I found this information, all I had to do was add "translate binary=true;" to the end of the JDBC URL and all was good! A couple of notes here though... 1) Yes, there is a space in there, and yes, you should leave it in there. 2) Case matters - lowercase the whole thing or it's not going to work.

For some unknown reason, I held onto the conference packet from the first ColdFusion conference ever, organized by Robi Sen and Mark Broner, held in 1998 at Colorado State University in Fort Collins Colorado. I've scanned some of the contents of the packet and put them online. Come check em out for some nostalgia.

Notable content includes:

• Session schedules and descriptions
• Proposed specs for Fusebox 1.5 (?!?!?!)
• CFDJ Vol 1 / Issue 1 (promo cardsheet)

Note that you can click "show all sizes" at the top (you may have to be logged into Flicker to see it) if you want to see the full size images.