With the move to Tomcat, the following is available to you in CF10: (I’m on Mac; adjust paths as appropriate for you platform; for example, on Windows, probbably c:\ColdFusion10\)


cd (cf10directory)
cd bin
./coldfusoion restart


Obviously this starts CF10 .. more examples follow, assuming you’re in (Coldfuion10Directory)/bin (these should be obvious, no explanation necessary)


./coldfusion stop



./coldfusion start


An additional option, “status”, just tells you what’s going on


./coldfusion status


The final option, “wsconfig” is how integrate CF10 into existing web servers like IIS or Apache. This command is pretty complex, and worthy of a post by itself. Supposedly to get a GUI similar to what you’re used to, you run


java -jar wsconfig.jar


but this file was nowhere to be found.

Many of us are no stranger to Tomcat, where CF is deployed as a WAR, inside the webapps folder (unless you changed this in (tomcatdirectory)/conf/server.xml). Say you wanted to add a virtual directory: you knew to go to the server.xml and add a new entry under the <Host> node.

So where is the Tomcat directory in ColdFusion 10?

(ColdFusion10installDirectory)/cfusion/runtime

Adjust as necessary of course for Windows. (probably c:\ColdFusion10\cfusion\runtime)

As best I can tell, Tomcat admin is as you’d expect, so to add a virtual host or change the root directory, you go to (directoryAsAbove)/conf/server.xml

I’ll of course update my blog as find exceptions to the normal Tomcat process

Of course, this is rare: most places tend to keep you from using something so easily guessed. I’d never use such a password in production, but I like to get in fast when I’m developing.

When installing the beta 1 release of ColdFusion 10, I saw this for the first time:

So CF 10 tries to set on the right path, but gives you the flexibility if you want an easy password. Maybe they should force you (or at least give you a develpment/production option: forced password complexity if it’s production), but nice to see this change (even if it means I have to click a few extra buttons during install)

Well, I jumped up as high as I could go, finally springing for a 512 GB SSD. I wanted to do a clean OS install, and just copy files over from the XT, by putting the XT in an external enclosure. Typically with 2.5″ drives the power consumption is such that you can use a USB powered external enclosure. Not so for the XT. When I put it in the enclosure (NexStar SX) the drive started beeping. Thought it was the enclosure, but turns out it was the drive. I then tried jury rigging the drive with a Western Digital MyBook interface (it took a fall, breaking the enclosure, but the circuitry and the drive itself work great). For whatever reason, that didn’t work either, though no beeping (perhaps that interface is designed to only work with WD drives)

I ended up putting the XT back in my laptop, doing a full backup of it, and now I’m restoring off of that backup.

Turns out the SSD part of the XT requires a bit more power to start the drive than a normal 2.5″ drive. So if you want to use it in an external enclosure, you’ll need either a powered one (use a 3.5″ enclosure) or if your 2.5″ enclosure doesn’t support external power, you can use a USB cable that draws from multiple USB ports. See http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-Momentus/Momentus-XT-500go-as-an-external-mass-storage-experience-and/td-p/88486

Getting ColdFusion support wasn’t too hard – I used the great package at https://github.com/indynagpal/coldfusion-sublime-text-2. However, it felt a little too “hands-on” for me for 2011.

However, today I discovered another ColdFusion package. The folks over at sublimetext.info (as best I can tell, not connected to the official company) have a GitHub repo at http://github.com/SublimeText with a number of Sublime Text packages for various languages. ColdFusion is one, and while it doesn’t have the massive snippet support of indynagpal’s, it does do a good job of mirroring some of the most common shortcuts used in Eclipse. You can do the downloading and unzipping thing (or git clone) – uggh – but you can also use the very excellent package manager over at http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control to install ColdFusion support in Sublime Text in just a few steps:

• Install Sublime Text from http://www.sublimetext.com if you haven’t already (unregistered version currently never times out, but I recommend purchasing it – the time you’ll save not waiting around for Eclipse to load will pay for itself quickly!)
• Open Sublime, press CTRL (Update: both Mac and PC – *NOT* CMD on Mac) + ` (For the confused: hold down those 2 keys at the same time – note it’s the character below ESC, not a single quote)
• Copy and paste the following into the console that comes up in Sublime Text: (from http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control/installation)

  import urllib2,os; pf='Package Control.sublime-package'; ipp=sublime.installed_packages_path(); os.makedirs(ipp) if not os.path.exists(ipp) else None; urllib2.install_opener(urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.ProxyHandler())); open(os.path.join(ipp,pf),'wb').write(urllib2.urlopen('http://sublime.wbond.net/'+pf.replace(' ','%20')).read()); print 'Please restart Sublime Text to finish installation'

• When it finishes (“Please restart Sublime Text to finish installation” shows in the bottom line of console), close Sublime Text and reopen
• Click Preferences > Package Control
• Click “Package Control: Install Package”
• Scroll to or just type “ColdFusion” – hit Enter
• You’ll see some action in the status bar of the app – it’ll tell you when it’s installed
• Code your little ColdFusion heart out now – for into on shortcuts, etc, see the readme at https://github.com/SublimeText/ColdFusion

You can automate this from ColdFusion. Typically I’ll have a URL I call that starts up a series of tasks on each machine. Since the address for each machine is assigned by Amazon (you can get fancy with Elastic IPs if you’d like, but there’s really no need), it’s a matter of querying Amazon for the list of server names. Of course, if you’re running different types of machines, you want to filter by AMI ID, which of course changes each time you build a new image.

I won’t get into the exact code for querying here, but here’s how you get the AMI for a given machine from within ColdFusion: (Assumption is that this machine is one of your cluster machines, so once you have its AMI ID, you can filter for other machines like it)

<cfscript>
if (! isdefined("application.amiId")){
application.amiId=fileRead("http://169.254.169.254/2011-01-01/meta-data/ami-id");
}
request.amiID = application.amiId;
</cfscript>

Note: above tested in Open BlueDragon 2.0 – use <cfhttp> tag for engines that don’t support fileRead(uri)

As you might guess, that IP address is an API for EC2 metadata. The date is the API version (call the root IP address to get a list of API versions), “meta-data” is the API service, and “ami-id” is the value you’re requesting. (Call the URL without “ami-id” for a list of available values). For more information, go to http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2008-08-08/DeveloperGuide/index.html?AESDG-chapter-instancedata.html

For unit testing in ColdFusion, MXUnit is the standard. Even better, you can run your tests from within Eclipse, via a plugin.

After dropping MXUnit into my app (OSX 10.7.2 on dev machine, Eclipse+CFEclipse, Tomcat 7.0, Open BlueDragon 2.0 – had some pathing issues, but that’s another post…)

Right clicking on a unit test (such as in mxunit/samples/MyComponentTest.cfc) and selecting Run MXUnit Test, I received the following error:

Turns out it was going to port 80, rather than the port my CFML engine was running on (8080 in my case). This is an Eclipse preference:

Change the port to “http://localhost:8080/…” (or whatever you’re running) and it should work

Our project management solution is Assembla. We were on Unfuddle, which is pretty good, but Assembla offers more. (I flirted with using a private GitHub repo) Some of the advantages Assembla offers:

• Single project workspace, multiple repos. I like being able to tie checkins to tickets, but don’t want a single set of tickets: other solutions are one-to-one or many-to-many with their tickets projects and repos.
• Support for post-commit hooks
• Integrated chat (not really useful, but makes impromptu chats without requiring folks to run IM clients)
• Agile planning tools: This was the thing that no one else seemed to do. It features burn down charts, a Kanban card wall, virtual stand-up meetings, per sprint hour summaries, and more.

On agile: I’m the only developer – does agile make sense? Absolutely!! I frequently have to drop things at a split moment’s notice and work on something else: it’s imperative I inject tasks and still keep sight of the overall progress. I could really go into this, but that’s for another blog post.

So I set up my git repo in Assemba, committed locally, and was ready to push. (This isn’t a git tutorial … we’ll get to the point here in a minute) However, the connection failed when doing the following:

git remote add origin git@git.assembla.com:myrepo.git
git push origin master


You want to make sure you properly set up your SSH keys:

• When setting up your SSH public key in Assembla, it’s easiest to upload (https://www.assembla.com/user/edit/edit_git_settings) your pub file (for example, id_rsa.pub). If you’re on a Mac, you’ll either have to enable seeing hidden folders (since it’s in ~/.ssh), or copy it someplace you can easily get to from browser:
  cp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ~/Desktop/id_rsa.pub
• Make sure you have git configured with the email address that you use to login to Assembla:
  git config --global user.email myassemblaemailaddress@example.com
• This was the one I still had to do to make it work .. configure your SSH hosts by editing ~/.ssh/config with the following: (if there’s other entries, just add to bottom of file)
  Host git.assembla.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
GSSAPIAuthentication no
PubkeyAuthentication yes
PasswordAuthentication no

That did the trick. I realize I left much about git out here (for example, you may not want to globally set your email address) but I just wanted to show what worked for me.

This is always very easy when you’re dealing with software you can “apt-get” (such as Firefox), but for other software, it can be a challenge (for example, Google Chrome).

First of all, finding where to download Google Chrome is a bit challenging; unlike a browser where you can just click a link and let the redirects bounce around, when downloading via the command line (using wget) you need the exact URL. Tracking this down isn’t immediately obvious (loading the download page up in a normal browser you see various forms and get some redirects). However, I found it:

https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb

So login to your server via SSH, and:

cd /tmp
sudo wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb


Now to install it:

sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb


Hmmm.. big oops – unmet dependencies. (At least on my server.) So let’s knock those out:

sudo apt-get -f install


At this point, Chrome should be good to go. Of course, there’s some gotchas with how you’d start Selenium, etc, but that’s for another post …..

Easy: go to AT&T store, get my new phone. They put a new SIM card in the iPhone 4, with her number (the Blackberry uses a standard SIM, iPhone 4 uses Micro SIM)

Then I reset her phone, and try to set it up. However, I run into problem, due to the fact that I was running a beta of iOS 5 on it: it doesn’t recognize the phone as provisioned for development. Even though it had been, and it is the same phone, apparently with a new SIM it is seen as a different device.

So I need to reset it, not only to get it working, but so it can be bumped up to release of iOS 5; no need for my wife’s phone to use the developer release.

First, put phone into DFU mode.

Hooking it up to my computer and attempted to reset resulted in an error message after running the restore. At first, I thought it was iTunes: I was running the beta of iTunes 10.5, which apparently expired yesterday. So I download latest version, and try again – it tells me the phone isn’t authorized for that version (it was trying to restore to iOS 4.3.5). I believe the restore checks with Apple to confirm the OS (it’s signed), and with the release of 5, Apple was revoking older versions.

The key: you need to update to iOS 5, not an older version. This requires downloading the iOS 5 update manually, rather than using iTunes/iPhone to do it (since you’re phone is in DFU mode).

• download it from Apple’s servers – here’s a list (Make sure you download the correct version for your device)
• in DFU mode, with iPhone connected to USB, hold Alt (Mac OSX) or Shift (Windows) key and click Restore while key is held  (in iTunes, select your phone > Summary tab) – it will then prompt you for the location of the IPSW file you downloaded
• Should be able to update your phone correctly at this point, restoring to clean iOS 5