The attacker used a vulnerability in phpMyAdmin, which once had been installed, used one or two times, and then forgotten (version 2.10.xx or so..). Sadly enough, whoever installed phpMyAdmin did not remove the setup.php file (which you are encouraged to do in the readme). This setup.php was the attackers starting point. He/she injected a ssh client running as root in /tmp/dd_ssh that started about 100 child processes.

What I did was the following:

• Removed phpMyAdmin
• Removed all suspicious files in /tmp
• Restarted the network interfaces
• Changed all user passwords
• Installed fail2ban
• Changed /tmp to be non-executable

So my suggestions for today:

• Keep your phpMyAdmin up to date
• Search for installations on all your servers NOW!
• Do NOT install in a folder named “phpmyadmin”, “sqladmin” or similar. Use a non-guessable name.
• Protect it at least using htaccess
• Last but not least: if you can access your server via ssh, there’s no need for phpMyAdmin. Setup a ssh tunnel, use your favourite mySQL GUI, and bingo, you’re safe.

Keep your phpMyAdmin installations up to date! is a post from: Blog in Black

• 18 confirmed speakers (and just a few more to come – stay tuned)
• 16 confirmed sessions
• 3 full-day workshops on the day before the conference starts (Wednesday, November 17 2010)

The final agenda will comprise way more than 20 sessions by leading industry-experts over two days – it’s a must for every CF developer in AU/NZ. It’s going to be awesome, join the crowd.

cf.Objective(ANZ) 2010 update is a post from: Blog in Black

As I said, it’s in the Admin API and it’s about the trusted cache. This is a feature that helps to increase the performance of your ColdFusion application, it basically tells the CF server not to check for a changed/updated .cfm or .cfc file when serving a request but to just go with the currently used Java class the CF server knows about. You can “clear” the trusted cache from the ColdFusion administrator manually, restart your CF server or use the Admin API to clear a file or a list of files from the trusted cache (clearTrustedCache() in the runtime.cfc)

The client runs a fairly large CF cluster under reasonably high load and as part of the deployment process of new files, the trusted cache is cleared for those files across all cluster nodes, making use of the Admin API. That worked well so far, but had one flaw (bug #82214): In cases where a file was actually deleted from the file system in a new build/release (or just moved), the Admin API didn’t allow us to remove the file from the trusted cache, but bombed with an error message bubbling up from the Java core that the file couldn’t be found. It rather should check for the existence of the file in the cache instead though.

As a result, even though a.cfm was deleted in the filesystem one could still call and execute it unless we cleared the whole cache for that cluster node or create a literally empty file a.cfm that doesn’t do anything and reset the trusted cache with said empty a.cfm. Clearing the whole cache as a work-around is fair enough but is obviously an unnecessary performance hit. With CF 9.0.1 this issue is fixed, yay. You can now delete a file from the trusted cache even though it doesn’t exist in the filesystem anymore. It’s a tiny fix, but it really make the life of that client much easier.

My personal #1 bug fix in ColdFusion 9.0.1 is in the Admin API is a post from: Blog in Black

But now – the topic recently crept up again and yesterday I picked up my new laptop stand (and the corresponding monitor stand). This is the “before” photo of my desk:

It could certainly be worse – it was still not good though. The desk is full of stuff, the laptop is obviously way to low etc. Now let’s have a look at the new layout:

Wow – screens on the same height, lots of cables gone, the permanent external hard drive is below the stand, so are my two mobiles hooked into USB for charging. Here’s the laptop stand a bit closer:

Solid craftsmanship, yay. What you can’t see btw is that the angled surface the laptop sits on has a built-in ventilation system, great for a Macbook Pro… It looks great and it’s just awesome! Thx so much Thomas (and make sure to follow the World Sweet World blog if you’re interested in DIY/MIY)

My new desk: awesome laptop and monitor stands for Macbook Pro is a post from: Blog in Black

Here’s my abstract/proposal, any feedback or suggestions are very appreciated:

—
A lot of server- and client-side web developers are interested in making the leap towards using a Rich Client technology like Adobe’s Flash or Flex. This workshop will help you to get you up to speed with Flex and will put a strong focus on integrating Flex applications with Adobe ColdFusion.

During the first half of the day we’ll introduce the basics of Flex, discuss MXML and ActionScript and certain elements of the Flex component library. We will discuss event handling, basic skinning in Flex 4 and build a straight forward Flex application following the Model-View-Controller pattern.

The second half of the day will focus on integrating with backends and data, in particular ColdFusion. We are going to discuss HTTP and XML Web services as well as AMF-based remoting and using CFCs as backend business and data access logic. We’re also going to have a look at the integrated BlazeDS engine in CF 9 and will look into ways to speed up your development process with using Flash Builder and its data wizards.

Also covered: XML configuration files for Flex in CF and setting up custom channels and adapters to make your development and deployment processes quicker and more flexible.
—

The training/workshop day is not part of the conference ticket, i.e. it has to be paid for separately. The early bird price for the workshop is AU$ 295 (until August 31 2010), the regular price from September 1 on is AU$ 395. You can obviously book the workshop without attending the main conference if you just want to attend the training. The minimum number of attendees needed to run this training is three – if you want to help make it happen, register now!

Note that there are two more and also very interesting workshops available:

Justin McLean is running a day of Arduino goodness (Hands-on Arduino workshop with ColdFusion and Flex) and Charlie Arehart will teach you how to deal with CF performance and reliability issues in his “CF911″ session.

Registration is open now – start the booking process here.

Flex 4 for ColdFusion developers (and others) at cf.Objective(ANZ) is a post from: Blog in Black

Even though I’m a convinced OS X / Mac user when it comes to my development machines, sometimes I unfortunately have to connect to resp. mount Windows shares via Samba. That could be a remote Windows server at the client’s end I’m connecting to via VPN or just a share in a virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my Mac.

Sometimes though unmounting the share/drive in Finder leads to a weird scenario that it unmounts fine but when I try again to mount the same or a different drive via Samba, I get a totally arbitrary error message saying nothing but “please check the IP address, bla bla bla”. Obviously the IP address is fine, rebooting the VM doesn’t help either.

The log files show something like:

<timestamp> /System/Library/CoreServices/NetAuthAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/NetAuthAgent[54255] Enumerate shares failed!: syserr = Operation timed out

You’ve got two options here – reboot your Mac (annoying) or enter the world of Terminal.app and run either:

killall NetAuthAgent

or

kill -9 <processID>

(you might need to do this as a super user depending on your setup)

After that – you’ll be able to hook up to Samba shares again just fine.

How to fix arbitrary error when mounting Windows drives via Samba in OSX is a post from: Blog in Black

Here are some useful links and additional information:

Download of CF 9.0.1

Dreamweaver Extensions for CF 9.0.1 and additional installers (LC DS, SOLR, .NET Integration)

Release Notes CF 9.0.1

What’s new in CF 9.0.1 (PDF)

ColdFusion 9.0.1 – yay! is a post from: Blog in Black

You ask why we’re doing this? Early registration helps us to plan the event and to make calls on how much food and drinks we need, how much T-Shirts to order and much more. So, if you know you’re going to attend, let us know as early as possible please. Another reason to register rather sooner than later is that more than half of the tickets are already gone now – even though the event is another 8 weeks out, get your ticket now to avoid disappointment.

Why should you attend? Let’s have a glance over the agenda:

The keynote will be delivered by Tim Buntel – Group Product Manager for Developer tools at Atlassian (and product manager for Flex Builder and ColdFusion at Adobe in his former Northern Hemisphere life). Tim’s talk is titled “More than just a pretty .as” and is going to be great!

After the keynote we break down into two tracks and the sessions are going to cover a variety of topics, here’s are some of the sessions:

Flash:

Campbell Anderson – Introducing the Orchid framework for Flash CS 5
Tanya Gray – Flex for Flash Developers – Why Flex is not scary and can make your life easier

Flex:

Marielle Lange – Migrating a project from FB3 to FB4
Ross Phillips – CSS Selector Mash-up in Flex 4

Architecture and general development:

Robin Hilliard – MVC From First Principles
Lenz Gschwendtner – Why NoSQL, what it actually is and why also front end developers should know about it
Chris Velevitch – Introduction to Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) with Mercurial

Multimedia and integration with the Flash Platform

Diane Sieger – Acrobat 9 Pro multimedia projects
Cameron Prebble – Flexing Rails: Connecting Flex to a Ruby on Rails Application
Mark Szulc – Adding real-time collaboration to your project with LC Collaboration Services

Again – make sure you register now – you don’t want to miss those awesome speakers and their sessions.

Register for Flash Platform Camp Wellington in September and win is a post from: Blog in Black

We’ve got a pretty awesome speaker lineup comprising local AU/NZ talent and international guests, it’s def. worth checking out who’s coming. Note – it’s not even complete, stay tuned for more announcements in the next few weeks. The same is true for the agenda – we’ve published a whole bunch of awesome sessions during the last few days but the list is obviously continuing to grow further and there’s more to come.

The conference is going to offer an early bird price (until the 31st of August) of AU$ 749 (incl. GST), from 1st of September the price increases to AU$ 869 (incl. GST). The registration is available as well – go for it and book your tickets now!

And obviously – a big thanks to Mark for heading this enterprise and to all the other folks in the cf.Objective(ANZ) committee with me who help to make this event a go again in 2010.

cf.Objective(ANZ) 2010 – some speakers, some sessions (and a registration system) is a post from: Blog in Black

Note: the only known way of doing this is by unlocking the boot loader of your Nexus One and that will void any warranty you might have on the phone. I just didn’t care because I planned to hack and play around with this phone anyway right away when I purchased it. So be warned: if you decide to go ahead it’s your own risk – if your phone breaks within the warranty period, you’ll be on your own.

Also: unlocking your boot loader and installing custom firmware on your phone is in principle not without risks. You might brick your phone, you might experience weird effects with a different firmware, the universe might collapse all of a sudden – tons of stuff could go wrong. For the vast majority of most of the people this method works just fine and it doesn’t seem to be illegal to go with this approach in most countries.

Still: If you decide to try any of the explanations I’m providing here, it’s your own choice and by your own free will. Don’t ask me for support, I’m also not liable for any damage you inflict on your device, other hardware, yourself or other living creatures of any species. Make sure to check if the authorities of the country you live and reside in don’t think it’s an illegal act of espionage and computer hacking to modify the boot loader of you own phone that you most likely have purchased for a few hundred dollars/euros etc.

This process will also most likely wipe your phone a few times during the process. Make sure you have backups of everything on the phone or can easily restore it. Don’t blame anyone but yourself if you haven’t. If you have all the files ready, the acutal updating will take about 15 minutes. Ready?

Step 1: Unlock the boot loader of your Google Nexus One

You need:
- Fastboot (zip contains Win/Mac/Linux versions)
- Your Nexus One connected to your computer via the USB cable (best is to never unplug it during the whole process)

Actions:
[Update: I forgot to mention one step here: Go to the settings screen of the phone, select "Applications" - "Development" and enable USB debugging]
- Switch off your phone.
- Push and hold the trackball, switch on phone while doing that -> you end up in the boot loader of the phone. Don’t do anything yet.
- Take the Fastboot download and unzip it into any folder you like. Open a command prompt and run the executable that matches your platform. I’m on OS X, so I did: ./fastboot-mac oem unlock
- That will trigger a new screen on your phone, and you have to confirm that you really want to unlock the boot loader. If you still think that’s a good idea, confirm and your phone will do a few things, it might go through one or two restart-like procedures and finally it will restart and boot into the operating system. Notice that from now on you have a little unlocked padlock icon below the Nexus Icon when you start up the phone.

Result:
Unlocked boot loader on your Nexus One, still on EPF30 though.

Step 2: Downgrade the Nexus One to firmware ERD79

You need:
- Firmware image: PASSIMG_Passion_Google_WWE_1.01.1700.1_ERD79_release_signed.zip (google for it, I’m not linking to it from here)
- Your Nexus One connected to your computer via the USB cable

Actions:
- Take the downloaded firmware and for ease of use unzip the file into the same folder as you’ve put Fastboot into
- Switch off your phone
- Push and hold the trackball, switch on phone while doing that -> you end up in the boot loader of the phone. Don’t do anything yet.
- Run the command: ./fastboot-mac devices
- It should list a device serial number, mine started with HT followed by lots of digits. That means your phone has been recognised. Good.
- Now we flash the ERD79 image on the phone. You need to run a series of commands in your command prompt:

./fastboot-mac erase cache
./fastboot-mac flash userdata userdata.img
./fastboot-mac flash boot boot.img
./fastboot-mac flash system system.img
./fastboot-mac flash recovery recovery.img
./fastboot-mac reboot

Result:
Now your phone will reboot – don’t panic, it might just take a while. After it has come up (again wiped), it will be on ERD79. That’s a win because from here we can easily get to Froyo in two more steps.

Step 3: Upgrade to ERE27

You need:
- Firmware image: signed-passion-ERE27-from-ERD79.a487b405.zip (google for it, I’m not linking to it from here)
- Your Nexus One connected to your computer via the USB cable

Actions:
- Take the downloaded firmware and rename it to update.zip (nothing else, all lowercase, no update.zip.zip etc)
- Mount the Nexus One as a USB drive and copy update.zip on the SD memory card
- Switch off your phone
- Push and hold the trackball, switch on phone while doing that -> you end up in the boot loader of the phone.
- Select Bootloader
- Select Recovery, when the Android robot shows up (also an exclamation mark) press Power and Volume Up at the same time
- Select “Apply sdcard:update.zip” and the installation will start. This will take quite a while and you will get another Android robot screen but your phone WILL eventually come back on firmware ERE27 (wiped).

Result:
Your phone is on firmware ERE27.

Step 4: Upgrade to FRF85B (Froyo)

You need:
- Firmware image: signed-passion-ota-42745.dc39ca1f.zip
- Your Nexus One connected to your computer via the USB cable

Actions:
- Take the downloaded firmware and rename it to update.zip (nothing else, all lowercase, no update.zip.zip etc)
- Mount the Nexus One as a USB drive and copy update.zip on the SD memory card
- Switch off your phone
- Push and hold the trackball, switch on phone while doing that -> you end up in the boot loader of the phone.
- Select Bootloader
- Select Recovery, when the Android robot shows up (also an exclamation mark) press Power and Volume Up at the same time
- Select “Apply sdcard:update.zip” and the installation will start. This will take quite a while and MUCH LONGER than step 3 and you will get another Android robot screen but your phone WILL eventually come back on firmware FRF85B (wiped).

Result:
Your phone is on Froyo, Android 2.2

Next steps: Treat your Nexus One well, because your out of warranty now. Have fun with Android 2.2, Flash Player 10.1 beta and AIR 2 for Android!

How to upgrade your Vodafone Google Nexus One from EPF30 to Froyo – today! is a post from: Blog in Black

Turns out that the Australian Nexus One firmware is EPF30 as well as Kirsty from @vodafoneau_help confirmed: “@agentK I’ve checked with devices, and they said “ships on EPF30″ – does that make sense? ^k”.Unfortunately it does make sense and it makes me believe that all Vodafone Nexus One devices in the world are pushed out with the EPF30 firmware.

It’s a shame because just alone the Froyo update for owners of phones with this firmware will be weeks later than the Froyo update for the same phone purchased from Google directly. Also there’s apparently confusion within Vodafone themselves because they said: “…so it’s not a Vodafone Variant…”. That’s utterly wrong – it a Vodafone custom firmware and as an owner of any of their devices one is tied to when and how they decide to release a firmware upgrade even though it should not make a difference at all as the Google N1 is the same phone all over the place, besides the radio bands for AT&T.

So, my dear Aussie friends (or New Zealanders going over and purchase the phone over there) – be aware that there’s no immediate Froyo/Android 2.2 for you if you purchase the N1 from Vodafone in AU unless you unlock the bootloader (voiding your warranty) and patch it yourself. Also – it seems that for all subsequent updates you’re going to be tied into whatever plans Vodafone has for the phone and its future. Bad. If you’re not deeply attached to your warranty, my next post will explain you how to get Froyo on your device.

Update: Australian Google Nexus One devices come with firmware EPF30 as well is a post from: Blog in Black

Recently I was in Germany to deliver a Flex training course and to attend webinale in Berlin. Toying with the idea of getting an Android phone to run Flash and AIR on it, I purchased a Google Nexus One at a Vodafone store in Berlin. Note: Vodafone Germany is the only official way to get the phone in Germany. I had done some research before and it seemed that the phone was totally unbranded (it really is when you get it – no trace of Vodafone branding on there) and in fact there are huge amounts of people using it successfully on one of the other networks in Germany anyway.

One of the reasons getting the Nexus One was the thought that it’ll be the first Android device to get Froyo (Android 2.2) so that I could get Flash Player 10.1 and the AIR runtime on the device. Towards mid/end of May, “leaked” updaters for various versions of the firmware bubbled up and most of them were geared towards the T-Mobile US version the the Nexus One. Now – in a phase of beta-testing and somewhat unofficial updates such a selection is fair enough, the guys who run the AT&T version didn’t get many upgrades either (I understand the firmwares are essentially identical, the only difference are the radio band frequencies).

But now it’s release time. Last week, Google lifted the Android 2.2 codebase into the daylight and there’s even a manual updater to firmware FRF85B that works “from ANY version of the firmware” according to some of the commenters. Unfortunately that’s utterly wrong as some people have now realised. Google has basically released and OTA’ed Froyo 2.2 for devices sold through their own channel.

Where does that leave users who purchased their Nexus One in Europe or other places in the world (I can see the same scenario happening in AU/NZ if it will ever hit the shelves here)? Basically – you’re lost and at the fate of the mobile network of your “choice” – in most cases that’d be Vodafone <yuk>. The underlying problem is that your phone has been modified to a special “Vodafone” version of the firmware (EPF30) that doesn’t get an OTA update any time soon and that you can’t manually update by just applying the signed-passion-ota-42745.dc39ca1f.zip all-in-one updater (trust me that I tried it and the phone wouldn’t access the update.zip with a verification failed error).

On the Android support forums, a google employee wrote:

“Nexus One customers that bought the phone from Vodafone will be getting Froyo, albeit a little delayed. We have to make a few changes to Froyo to optimize it for the Vodafone network (small stuff around Emergency calling, etc.), so it will take at least another couple of weeks (changes + testing).”

This is at least deceiving if not utterly bullsh*t. Lots of people who purchased the phone from Vodafone don’t even use it on the Vodafone network and what changes “around Emergency calling” would there be necessary. Funny enough – Vodafone UK is telling a totally different story: http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/topic/61110-google-nexus-one-android-22-froyo/ – according to them it’s about default APN settings (Funny, my German Vodafone Nexus One picked up the APN settings just fine from my NZ SIM card…). Oh and this is Vodafone’s policy on upgrades according to the same thread: “In regards to firmware updates once they have been released by Google, we approve them and then they get rolled out”

Given the history of Vodafone heavily branding and customising phones they sell (in a negative way), I shouldn’t be surprised about all this. Still, with the phone coming from Google I thought it would be different this time – I was wrong. Note: this is a typical #firstworldproblemblogpost and I’m aware of that. I’m 100% sure that the European Vodafone Nexus One phones WILL eventually get Froyo (Android 2.2) coming from EPF30, but I’m just sick of waiting another few weeks to start playing with Flash and AIR on mobiles and also sick of being tied to the decisions of the most annoying global mobile network ever when and how updates of my phone will happen. I’m also disappointed of Google and I seriously wonder what made them enter such an agreement with Vodafone.

Lesson learnt: Never ever buy a phone through those channels unless you’re either happy with their way of doing things or willing to hack the phone. My solution (and be aware that this will instantly void the warranty of your phone) was to unlock the bootloader, downgrade the firmware to the official Google version and upgrade to Froyo from there. Absolutely smooth process, took me about 15 minutes and was def. worth it. Not just because I’ve got Froyo now and with that the phone is so much better now than it was with Android 2.1 but also because I’ve cut the ties to the Vodafone firmware for good now.

I’ll write another blog post tonight or tomorrow about how to do the upgrade, more to come.

Google Nexus One: Why there’s no Froyo (Android 2.2) for the European Vodafone version (EPF30) yet. is a post from: Blog in Black

Then there’s Flash Builder 4 Premium which is being sold as a stand-alone tool that targets enterprise-level or in general more advanced Flex and AS3 developers. FB 4 Premium comes with features such as Unit Test integration, Profiling etc.

Unfortunately both products (and I assume that’d be true for all CS5 suite products that contain Flash Builder 4) create a license activation issue. It seems that the CS5 suites downgrade a Flash Builder 4 Premium license to a Flash Builder 4 Standard license – which actually can be quite disastrous if one has to rely on FB 4 Premium features.

Here’s what happened to me and how I fixed it for me.

Scenario: I installed and activated FB 4 Premium in March, it worked fine until I installed MC CS 5 and activated it the other week (without ever having installed FB 4 Standard that comes with Master Collection). The installation reverted my Flash Builder 4 Premium back to FB 4 Standard. All products are final and all happened on OS X 10.6.2.

There are a few resources out there that are supposed to help with this issue:

1. Tech note Upgrading FB 4 Standard to Premium

The tech note seems to cover the issue (that I have a FB 4 Standard and want my FB 4 Premium back), but it’s imho at best misleading and not helpful at all. You can pretty much disregard it.

2. Adobe Forums post providing help to fix the issue.

This one is much better, one can actually understand the steps to go through and give it a try. I know that this procedure worked for some people (both in the forums and on another mailing list), unfortunately it didn’t work for me.

Here’s my solution (very detailed and a variation of 2 above):

1. Launch FB 4 – deactivate it permanently (it just lists FB 4 as a product to be deactivated)
2. Close FB 4
3. Launch FB 4 again to find that it still works; it seems there are two overlapping activations, deactivate again permanently – this time the Master Collection CS 5 activation with all the other CS 5 tools that I had used/openend since installation
4. Close FB 4
5. (For the sake of checking) – open Photoshop CS 5 and find that it won’t start due to not being activated
6. (If you did 5) – close Photoshop CS 5

Note: At this stage neither FB 4 nor CS 5 should be activated

7. Launch FB 4 – it comes up with the activation screen
8. Pick the 60 day trial – for me it then loaded the splash screen of FB 4 Standard but had all the FB 4 Premium features
9. Close FB 4
10. Launch FB 4 – Continue your trial, now the splash screen shows FB 4 Premium and the features still should work.
11. Close FB 4
12. Launch FB 4 – Put in your FB 4 Premium key, splash screen shows FB 4 Premium, features are still there
13. Close FB 4
14. Launch PS CS 5 – it comes up with the CS 5 activation screen.
15. Put in CS 5 key, let PS load, make sure that the menu item to de-activate is NOT greyed out
16. Close PS CS 5
17. Launch FB 4 – it should still come up with FB 4 Premium

The crucial steps seem to be 7-11 – after the messed up installation/activation that was the only way for me to get the FB 4 Premium features back in the first place and it seems that the decision which feature set to enable is made way after the splash screen, i.e. the splash screen shows the feature set of the product launch before the current one (delayed by one execution) – hence I’d recommend to def. undertake steps 10 and 11.

That’s it – I’m not saying that this is the only or even best solution. It worked for me – your mileage might vary.

Adobe Master Collection CS5 breaks Flash Builder 4 Premium and how to fix it is a post from: Blog in Black

Registration opens soon…

Flash Platform Code Camp Wellington 2010 is a post from: Blog in Black

Disclaimer: I’m a Flex and Flash developer myself and I personally would have really liked to see any form of Flash support for the iPhone or iPad. But maybe it’s time that everyone moves on. I for my part will continue to do Flash and Flex and use lots of other Adobe tools because there are a lot of cases in which those technologies make a lot of sense. But I will also continue to be a good Apple customer and buy Macs and iPhones and probably an iPad at some stage.

Apple vs Adobe vs HTML 5 vs Apple vs Flash vs whatever is a post from: Blog in Black

MySnapper Highs and Lows!

Zaid Dabbagh (RIA Developer) and Sean Higham (Product Manager) from Snapper Services Limited (www.snapper.co.nz) present some of the highs and lows of developing MySnapper – an AIR Application that allows users to top up their Snapper Cards. This session explores limitations of AIR 1.0, and security flaws and how we had to work around those. We also explore other components of MySnapper including the Driver Package that allows access to smart cards.

Flex war stories ~ Surviving the battles of development

Marielle Lange presents ideas of how to tackle day to day issues with the development life cycle.  Covering unit testing, mock data injection, ui development and experimentation, team utilities and helpers, rapid testing of web services.

Please register for the meeting since seats are limited.

The meeting will be hosted by Natcoll Design Technology in Wellington

Times: 5:15pm-5:30pm doors open for a 5:45pm presentation start.  If you come late and the doors are locked when you arrive, just call the mobile number(s) on the sign at the door.

Venue: Level 1, Natcoll House, 2/20 Kent Terrace, Wellington, New Zealand

Next Flash Platform User Group in Wellington: May 18, 2010 is a post from: Blog in Black

Now – on Linux or OS X that sounds like a trivial task (it actually is), but I had to look around a bit to find a good solution for Windows. At the end we went with Subversion Notify for Windows, an open source solution that’s actually easy to install and setup, and that we’ve been able to configure smoothly for our needs with an XML config file.

Commit notification for SVN on Windows is a post from: Blog in Black

After having tried it myself with files of a variety of encodings, I can assure everyone that those statements are wrong and the problems people run into most of the time would be issues of having a misconception of character and file encodings. Let’s clear up some of the confusion and myth around file encodings in CF Builder (and other Eclipse-based tools), shall we?

We all know Unicode and one of its particular encodings UTF-8. It’s 2010, folks – by now everyone should be aware of the fact that the world spans more than one single country and that UTF-8 is the only decent way forward when it comes to web-based applications and character encoding of your content, data and files.

Unfortunately the world sometimes isn’t that easy. Even if one knew about UTF-8 there are lots of legacy files around. Those files (and similar is true for database content) might be encoded in ISO-8859-1 or even US-ASCII. If you have files encoded as “Western Latin 1″ or alike, you might have to deal with similar issues – this is not to mention a variety of encodings for Asian languages.

ColdFusion Builder’s default encoding is UTF-8 and that’s exactly what it should be. People in the said discussion thread claimed that CF Builder was just showing them question marks and weird characters when they opened files that contained German umlauts. One participant focussed on RDS and that CF Builder’s RDS integration breaks the correct display of umlauts. There’s been a bug logged on that which turned out to be closed as a duplicate of another bug and both have been fixed for the CF Builder 1.0 release (Kudos to Ram from the CFB team for following that up).

So – what’s the story here? It’s surprisingly simple: If one was to create a file containing German umlauts or in fact any other special characters with a non-UTF-8 encoding (let’s say in ISO-8859-1) and then opens that file (via RDS or locally, it doesn’t matter) in CF Builder, it would not display those special characters correctly. What exactly you’d get to see would depend on the specific encoding being used. Here is an example showing the wrong encoding (actually the terminology “wrong encoding” is wrong in itself – I should rather use “not matching the expected encoding”):

Now that we have established that we’re dealing with a non-matching encoding here, what can you do? There are multiple scenarios:

1. All or the vast majority of your files are not encoded in UTF-8: You might want to consider changing the default encoding for the whole workspace in “Preferences/General/Workspace”.

2. Just one or a few of your projects are completely done in a different encoding – change the encoding settings per project by doing a secondary click on the project name in the navigator view, picking “Properties” and then change the encoding in the “Resources” section.

3. Just one single file is encoded in a different way – use “set Encoding” in the “Edit” menu, this will apply a different encoding for this instance of the editor view:

Last but not least – you can also set the default encodings per file/content type. That’s possible in “Preferences/General/Content Type” – the CF-related types are in “Text”:

That should give everyone some leverage to work with files in non-UTF-8 encodings. So – ColdFusion Builder is NOT broken for non-English users, even if they don’t use Unicode and UTF-8 (you would really want to move to UTF-8 as soon as you can though). I personally use ColdFusion Builder to work with HTML and CFML files in twenty-something languages, sometimes there are even twenty-something languages in one file – and it works just fine (this is Unicode-based though).

To be fair and reasonable to both sides – it would be very cool if ColdFusion Builder was able to heuristically apply the correct encoding/decoding to files – basically a statistically driven guess and then fallback to whatever the default encoding is set to if it has no clue what to do with the file. At the end of the day my strongest recommendation would be to move on to UTF-8 and while one is at it, make sure you stop using RDS to talk to your ColdFusion server(s) in the first place and come up with a proper development/deployment model.

ColdFusion Builder, file encodings and i18n is a post from: Blog in Black

Turns out that this particular VM had recently undergone some changes as I’m using it for ASP.NET MVC coding and have VisualStudio 2008 as well as SQL Server 2008 installed on it. Since I installed those a few weeks ago, I haven’t used LiveCycle Designer on that VM. And indeed – after digging around in some forums, I found that there is actually a tech note (LiveCycle Designer ES 8.2 conflicts with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 when installed on the same computer) on how to fix this issue in LiveCycle Designer ES 8.2. Some folks in forum threads reported that they copied files from a position some deep in the guts of Windows to another location somewhere else in the guts of Windows – not necessary. It turns out that there’s a bug in one of the shared libraries that come with SQL Server 2008 and that are used by LC Designer ES 8.2 as well.

Installing the fix did the trick and SQL Server 2008 still seems to work fine as well, yay!

Unhandled exception in FormDesigner.exe – Excuse me? is a post from: Blog in Black

You all have an idea what a data center is, right? Quite large buildings hosting a vast amount of technology such as server racks and servers, air conditioning, diesel backup generators and much more. A data center is pretty much the representation of the virtual infrastructure we all rely on for the work and play we do while using the internet.

Naturally managing a data center is a reasonably complex process – one’d have to make sure that ventilation systems fit the amount of heat generated in a room, you’d have to ensure that power supply is appropriate for the devices housed in the racks, you might need to be compliant with certain environmental regulations etc.

If you own/operate/work in a data center, CENTEROS is a solution that (among other things) helps you to deal with all those management tasks and it’s built in Flex (with a FluorineFx/.NET backend). One reason why the client originally decided to ask for Flex were the awesome visualisation aspects that no other technology offered. It’s possible to maintain your own floor plans and different rooms as well as create racks and servers with all the physical specifications needed for running the center.

The screenshot below shows the capacity management screen. It’s pretty much a room schematic with racks that allow a user to drill-down further into the data center’s housed machinery.

The next screenshot is the rack view. It shows front and back of the racks (as that can be important for power supplies or other connections that have to be accessed regularly). The rack’s content is also being listed at the left and it’s tied to the position of the appliance in the rack. Also – it becomes very clear by just looking at the rack schematic how well rack space is utilised.

The last screenshot shows a further drill down into an appliance. In this case it’s showing a BladeCenter comprising a few individual blades. This information is also linked against customers and contact details, installations on the server/blade – websites, services etc. There’s a task and workflow management system built-in that allows data center operations to keep track of urgent things to do on a machine as well as regular scheduled maintenance.

All in all besides being a very cool Flex app, I think it’s a great solution for anyone working in the fields of data center management and operations management. The guys at CENTEROS would be happy to provide you with more information and a demo.

CENTEROS: Data Center Management with Flex is a post from: Blog in Black