Foto Feb: day 10 is a post from: Blog in Black

Foto Feb: day 9 is a post from: Blog in Black

Foto Feb: day 8 is a post from: Blog in Black

Also, it shall be noted that @ilaeria dared to not like them and claimed instead that the Orange flavour with “gooey” Caramel wasn’t going well together. Sigh. Sigh. Siiiiiiiiiiiigh!

Foto Feb: day 7 is a post from: Blog in Black

Foto Feb: day 6 is a post from: Blog in Black

The result of my commit was weird though:

Error: transaction abort! rollback completed abort: decoding near ‘ailbox, we’re not’: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xe2 in position 24: ordinal not in range(128)!

Error message on commit

What had happened? Basically – I copied some content for the commit message from a Skype discussion I was having with someone over exactly the bug fix I was going to commit. What I didn’t realise was that the apostrophe in “we’re” wasn’t an ascii-character compatible apostrophe, but a typographic apostrophe from within Skype. Anyway – it seems that this made the commit fail (It didn’t help that I didn’t read the message properly at first and though that something was wrong with me repo

Special characters in Hg Commit comments is a post from: Blog in Black

Foto Feb: day 5 is a post from: Blog in Black

You might just know Adobe Connect from using Adobe’s hosted SaaS, but Adobe sells Adobe Connect as a so called licensed version – you buy licenses and can host it yourself within the IT structure of your organisation. Adobe Connect 8 is a Java-based web application that’s bundled with Apache Tomcat.

When users upload content such as slides, videos, documents etc to the Adobe Connect server, Connect will ask the user to provide a server-unique URL – if the user doesn’t, Connect will store the content under a self-created and unique URL.

Essentially, you might end up with something like http://yourserver.whatever/myContent or http://yourserver.whatever/p/6554787856. That’s usually fine because if the requested content item is available, Adobe Connect will return the content and the HTTP response has an HTTP status code of 200 – as it should be.

It gets interesting as soon as the user requests a URL that doesn’t exist. This might happen accidentally (user error or typo) but in some instances it also might happen on purpose. For example: One is loading 3rd-party eLearning courses into Connect that use their own course content launcher – which would as such during the initialisation of the course test the existence of some files on the HTTP server it’s running on. In such a scenario, the course launcher might or might not request a resource that doesn’t exist.

Now – we all know what a good HTTP server would do here, right? Correct – it would return an error page of some kind and the HTTP status code would be 404. This is what HTTP servers do for quite a while now.

Not Adobe Connect though. If one requests a non-existing resource it will return a nicely designed error page, but the HTTP status code of the response is 200 for “OK”. Clearly that’s not the intention of the semantic of the HTTP protocol. I can even see where that thinking is coming from – the Connect web application is returning a pretty page, so from the point of view of the developers it might even be a valid request. Unfortunately this type of thinking fundamentally breaks the web.

By now you have surely figured out that I actually had to deal with exactly this scenario. I had a look into a few options of tweaking both the Tomcat as well as the Adobe Connect configuration but can’t see an easy solution. The best idea I can come up with is writing a ServletFilter that intercepts the HTTP response and modifies the HTTP status code to what I want it to be.

The problem with this solution though is that it’d be an annoying hack and would prob. be broken after the next Adobe Connect 8 Service Pack. The only criteria for me to actually know if the status code has to be changed would be the content of the response payload. If said content looked like an error page (maybe I could grab the page title – but then I’d have to deal with it in multiple locales to do it properly), this would be the indication to change the HTTP status code to 404. I suppose everyone can say why this gets more hacky by the minute…

Obviously we logged a support ticket with Adobe’s Enterprise Support – unfortunately without result. According to Adobe it’s not possible to achieve what I want to do here (simply getting a 404 status code if the resource doesn’t exist). If anyone has another good idea as an alternative to the ServletFilter I mentioned in the paragraph above – please let me know.

Adobe Connect and HTTP status codes is a post from: Blog in Black

Foto Feb: day 4 is a post from: Blog in Black

I saw this from my balcony during the Chinese New Year 2012 Parade in Sydney – massively huge Dragon animation projected onto the side of a very tall building.

Foto Feb: day 3 is a post from: Blog in Black

This is quite possibly the cutest and most friendly dog I’ve come across for a long time. 9 months old female Staffordshire Bull Terrier puppy and the dog-in-residence at Sydney-based client.

Foto Feb: day 2 is a post from: Blog in Black

A few weeks ago a client asked me how to do exactly this. Given how easy it is, it’s surprisingly badly documented and hard to find. Here you go:

1. Stop the services (Adobe Connect server as well as the Flash Media Server)
2. Move or copy the content folder into the new location (Note: your content folder is usually the “content” subfolder in your Adobe Connect installation directory. If you’ve just clicked “next”, “next” etc during installation, your content folder would most likely be C:\Breeze\content). I tend to copy the folder to the new location and rename the existing content folder to something like “_content” for the time being.
3. Locate and edit the custom.ini file in your Connect installation directory. If you went with the default settings this would be in C:\Breeze\custom.ini . Make the following additions to the file (or change the values of the three settings below in case they were already in there). Make sure that you specify a proper path, for example: D:\ELearningLib\content\ or similar.
   • CONTENT_PATH=_new location of content folder_
   • FCS_MEETING_PATH=_new location of content folder_
   • FCS_CONTENT_PATH=_new location of content folder_
4. Restart your services again and test that Connect still works and that all your content is available, recordings still work etc.
5. If you’re happy with the outcome of the previous step, get rid of the old content folder – resp. the renamed old content folder if you followed my recommendation in step 2.

Moving the Adobe Connect content storage is a post from: Blog in Black

The person who’s desk I’m currently occupying at my client in Sydney is kind of a snow globe fan. That’s not even all of them

Foto Feb: day 1 is a post from: Blog in Black

I did a bit of digging around on how to get root access back with the GRK39F firmware and as it ended being up sort of being a puzzle game to find all the information, so I thought I’d put it all into a blog post.

It seems that what I’d usually would have used (Superboot) isn’t supported on the Nexus One post firmware GRI40 anymore. Bummer. Luckily a guy from Germany (“Bexton” on xda-dev) forked Superboot and called it Bexboot and made it work on Android GRK39F on the passion hardware. The problem with that is that apparently his server is down or has been shut down and it was not as obvious to get instructions and the necessary files.

Here’s what I did:

• Download the OTA update zip file
• Follow the instructions in this (spanish/english) blog post

It’s really straight forward – took me about 5 mins to actually apply the firmware change and I’ve got root access on my Nexus One again.

Obviously I’m not endorsing all this … insert more legal blabla here … Essentially: in case you read this and/or try to do anything I’ve described here, you’re on your own. Don’t ask me for help when you break your own or other people’s devices, create a black hole, attract aliens or cause any other kind of harm to you, anyone or anything.

Rooting Google Nexus One on Android GRK39F build is a post from: Blog in Black

The easiest way would obviously be to install the software in a virtual machine and to run just Windows in such a VM with VMWare Fusion or Parallels. That’s what I usually do whenever I need to run a Windows system for development or for a certain client setup. With this flight planning software it’s a bit different as it’s really just a stand-alone software I’d like to run within OS X. So, I thought I’d give Wine a try.

Wine is a software that emulates a Windows environment via X11. It’s available for various *nix platforms and also via Macports for OS X. The installation is quite simple if you have Macports already installed (if not, follow this great tutorial from David Baumgold on how to setup Wine with Macports from scratch):

sudo port install wine

That’ll give you a working installation of Wine and you should be able to run/install Windows software (note: not every software might work easily within Wine) with:

wine whatever.exe

All that went good and well. The only issue was that I wasn’t able to print from the flight planning software. For obvious reasons I wanted to be able to print the flight plans/maps I’ve created to take them on the plane. I did some investigation and some people suggested installing CUPS-pdf. CUPS-pdf is basically a “Print to PDF”-feature for CUPS-based printing systems (as OS X is). It’s actually quite cool as it also allows one to print to PDF from the command line. CUPS-pdf is part of Macports as well and can installed by the same mechanism via port install.

Unfortunately that didn’t solve the issue. There’s a bug report on issues with Wine and OSX printing with the resolution of it being an issue in the Wine bundle within Macports not being configured for CUPS. I uninstalled Wine and installed Wine-devel instead (which is supposed to be on a version where the bundling is fixed). Still no solution for printing.

At this stage (and because I found a few more reports from people having issues with the particular combination of Macports and Wine) I resorted back to using Wineskin. Wineskin is a tool that essentially creates a Mac application wrapper around your Windows application by using an embedded version of Wine. It’s actually quite cool because it makes the experience of running a Windows application even more integrated with your Mac.

The welcome surprise – within Wineskin, I automatically had access to the pdf printer installed by CUPS-pdf and happy flight planning is on the way

Printing from Wine on OS X is a post from: Blog in Black

Let me briefly explain: D2WC is a conference about and for designers, developers, hybrid and the famous designer-developer workflow. It will go into its third iteration in 2012 and after Dee Sadler was originally trying to get me involved with the event already in 2010, I finally went in 2011 and had a great time over there (you can find my 2011 talk on Slideshare).

Apart from the fact that D2WC was an excellent conference where I met a lot of inspirational and fun people (including – but not limited to - Dave, Val and Seb) Kansas City was also a very pleasant surprise as a place to hold it and stay for a few days. The city is really interesting and has an very cool mix of beautiful old buildings and new, modern skyscrapers. Besides that I went flying – and even got some proper IFR done while I was there – went to two really good museum and discovered the area around KC a little bit.

Anyway – D2WC is back in 2012 and if you’re looking at the list of speakers on the website you might be impressed. If you’re in the US and involved with design and (web) development or work in hybrid teams, it’s a conference you should seriously consider. Even if you’re overseas, it’ll be a really worthwhile event to attend – trust me and the 7938 miles I have to travel (in a direct line) to get there.

My talk at D2WC 2012 will be about AngularJS – a very, very awesome Javascript framework:

AngularJS for developers and designers

AngularJS is a Javascript framework that comes with the subtitle “What HTML would have been had it been designed for web apps”. This talk introduces AngularJS briefly and will then show why it’s one of the best application frameworks based on the HTML5/JS/CSS-stack out there. AngularJS’ templating system and data binding mechanism usually lead to well defined responsibilities for both designers and developers. While going through the workflow of building an AngularJS app we will have a look at the different interaction points between design and development and you’ll learn how the framework helps both roles to build a well working application as well as how to create clean and maintainable front end markup and code.

I will also offer a 1/2-day hands-on workshop on May 16 (the day before the conference-proper), also on AngularJS:

A better way to build apps with JavaScript: AngularJS

AngularJS is a Javascript framework that comes with the subtitle “What HTML would have been had it been designed for web apps”. With HTML5 currently being overhyped and both Adobe as well as Microsoft turning the back to their former plugin-based poster children Flash/Flex and Silverlight, a lot of web developers ask themselves: “Now what?”. The technology stack of HTML5/JS and CSS will obviously play a more and more important role in the future; the frameworks, libraries and tools we have at hand do not quite compare to what the aforementioned plugin environments can provide though.

This becomes clear in particular when we’re trying to build complex but still well structured applications in HTML and Javascript. Even the use of frameworks such as jQuery, ExtJS etc will in many cases lead to an unfavourable architectural structure. AngularJS tried to overcome those issues and provide developers with an MVC-based architecture, Dependency Injection and Data Binding. The best is – it still works fine in combination with the JS libraries of your choice, there’s no need to drop tools like jQuery.

In this half-day hands-on class we’re going to get you started with application development in AngularJS. You should have a good working knowledge of HTML and Javascript, jQuery experience is useful, but not necessary. Topics will be: Templating, the MVC pattern in general and with AngularJS, Data Binding, View Routing and service and external resource integration.

Why would anyone travel from New Zealand to Kansas City, MO? D2WC! is a post from: Blog in Black

I don’t want to go into rant-mode (again) and start elaborating on why Adobe has made such a fool of themselves with their handling on the November-of-2011-layoffs-and-technology-decisions, you’re free to form your own opinions – there are lots of pieces on Flash Mobile, Flex, layoffs and various communication disasters around there.

But those (and some other events I really don’t want to talk about at this time and place) sent a clear message: Further diversification is needed, even if Apache Flex turns out to be the most successful thing in the world and there would be further demand for it and even if I was to become the most awesome JS coder ever and even if Adobe ColdFusion was a viable product for the rest of all times.

Back from uni and various toying-around with Haskell and Erlang I had an existing interest in Clojure. The other day I had an email conversation with my friend Sean Corfield about something CFML-related when we got into talking about Clojure. I had noticed before that Sean was doing more and more with Clojure and was quite active on Twitter when it came to this topic. Anyway –  I decided to have a look into Clojure and I really like it so far. It’s basically a Lisp-dialect for the JVM (with ports to target MSFT’s CLR and Javascript).

As Sean had shared a few interesting links and books to get started with me, I thought I’ll pass the info on and make it available for others who’d be interested in getting into Clojure.

Sites:

Home of Clojure: Clojure.org
In-Browser tutorial: http://tryclj.com
Puzzles to explore the tricks and trades of the language: http://4clojure.com

Books:

Clojure Programming (O’Reilly Rough Cuts)
The Joy Of Clojure (Manning)
Clojure in Action (Manning)

The author of the latter, Amit Rathore, is also running an online course “Introduction to Clojure” starting on January 30th via codelesson.com. I have signed up for it because it looks really, really interesting and a good way to get up to speed even faster than by playing around as I do now. Finally – there’s Clojure/West in March in San Jose. If everything goes according to my plan, I’ll be there!

That’s not all though, I do realise that Clojure is at this stage just another niche technology. There’ll be more news, updates and further plans coming in this blog as soon as I find the time to write about them.

Getting into Clojure (and other stuff) is a post from: Blog in Black

IntelliJ IDEA has a CFML plugin for a few versions now and it got quite a few enhancements with the recent release of version 11. Now, there’s also another BER update for only the plugin available that one can use to patch their IDEA 11 installation further. You can download the update from Jetbrain’s wiki, the page also describes how to patch your installation. Note: this is just for owners of the IntelliJ IDEA 11 Ultimate Edition or for people who’re using the trial of the Ultimate Edition. The CFML plugin is not part of the Community Edition.

If you’re interested in learning more about IntelliJ IDEA and the CFML plugin, Mark Mandel and I interviewed Kirill just recently on our 2DDU Podcast’s episode #17.

CFML update for IntelliJ IDEA 11 is a post from: Blog in Black

At first glance, it might make you wonder because if you’re about to apply a ColdFusion Builder 2 hot fix, one would expect ColdFusion Builder 2 to have access to a Java Runtime Environment somewhere on the machine as CF Builder 2 is based on Eclipse which itself is based on Java.

The most likely reason why this is happening to you is that there’s no JRE or JDK in your system PATH. Even though ColdFusion Builder and its installer provides and installs a JRE (which would be in the \jre\bin folder of the ColdFusion Builder 2 installation folder in a stand-alone Windows installation), this JRE is not added to the system PATH. There’s a good reason for this – basically trying to install ColdFusion Builder 2 as less system-invasive as possible.

In case there are other JREs installed on the system (and added to the PATH) the error message should not hit you as the hot fix installer would just grab said JRE from the system path. In case there is no other JRE installed, the hot fix installer (which is delivered without a JRE for size reasons) will not be able to execute its payload and therefore provide you the error message.

You might have already figured it – but this is mostly an issue on Windows. On Mac there’s usually a JRE/JDK installed anyway (not on Lion though, where you have to manually add it) and I haven’t seen this problem occurring on OS X so far (not saying that it can’t happen). Adobe’s tech note about hot fix 1 mentions this very briefly:

“Note: On Windows, ensure that JRE is in the system path. If not, set the path and proceed.”

The easiest way to deal with this (without installing another JRE/JDK) is to use the already existing one on your system. So, you could just add the following (or similar, depending on your installation) path your to your PATH: C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe ColdFusion Builder\jre\bin . After that, run the hot fix installer as described in the tech note.

ColdFusion Builder 2 Hot fix – be aware that you need a JRE is a post from: Blog in Black

Some basics: If you’re getting a “null, null” error in ColdFusion (and yes, this still does occur in ColdFusion 8 and 9 occasionally, even though there was a certain known issue in CFMX 6/6.1 that was fixed with a hotfix), that almost always points to a Null Pointer Exception somewhere in the Java application that ColdFusion is nowadays. You will also see an HTTP status code of 500 and not necessarily any log output in the ColdFusion logs. Note: double check the JRun log files, you might get some additional information from them.

The reason why you’re getting a “null, null” error in the first place is essentially because you’d be using a CFERROR tag or any other global error handler while your application ran into that Null Pointer Exception. This has been very well explained by Steven Erat and is also noted in an Adobe technote. The best way to find out more about the issue is to actually remove all of those and then have a look into what the error is really about. That might prove tricky if the error just happens sporadically, seems to be impossible to reproduce and “obviously” just hits you on production, never on dev/test or under any artificial load test scenarios. Doh. When our instance of the “null, null” error happened it was usually during night time and hard for us to debug and get into it.

Just the other week though, the error happened during day time while I was working on-site at the client’s premises and we had a chance to jump on the production system, isolated the particular CF instance from the production cluster and started digging. After switching off all the error handling we found the following error messages per occurrence of the “null, null” error:

That’s something to work with. The application is actually a large-scale Fusebox 5.5 application therefore {filename} pointed to a FB-parsed .cfm file. So – we were looking into the mentioned lines (there were a few other versions of this NPE in different areas of the site) and they all had in common that they were calling out to CFC instances in CF’s application scope (let’s call that A.cfc from now on – or better: application.A – and let the method we called be .doSomething()).

From there we looked into the application.A and the .doSomething() method that was being called and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. Within .doSomething() a few function-scoped variables were created that itself pointed to other CFCs in the application scope in the further course of .doSomething() – but again there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with that. We went ahead and removed the code from within .doSomething step-by-step to identify what would cause the NPE. Funny enough – nothing seemed to work. So we removed all the other methods from application.A until it was literally a barebone CFC structure with only an empty .doSomething() inside. Still, every request would bomb with a NullPointerException exactly in line 247.

All of a sudden I realised that application.A was actually implementing an interface (for the sake of it, let’s call it IA.cfc). IA.cfc prescribed that its implementations were supposed to have a .doSomething() function and it was working just fine in the vast majority of cases. However – removing the implements=”com.bla.IA”-atrribute in application.A fixed the NPE and the application started working again. I have absolutely no idea what happened here and why this particular implements-attribute would cause a NullPointException in some circumstances, but it did. As I said before – the application was working fine with such an architecture for more than a year. All of a sudden (and that might have been triggered by a CF- or server update or anything else) it started to occasionally get into a situation where all the app-scope’d CFCs that implemented an interface were creating those issues from time to time.

Now – if you’re having trouble with “null, null” errors in ColdFusion I definitely do not want to suggest that it is due to CFINTERFACE. In fact, most likely it won’t. There are tons of discussions out there that talk about various reasons and “solutions” for “null, null” errors such as Client variables, Cookies, Unix ports, Database drivers etc. The reality and the message to take from this is – please repeat that after me: all those are NOT reasons for the “null, null” errors. The “null, null” errors are just covering up the real NullPointerException you need to look into. In our case it was a weird behaviour of CFINTERFACE, in other cases it might be Query of Queries or whatever else. There’s NO unique solution to a “null, null” error, just a unique path to a solution.

ColdFusion “null, null” errors – CFInterface another possible reason is a post from: Blog in Black