Style and Choose Icons on your browser

Today I ran into this site that is currently in beta (http://iconbench.com/). It is pretty cool, it lets you style an icon as you'd like and then you can select from several sets they have available. Currently they have 702 icons to choose from. It lets you create a file with the icons you choose and you can select to include the css sprite styles. Currently it is free, I say check it out.

ColdFusion 10 Update 4 now available

The latest update to ColdFusion 10 is now available thru the administrator portal. This is a cumulative update, it includes all updates previously released.

Find out more at the following link:

http://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion-10-update-4.html

ColdFusion 10 Update 3

A day late but just noticed there is a new update for ColdFusion 10. Please note in order to run this update you are required to have run the previous Mandatory Update for ColdFUsion 10. You can find out more at http://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion-10-update-3.html

ColdFusion 10 Mandatory Update

There is a new mandatory update available for ColdFusion 10. This update is required for proper functioning of the auto update functionality in ColdFusion 10. Adobe strongly recommends that you apply this update.

Find out more at:
http://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion-10-mandatory-update.html

Download at:
http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads_updates.html

Inform yourself how to run the update:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/10.0/Admin/WSe61e35da8d318518-33adffe0134c60cd31c-7ffe.html

I already updated my Windows Production, Windows Development and Mac Development Servers and did not notice any hicups. The install requires you to type a command in your command prompt or terminal. Just in case you do not have Java installed on your windows machines you can run the java call from the jre/bin folder inside your ColdFusion10 install folder (You can also add this to your PATH so you can run the java call from anywhere).

Hello, Goodbye - Another iPhone Transition

Well yesterday was a bit of a long day for me and my lack of sleep finally caught up with me so I never opened my new iPhone until this morning. Below are the images of my now old 4S and my new 5 side by side. Shortly I will be calling AT&T to unlock my 4S and post it on eBay so if you know anyone looking for a 4S let me know. By the way the 4S is only a few weeks old as I had it replace at Apple because my old one was acting up, so pretty much new!

New iPhone Pre-Order Time!!!

It is 3AM and the Apple store is still closed and the AT&T Pre-Order Screen just tells me I am eligible for a discounted upgrade but then nothing!!!!!! Ahhhh!!!!!! I will update soon ...

UPDATE

Purchase complete at 3:10AM ... AT&T site sucked and Apple Store ran smoothly ....

Are you excited?

Well with only a few hours to go for the pre-orders to be available for the new iPhone I decided to check my AT&T account and their site apparently was having issues responding and then I got a new countdown landing page.

I do hope the sites are responsive come 3am as I would love this to be quick and painless (except for the pain in my wallet). Apparently AT&T won't be giving early adopters the reduced upgrade price, which in my opinion is bullshit and truly sucks. But honestly I have to say AT&T still offers the best service for iPhone as Verizon and Sprint still won't be able to give their users the ability to surf the internet and be on a call at the same time. Also, I love the new shared data plans for families, it has saved me over $60 a month and that is with adding the kids iPad to the plan.

Anyways, are you excited? Well, I am and you can call me a sheep or an Apple fan boy but I don't care, because the truth is I love Apple products and I will continue to support their ingenuity for as long as they keep creating amazing products.

iPhone 5 is here .. almost!!!!!

Definitely another update that is extraordinary! I am ordering mine this Friday .. are you?

Check out the video!!!

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

ColdFusion 10 Book Available For Pre-Order

The new ColdFusion 10 Book is finally available for pre-order. Unlike previous WACK books, this is a single edition book which is more like the 4th volume of the ColdFusion 9 WACK books as it details on what is new on ColdFusion 10.

The pre-order is for paperback only at the moment, I myself will wait until it is available in the iBook store or any other store that will sell the PDF version as I like that my library of books weighs the total amount of my iPad and no longer requires me breaking my back when I move ... SAVE THE TREES!!! LOL

THe pre-order link is as follow

ColdFusion 10 Book Pre-Order @ Amazon

ColdFusion 10 developer edition can now be accessed by any IP address

This is a cool little note about ColdFusion 10 which was news to me. As per the Adobe ColdFusion Blog ...

A small but significant change in ColdFusion 10 is around IP address restriction. Till ColdFusion 9, only two fixed IP addresses can access the developer edition of server. But this restriction is changed in ColdFusion 10. ColdFusion 10 developer edition can now be accessed concurrently by any two IP addresses. The restriction is on two concurrent request from any two IP addresses and not on which IP addresses.

You can see the original post @

http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-10-developer-edition-can-now-be-accessed-by-any-ip-address

ColdFusion Security Update

I am sure you all know by now but just in case, Adobe posted a new security hotfix yesterday the 11th. I am happy to say that I love doing these installs on ColdFusion 10, the updater makes it stupid simple, no more worries about missing a step on an install.

This update does apply to all versions of ColdFusion from 8 up so for you guys on 8 and 9, you still need to go thru the step process but for those of you on 10 just be nice and wait until after hours so your customers don;t go crazy that their websites go down while ColdFusion restarts itself :).

The hotfix is available @ http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb12-21.html

Windows 8 Installed

Well I previously installed Windows 8 but never got around to playing with it. Today I decided to install and start playing around with it. Now there is not much that I have done other than swipe thru screens and do some of the tips mentioned by Scott Hanselman especially since I am waiting for my MSDN subscription to become active. But I did want to comment on how nice .. yes I said nice .. the default landing page of IIS 8 is. I can't really remember the boring page from IIS6 and IIS& was kind of dull and dark but this one is just bright and inviting as you can see below.

ColdFusion 10 update 1 :: UPDATE

It appears the ColdFusion team has released the 1st update to ColdFusion 10 which appears to solve a lot of important issues, especially for those of us that relied on using friendly URLs and much more.

Find out more in the following tech note
http://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion10-update-01.html


UPDATE

The cgi.path_info problem is finally gone!!! The update thru the admin worked perfectly, I truly love this new feature! Now one thing to note, on my Mac I ran the update and did not have to do anything but on my windows machines I did have to reconfigure the sites using the Web Server Configuration Tool as they specify. I just opened it up, removed all IIS sites and then added them all back again. I guess it registers a new connector and everything works again. Now we can use our favorite frameworks (community or homegrown) without having to add the previous little hack I had blogged about. Thank you Adobe!

ColdFusion 10 on OS X Mountain Lion Server - Apache Config

Ok so this rattled my brain a little today as I was installing ColdFusion 10 on my new Mac Mini Server using the new OS X Mountain Lion Server (Registered developer - I have the Gold Master Release). Well, when I would try to configure the connector, apparently OS X Server does not use the default /etc/apache/httpd.config instead this is located in /Library/Server/Web/Config/apache2/ and the default file is not httpd.conf even though it is in there, instead it is httpd_server_app.conf.

So real simple add your reference to the mod_jk.conf to :
/Library/Server/Web/Config/apache2/ httpd_server_app.conf

And then you are Golden - CF10 up and running!

ColdFusion 10 and AJAX HTTP POST Request hangs

For the past few days I was working on an old application that now runs on ColdFusion 10 in my test environment and all the Ajax calls where just hanging with no response. The funny thing, is in the production server which is CF 8 everything was working fine and in 9 they worked as well as my development server was 9 before. After a little debugging I noticed the problem was because we had the calls being sent as HTTP POST request rather than GET. Now I remember the reason for doing this was an IE issue with caching that would be fixed by making the calls as POST rather than GET.

So how come ColdFusion 10 fails, well it is quite weird. First I will show you an example of how our calls where structured.

First our test CFC (ajax.cfc) we will use an example.


As you can see it is quite simple. We have a function called TestCall which requires an argument called name and then returns a struct with the name value back in it. Real simple just for this simple test.

Now below is an example of how our calls were structured.


As you can see we saved our CFC's url into a global variable in case we used it more than once, then our params in an object that get passed in the simple jQuery ajax function. At success I am just dumping our response to the console log. Absolutely nothing wrong here but in ColdFusion 10 this would just hang. Below is an example with 3 different calls and the firebug output for a better visual representation.




As you can see our first call is just hanging and honestly never responds and the following 2 do work. The difference between each, is that the second request is made as a GET HTTP request and the third is a POST but with the method name in the URL portion rather than as a POST param. So to me it appeared that CF is now only looking for a method definition in the GET (URL) scope and if passed in the POST (form) scope, it just didn't know what to do. As you can see I thought I had it solved but then one thing happened by mistake. As I was writing this post I forgot to add the wsdl to the URL and everything worked.




This time everything worked. Now when I started playing with AJAX a couple of years back it was my understanding that we had to append WSDL to our CFC request but it appears it is not needed and by removing this everything worked fine in 10. So if you are experiencing this same issue do 1 of 2 things.

1. Remove WSDL from your URL if you have it
2. Make sure the method request is in the URL portion in a POST request

Hope this helps someone from pulling out as many hairs as I did .. good night world!

ColdFusion 9, Mac OS X 64 Bit, missing intel-macosx64

So today, I reinstalled ColdFusion 9 on my Mac so I can have both 9 and 10 running. As fas as my apache server, I have 2 config files that I choose which to use depending on which version of CF I want running (note you can use the buit in webserver and avoid this). Anyways, while I was doing this, I referenced Andy Allan's instruction on how to bypass wsconfig. Now everything is pretty straight forward and it all works fine except the the 64 bit installer is missing the 64 bit connector in the wsconfig.jar file. Basically the following directory connectors/apache/intel-macosx64/ is not in the jar file, you actually have to go get the wsconfig.jar file from hotfix CVE-2009-1876 which is part of Adobe Security Bulletin APSB09-12. I know, it is frustrating but at least there is a solution :-).

Directory named manager in webroot not accessible in ColdFusion 10

So today I ran into another little ColdFusion 10 related problem. I am not calling it a bug because I guess it has its purpose but I am calling it a problem, because it has now become something I need to figure what to do with. Apparently if you have a site with a directory named manager from the root, so /manager/ you will get a 404 from Tomcat like displayed below.



Apparently Tomcat is giving another directory precedence over my local /manager folder. Now the fix is really easy, just rename my folder and all works but I wanted to find out what folder Tomcat was running instead of mine. After some tinkering, the folder is located in (based on single server install) ColdFusion10/cfusion/runtime/manager/. I believe this folder is for the Tomcat manager app, which I don't know much of since this is my first time really working with Tomcat so it is all a learning experience. Now, if I rename this folder to something other than manager and restart ColdFusion, then everything works great but I don't know if this will have a negative impact on ColdFusion. This is a development server so I will continue to play and test but maybe someone smarter will be able to comment here.

A couple of things I tried is doing a rewrite, but if the folder in the end that you are pointing to is /manager at your webroot it will fail but a manager folder 1 level or more deep is fine. So /app/manager/ will work without any problems.

I thought this was quite weird and some people may ask why did I call the directory /manager but at the time when this particular app was built it is what seemed right. Hope this answers someone else similar issue with a simple Google search.

You are not going crazy CGI.PATH_INFO is empty in ColdFusion 10

Well I think the subject says it all. Today I upgraded my development and new production server to ColdFusion 10 and to my surprise a variable I was relying on to manage my routing is being passed empty on all requests. After a little googling I stumbled upon this page over at RIA Forge which stated this.

RIA Forge Page

Now I didn't just want to rely on that alone so I decided to do a test on all 3 servers I have, 8, 9 and 10 with the same page showing the same information (ColdFusion Version Number, CGI.PATH_INFO and CGI.SCRIPT_NAME)

Windows 2003, IIS 6, ColdFusion 8

Windows 2003, IIS 6, ColdFusion 9

Windows 2008 R2, IIS 7.5, ColdFusion 10

As you can see the third one does not show the cgi.path_info variable. So stop pulling your hair out and thinking it is more than just what it is. Apparently from IIS7 to Tomcat this just does not get passed. But I decided to do one more test on my Mac and it appears it is not only IIS7 but Apache is also affected and this variable is not being passed. So if you really need this and you are going to 10 lets hope the Tomcat team does something to remedy soon or come up with a different solution. Remember there is always more than 1 way to skin a cat.

Mac, Apache, ColdFusion 10

Code Example

Below is what I did to work with this issue in a current project. Since several developers using different platforms are on this single project I wrote it with that in mind. Basically save the final variable output into the request scope in case I need it anywhere else thru the request. This is set on the onRequestStart function of my APplication.cfc

Update

This is an output of what I use to get from CF9 using cgi.path_info, check out the URL and the output.



BTW * the domain used is not a real one, this is a local url I defined in my host file, in case anyone tries to go to it :). giancarlo.com actually belongs to someone else.

ColdFusion Developer Week!!!

As per the ColdFusion blog,  the ColdFusion developer week is back and is free as usual.  If you haven't already learned CF or want to check out the new things in CF10 go ahead and sign up now!!!

The ColdFusion Blog

Sign up by click here

Availability of ColdFusion with Verity

Well as per this post on the Adobe ColdFusion Blog, it appears their contract with Verity will end soon, so if for any case you use COldFusion w/ Verity (Yuck) then you need to download installers prior to May 31st. After that installers will not include it.

http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/availability-of-coldfusion-9

Adobe Creative Cloud is here!!!

Adobe Creative Cloud is now live. I can't wait to get my account and all the CS6 goodies up and running into my current workflow!

HTML5 PLease

Look up HTML5, CSS3, etc features, know if they are ready for use, and if so find out how you should use them – with polyfills, fallbacks or as they are.

http://html5please.com/

Dev Rocket - The Photoshop Plugin for iOS develoeprs

I just saw the video for this plugin and immediately purchased it!

Dev Rocket is a panel plugin that helps you with designing apps for iOS. It pretty much looks like a panel with actions and workflows to ease the process. From designing for two resolutions using one canvas, help with icon design, easily creating Ui snips and easy save for retina displays, if this plugin works good, it is totally worth the $10. Check it out at http://devrocket.uiparade.com/

Adobe & HTML

Check out Adobe's new site showcasing what they are currently doing and how you can help to make the web better http://html.adobe.com/

CSS Layer Styles the Photoshop Way

This is too cool. Kudos to the people involved.

Create CSS3 Shadows, Gradients and Borders just like you would in photoshop.

http://www.layerstyles.org/

Modernizr Presentation Links

Thank you to everyone who attended my CFUG presentation "Introduction to Modernizr" on Thursday March 29th, 2012. Below I've placed the links to the slides and the github repo with all the code.

The presentation showed off more than just Modernizr, it also included little HTML5 examples, CSS3 tidbits and a lot of links to information and tools I use myself. Oh, an of course, reference to ColdFusion 10 along with links to Ray Camden's presentation and code as well as a simple Drag and Drop uploader example that takes advantage of all the technology reviewed.

This month I will presenting again. The subject will be about performance optimization for websites starting at the web server level and moving into caching with ColdFusion. Hope you can all make it again!!!

• Slides
• GitHub Repo

A new way to multitask ....

Chrome Multitask Mode lets you browse the web with multiple cursors at the same time, so you can get more done, faster. Welcome to the ambinavigation revolution.


Click to see it for yourself!

ColdFusion 10 + CFBuilder 2.0.1 + RDS and a little Apache Issue

Hello everyone, this is a simple little post but it was extremely helpful to me when I found it.

I, for once, was trying to really get my local Mac to work with ColdFusion and CFBuilder, and what I mean by that is to get the debugger working and RDS, etc. Now I have done this before without a problem but only to look at my DB thru RDS on my remote development server (on windows) and not really played much with the debugger.

It is quite a funny thing to say now, but since I've been working a lot with .NET C# and mostly with MVC I have grown to love VS's debugger as they don't have something as nice as cfdump. So as I tried to do this today on my install I kept getting the following error from my CFBuilder.

"could not initialize class com.adobe.rds.core.services.messages"

It was driving me insane and the answer was quite simple, if you are using apache with Virtual Hosts, which I am. Basically there is this one little line inside the mod_jk.conf file that you need to add to your VirtualHost entries, for me it was the localhost definition, just like the person I received the answer from.


JkMountFile "/Applications/ColdFusion10/config/wsconfig/1/uriworkermap.properties"

Source:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4233616#4233616 (Thank you Doug!!!!)