Adam Howitt's Blog

/dev/hdd1 -- converted during upgrade to edgy

Adam Howitt — 2008-06-29T11:30:28-05:00

I recently upgraded one of my Ubuntu servers from Dapper to Hardy Heron one upgrade at a time as is recommended all over the place. In the course of doing the first upgrade, I missed an important note in the fstab file to say that my hard disk had been converted during the the upgrade. I only found out when Apache failed to start due o a missing log file location. Upon further inspection, the log file located on a mountpoint /media/bigdrive wasn't there. I looked at the output of df -h to see if it was still there and noticed that the volume was now described as lrm. I ran fdisk list: sudo fdisk -l and it reported /dev/sdb was available and still 23% full so I knew my data was intact. I tried to mount it but got the message /dev/sdb1 already...

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WebDevRef Wiki Launched

Adam Howitt — 2008-06-09T15:21:53-05:00

I've finally created the WebDevRef Wiki as a repository for the HOWTO type articles on my blog. I've found that blog posts don't necessarily provide the best format for sharing living concepts so to reflect this I'll be posting links to specific Wiki entries moving forward and as the topics evolve, I'll simply blog about the updates. So far, of course, I've only added test content but my summer intern, Adam Gedeborg, has been going to town including his internship journal, dev machine setup notes, notes on the WACK 8 chapters from a newb's perspective and project specific info so he's already streets ahead of me! The wiki is powered by Ray Camden's CanvasWiki project and I've got to say it's another winner. Easy to install and I'll be customizing the skin over the summer to...

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Handling Undeliverable ColdFusion Messages

Adam Howitt — 2008-05-15T10:38:20-05:00

Occasionally ColdFusion decides email messages are undeliverable and moves messages from the spool directory into the undelivr folder. This can be that the sending mail server is offline, the attachment poses problems or the server isn't patched to handle attachments over a certain size for the number of recipients on your list. Whatever the reason, it does so silently and one client needed a solution. I wrote a script you can schedule to run through the cfadmin. It checks the undelivr folder and summarizes any mail it finds and sends a single message to each sender with a summary of the message subject and date and a list of failed recipients. It works as-is for CF7 on Windows or CF8 on Ubuntu but you'll have to change some paths for any other server...

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VMWare Workstation on Hardy Heron

Adam Howitt — 2008-05-09T10:16:16-05:00

On a whim I upgraded my Ubuntu Gutsy install to Hardy Heron yesterday and while most things are working, a key component to allow me to run my billing was not. Since Quickbooks Online only supports IE and iPhone browsers (don't get me started about that genius decision), I run VMWare Workstation with XP as a guest OS. The upgrade went smoothly but when I tried to open VMWare it kept crashing without loading. A quick scout around and I found this great thread with DirkCoopman's solution. Basically you edit one file in vmmon.tar, tar it back up and re-run vmware-config.pl. I'm running Hardy Heron 8.04 and VMWare Workstation 6.0.3 build-80004.

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CFImage bug: bandOffsets.length is wrong!

Adam Howitt — 2008-05-05T12:55:50-05:00

I was working on a client site and ran into a CFImage bug in CF8.0 that happens with certain images but I was unable to deduce a pattern, nor communicate to the client how to change their images to ensure success. I've submitted a bug report to Adobe for this but until a fix is released I've created a Java-based workaround. The bug happens when I try to use CFImage with this file. I have a function called ScaleImage that reads in an image and attempts to generate a "best fit" thumbnail for dimensions or apply a specific scaling percentage. If you save the file and just do the following cfimage operation you get a CFError reporting "bandOffsets.length is wrong!":<cfimage action="info" structName="stcInfo" source="#filePath#"...

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Wanted: Junior Developer for Contract Work in Chicago

Adam Howitt — 2008-04-29T07:48:34-05:00

I am looking for a Junior Developer located in Chicago to help with some contracts and learn some new chops. The ideal candidate would be a student looking to pick up some hours over the summer and get some experience with ColdFusion. The work varies from maintaining existing applications to working on new projects. If you are interested or know someone who might be, please contact me through the contact form at http://www.adamhowitt.com

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Google Sitemaps made easy with Linux

Adam Howitt — 2008-04-10T18:03:04-05:00

I just discovered that Google Webmaster now allows you to register Google Sitemaps in a variety of formats: RSS, Simple text or sitemap XML format. This may not be exciting news to most but the simple text format makes life drastically simpler in terms of an entry point to creating a sitemap. I was about to fire up a text editor and some tunes to rip through a site to manually collect the page names when I realized that the find command in linux will spit out a carriage return separated list. A quick find -name \*.\.htm yielded the foundation of what I needed. Note that backslashes used to escape special characters. This gave me output as follows:./index.htm ./thanks_mailing.htm ./resources.htm ./closing copy.htm ./header.htm ./vegas_17.htm The last step was to...

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Elastic IP addresses for Amazon

Adam Howitt — 2008-03-27T18:38:01-05:00

Amazon launched elastic IP addresses today for EC2. Elastic IP addresses allow you to assign a static ip address to your Amazon instance which makes it far more suitable for hosting your own sites now. Prior to the launch of elastic IP addresses, your EC2 instances would be assigned an IP address from the pool that was not guaranteed to remain under your power. So if your instance crashed and you had to bring up a new instance, you get a new IP address and, if you were hosting a site on the old IP would now have to login to your domain name provider and update the A NAME record to the new address. PITA. I just cut WalkJogRun over to an elastic IP address and it was far less painful than I imagined. The process for using elastic IP addresses is as follows: Start an Amazon EC2...

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PASV mode FTP on Amazon EC2 with VSFTP

Adam Howitt — 2008-03-18T12:26:03-05:00

I've just spent the better part of an hour bashing my head against an FTP problem with Amazon EC2 so I thought I'd share the answer. The problem was that active mode FTP kept crashing when I tried to use Beyond Compare to compare my local machine to my Amazon EC2 hosted site. I would get 500 Illegal PORT command when using active and frequently saw suggestions to use PASV mode instead. PASV mode on Ubuntu's default VSFTP installation is enabled by default but the default is to use any available pair of ports to handle passive mode. Since Amazon locks down all ports except those you open manually my requests were being denied. I don't want to open up all ports on the server for the potential that a client tries to connect on any port. You can force VSFTP to use a set...

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AMD 64 bit Troubles with Ubuntu 7.10

Adam Howitt — 2008-03-11T18:59:29-05:00

Just a teaser of a post to see if anyone else has run into issues with Ubuntu 7.10 and 64 bit architectures. I built a machine from scratch on Sunday after months of piece by piece purchases and readily installed Ubuntu 7.10 64 bit server version. 4 gig of Corsair RAM, 250 GB hard disk, AMD X2 6400+ chip and a Gigabyte motherboard to support it all in a Rosewill case. Connected up to my LAN and SSH'd into the box no problems. My first issue came when I tried to install ColdFusion 8 with the same old CF7 approach for Ubuntu thanks to Dave Shuck's guide. The first step appeared to go well of installing zlib, but Apache 2.2 from source build failed at the zlib part. It turns out that the mod_deflate piece of Apache that relies on zlib's gzip was struggling to...

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Earthquake!

Adam Howitt — 2008-02-26T19:30:41-05:00

Argh! First there are problems with the planes and now my trip home to Manchester is disrupted by an earthquake! I jumped out of bed after it started shaking pretty roughly around 30 minutes ago at just about 1pm GMT. My Mum jumped out of her bed thinking there was something hiding under her bed. Being a big nerd I googled and saw nothing, put on 24 hour news but saw nothing, found the USGS site and didn't see anything listed so I added my tremor in the hopes I'd hear some news that I'm not going crazy. Shortly after I started my report BBC 24 reported breaking news of an earthquake felt around the country and USGS updated to show a lot more activity. I looked through Google blog search and now see a bunch of reports from late night nerds like me. I've never felt...

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WalkJogRun on Air

Adam Howitt — 2008-02-25T04:58:23-05:00

The clock is ticking. In what I hope will be next to no time, I expect to be announcing the launch of a new Flex 3 version of WalkJogRun.net in the next couple of weeks and an offline AIR version a couple of weeks later. Adobe just launched AIR 1.0 and Flex 3 so Jeff and I have jumped into it. Watch this space and in the meantime, go for a run.

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Amazon S3: 503 error Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

Adam Howitt — 2008-02-15T08:42:32-05:00

To say I'm disappointed is an understatement but Amazon S3 is currently reporting Http/1.1 Service Unavailable since 6.02 AM. Boooo. I've added a cfhttp call to the top of WalkJogRun.net to detect the 503 error so I can at least offer an explanation to my visitors. <cfhttp url="http://s3.amazonaws.com/wjr/images/mile_1.png" timeout="8"></cfhttp> <cfif not isdefined("cfhttp.statuscode") OR listFind(cfhttp.statuscode, "200"," ") neq 0> Sorry but WalkJogRun is unavailable right now since Amazon's S3 service is down. Our route files, images and scripts are stored up there and they have a technical issue so as a result, so do we. I apologize for the issue and will have everything back up just as soon...

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Protect Your Children Online for Free

Adam Howitt — 2008-02-13T08:07:44-05:00

In just a minute you can set-up an alert to keep a watch on your family's internet exposure with Google Alerts. I heard about some changes on the radar for Facebook or maybe MySpace yesterday to protect children online by requiring their parents to register and it reminded me that I was going to post a tip about Google Alerts. When the name of one of your family members or your business appears on a blog, in the news, in a video or even in a newsgroup, you can get a daily summary of those listings. I use it for my business and my running site to make sure I know what people are saying, if anything at all. In most cases it is a blog somewhere and I leave a comment thanking them for the feedback or offering an answer to a question or a problem they encountered using my...

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WalkJogRun Popfly mashup on Facebook

Adam Howitt — 2008-02-10T12:50:19-05:00

In just over an hour with no prior experience, I created a mashup using Microsoft's Popfly application to allow WalkJogRun visitors to enter their username to see an overview of their running routes plotted on Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Next, through the magic of the Popfly Facebook plug-in, I can share my new application with all my Facebook friends. I learned about Popfly just over an hour ago when my wife was reading the New York Times and asked me if I had heard of it. From her description it sounded like a Yahoo Pipes wannabe so my initial reaction was lukewarm. As I kept reading my Michael Crichton novel, my brain kept spinning so I finished the chapter and turned on my laptop to play around. Within minutes I had mashed up my geo-tagged Flickr photos with...

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