Digital Rewind

Connecting to EC2 with Transmit

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:54:00 GMT

This example is for Amazon Linux EC2 so your milage will vary. Click the [+] to add a site to transmit:

You need to select sFTP as your protocal, enter either your instance name given to you by AWS or the domain you use to access it. The user will be ec2-user with no password. You should have saved your PEM key file to your local system to you can SSH and manage your instance. I put it in ~/Documents/ec2-keys/[yourkey].pem. Then go to the command line and change directory to the ~/Documents/ec2-keys/ folder in this case and run :

chmod 700 [yourkey].pem ssh-add [yourkey].pem

Also a special note you have to do the ssh-add command again if you reboot or logoff.

Sam Moore's New Website

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:47:30 GMT

We just finished the updated layout programming for Sam Moore. They wanted the site to look more like the existing www.hookerfurniture.com parent site while adding updated meta data, social networking, fabrics, and product information. The site was originally in ASP/HTML and didn't match their new marketing. It's been completely redone with Coldfusion, mySQL, jQuery, and YUI grids.

View the Previous Site for Comparison

Coldfusion MYSQL JDBC Data Truncated for Column on Import

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:00:14 GMT

This post is more for my notes so I remember it, but once again Ben Nadel's blog saved the day.

MYSQL MultiQueries 1

MYSQL MultiQueries 2

My problem was similar, but I was getting "Data Truncated for Column" errors using MYSQL import. To stop this error, basically just let mysql truncate teh fields without throwing the error. Follow Ben's instructions for whichever version of the driver you are using. Except you want to add jdbcCompliantTruncation=false to the driver. If you have multiple parameters then you separate them with an &.

Bassett Mirror Company's New Website

Fri, 20 May 2011 23:36:41 GMT

My friend's over at Chatmoss Web Systems launched the updated version of Bassett Mirror Company's website this week.

I think they did a wonderfull job, but you may be asking why am I posting about it? I helped out with the images :) The site is being powered by our image library and web services from FurnishWEB written in Coldfusion and hosted on Amazon's S3.

Installing Railo on EC2 with Amazon Linux

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 23:24:25 GMT

After following the Comments on Ben's blog about EC2 and Railo I dedcided to type up my notes in case they might help anyone. This assumes you know how to setup an account and the firewall. There is a GUI on the amazon site to do all this and setup your security files to SSH. If not google and you can find videos.

1. Setup an EC2 account and launch an Amazon Linux AMI instance with the security settings to have ports :20, 21, 22, 80, 3306,8888 open.

2. Once it's launched ssh to your new instance as ec2-user

3. sudo su - ( logs you in as root )

Update AMAZON LINUX

yum update

Install MYSQL

yum install mysql mysql-server

This installs mysql just follow the prompts.

chkconfig mysqld on

This sets mysql to run on the start of the instance. ( edit the server settings in /etc/my.cnf with nano )

service mysqld start

This starts MYSQL on your instance for the first time.

cd /usr/bin/ ./mysql_secure_installation

This file lets you setup the mysql root password and disable other stuff. The default mysql root password is "blank" so you must run this script.

CREATE USER ’remote_user’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ’password’; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON . TO ’remote_user’@’localhost’; CREATE USER ’remote_user’@’%’ IDENTIFIED BY ’password’; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON . TO ’remote_user’@’%’;

% lets your user login from anywhere usually this is a bad idea. Set it to your IP address will be connecting remotely from. Localhost setups up the user so your Railo DSN's can talk to mysql. Change 'password' to a secure password you want to use.

Apache

yum install httpd httpd-devel chkconfig httpd on service httpd start

This is similar to how we did mysql. If you navigate to your instance http://[yourinstancename].compute-1.amazonaws.com/ you should get the apache start screen.

RAILo

cd /tmp wget http://railo.viviotech.net/downloader.cfm/id/15/file/railo-3.2.1.000-pl0-linux-x64-installer.run chmod 777 railo-3.2.1.000-pl0-linux-x64-installer.run ./railo-3.2.1.000-pl0-linux-x64-installer.run

This runs the installer you'll need the folders below. On the 64bit version the defaults work. Apache is 2.2 for the connector.

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd /usr/lib64/httpd/modules /etc/httpd/conf.d

http://[yourinstancename].compute-1.amazonaws.com:8888 http://[yourinstancename].compute-1.amazonaws.com:8888/railo-context/admin/web.cfm http://[yourinstancename].compute-1.amazonaws.com:8888/railo-context/admin/server.cfm

Railo will now be running you can get to it by your EC2 name and port 8888 check the server and web admin to make sure the passwords are setup.

Configuring a new site on APACHE and RAILO

The sites need to be setup in railo and apache we'll setup a test site so you can see what to do.

On you laptop edit your hosts file and add an entry for :

999.999.999.999 mytestdomain.com 999.999.999.999 www.mytestdomain.com

Substitue your EC2 ip for 999.999.999.999

on your EC2 instance :

cd /var/www/ mkdir mytestdomain.com cd mytestdomain.com mkdir html cd html nano index.cfm cd .. cd .. chmod -R 777 mytestdomain.com

Setup the folder for Apache and Railo. And add a default index.cfm page with hello world in it. This is where your code will go.

nano /opt/railo/tomcat/conf/server.xml

At the end of the file near the example add:

www.mytestdomain.com

This will add the webroot to railo

/opt/railo/railo_ctl restart

This will reboot railo to see the new web folder.

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

ctr-w : index.html and add index.cfm to the end of the DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.cfm line.

service restart httpd

Restart Apache

Navigate to www.mytestdomain.com and you should be running Railo

This is just a summary of my notes to get everything running. Obviously your milage will vary and you need to know about running Apache,MYSQL, and railo :). Good Luck.

Notes and stuff

nano /opt/railo/tomcat/bin/setenv.sh [to setup memory settings for railo]

/opt/railo/railo_ctl restart [restart railo]

Railo SES URL subfolders with Tomcat

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 03:49:10 GMT

This is a continuation of my last post. In my effort to not have a million domain names and hosts file edits; I setup my TOMCAT server on ec2 the same way as the jetty server on my laptop :). This is to get SES urls to work on TOMCAT in a subfolder.

To get http://my.ec2-server.com/site1/index.cfm/fuseaction/my.page/test/1 to function properly we do something similar to Jetty. This time we edit the /opt/railo/tomcat/conf/web.xml file. Search for /index.cfm/*

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>CFMLServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/index.cfm/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>CFMLServlet</servlet-name>  
    <url-pattern>/site1/index.cfm/*</url-pattern>  
</servlet-mapping>

Run /opt/railo/railo_ctl restart And you are all set.

Railo SES URL subfolders with Jetty

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 15:57:08 GMT

I've been working my way through learning the ins and outs of Railo over the last few months. So far I'm impressed, but still trying to figure out all the quirks.

Our sites use Fusebox and SES url's and for some reason they would work on my EC2 instance and not on my laptop. If I searched for a solution most of the posts were old and pointed to .cfm/* and .cfc/* needing to be added to the /railo/etc/defaultweb.xml. It seems in the latest download these are already added. So that didn't help me. I finally figured it out though. When I develop on my laptop I have all my webs in subfolders under the main web root : http://localhost:8888/cfbuilder/site1/index.cfm/fuseaction/my.page/test/1 for example. The mappings only seem to work if the site is in the root. So to get this to work you have to add :

<servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>CFMLServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>*.cfm</url-pattern> <url-pattern>*.cfml</url-pattern> <url-pattern>*.cfc</url-pattern> <url-pattern>*.cfm/*</url-pattern> <url-pattern>*.cfml/*</url-pattern> <url-pattern>*.cfc/*</url-pattern> <url-pattern>/*.cfm/*</url-pattern> <url-pattern>/cfbuilder/site1/index.cfm/*</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping>

Kinda of a pain to add each site manually to the file, but it works. So I can't complain too much.

Vaughan-Bassett on ABC News made in America

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 02:04:39 GMT

One of our clients was on ABC news Made in America tonight. A Dallas family replaced all their foreign made items with American made items which from the looks of the clips was harder than they thought.

If you go to the listing of the items they bought for the house the bedroom furniture comes from Vaughan-Bassett in Galax, Virginia.

We built their site on Coldfusion, MYSQL, and Fusebox.

Yahoo SLURP! why are you so greedy?

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:25:09 GMT

Yesterday our servers were being hammered from IP address : 67.195.37.172 which appears to be the Yahoo indexer. Then today I read a tweet from Ben Nadel he was having the same thing happen. So I thought I would write a quick post in case some others were having the same issue.

On the Yahoo SLURP! page they suggest adding :

Crawl-delay:10

to your robots.txt file. Where the number is the seconds of delay before it hits you with another request.

This seemed to stop the problem unless SLURP! just gave up :)

In doing more research there appears to also be a

Visit-time: 1800-2330

entry you can make but nothing supports it right now. I added it just in case.

Amazon Linux AMI and Coldfusion 9

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:07:10 GMT

For fun this weekend I was playing with the Amazon Linux on EC2 with Coldfusion 9. Since Amazon Linux is based on CENTOS I figured it shouldn't be too hard to get it to work so why not... I'll make the disclaimer now that CENTOS and Amazon Linux are not offically supported, but we have been running Coldfusion 7/8 on CENTOS for a couple years now and it seems to work great once you get the installer and apache connector to work.

I used Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI 1.0 on a Micro T1 instance for my test. Setting up launching and connecting to the instance is a bit out of reach for this post, but I just used the AWS console and followed the instructions to create my key-pair to SSH in.

Once you have the instance launched and you are connected you use YUM to install apache:

yum install httpd
yum install httpd-devel
yum install libstdc++.so.5

[The httpd-devl and libstdc++.so.5 are required by the Coldfusion installer]

Then Run:

chkconfig httpd on

[This makes Apache start when the Image starts or you reboot it if you are on an EBS instance]

Then you need to get the Linux 64bit Coldfusion 9 off the Adobe website. it's kinda silly you can't get to it with Curl, wGet, or Lynx. So I downloaded it and put it on a private S3 Bucket the used curl to download it to my new instance

Then I followed Willem Redelijkheid's post on installing on CENTOS for directions on installing Coldfusion 9 and it worked like a charm. Only one slight oddity when the Installer progress bar got to the end on the script it sat there for the longest time. I hit enter and it displayed the Coldfusion install finished method. Not sure why.

Hope this helps someone else. If you are running Coldfusion 9 on Amazon Linux ping me in the comments to let me know how it's going.

CFIMAGE CMYK workaround to RGB

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:49:29 GMT

I deal with a large amount of CMYK images for work. Some with Color Profiles and some without. So far Coldfusion hasn't been much help. Although it gets closer with each new release. Here is my workaround to convert CMYK images into RGB until Adobe lets us convert images with the CFIMAGE tag.

Starting Image

Above is the starting image of my faithful coding companion Bailey. I converted it to CMYK and added the U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 color profile in Photoshop. When you try and read this image in Coldfusion 8/9 it throws:

 <cfimage action="info" source="#expandpath(".")#/images/bailey-cmyk-profile-800x600.jpg" structname="cmyk" />

An exception occurred while trying to read the image. Unsupported Image Type

This is where Imagemagick comes in. We can convert the image to RGB and remove the color profiles so we can continue. I chose to use a BASH script that I call with CFEXECUTE, but it appears to work calling it directly from CFEXECUTE. I had problems in the past with this so I have always done it this way, in case you were wondering.

#!/bin/bash
infile=$1
outfile=$2
/usr/bin/convert $infile -strip -colorspace rgb -quality 100  $outfile
echo "Convert Finished"
exit 0

I pass this script the file I want to convert and where I want to create the new RGB version. The -strip command removes all the Photoshop meta data and the color profile. The -colorspace rgb command converts the image from CMYK to RGB. Finally the -quality 100 sets the JPG quality setting for the new image, I created the original at 100 so I just kept it that way for the new one. (It can be adjusted to your personal preference or requirement from 1 to 100.) The new image will keep the same dimensions and resolution as the original image had to start.

Coldfusion Example

<cftry>
<!--- Try to get image info --->
<cfimage action="info" source="#expandpath(".")#/images/bailey-cmyk-profile-800x600.jpg" structname="cmyk" />
 <cfcatch type="any">
 <!--- If it fails convert to RGB and Strip Information with ImageMagick --->
 <cfexecute name="#expandpath(".")#/img_to_rgb.sh" 
  arguments="#expandpath(".")#/images/bailey-cmyk-profile-800x600.jpg #expandpath(".")#/images-convert/bailey-rgb-800x600.jpg" 
  timeout="30" variable="msg" />
 </cfcatch>
</cftry>
<!--- Image can now be read --->
<cfimage action="info" source="#expandpath(".")#/images/bailey-rgb-800x600.jpg" structname="cmyk" />

In the Coldfusion example i created here I first try to read the image information. If this fails I call the script to convert the image to RGB and remove the profile information. Then I read the file with CFIMAGE and it works. If that fails then you started out with a bum image to begin with.

If you aren't on OS X or Linux and want to call ImageMagick directly it would work like this :

<cftry>
  <!--- Try to get image info --->
  <cfimage action="info" source="#expandpath(".")#/images/bailey-cmyk-profile-800x600.jpg" structname="cmyk" />
  <cfcatch type="any">
   <!--- If it fails convert to RGB and Strip Information with ImageMagick --->
   <cfexecute name="/usr/bin/convert" 
   arguments="#expandpath(".")#/images/bailey-cmyk-profile-800x600.jpg -strip -colorspace rgb -quality 100 #expandpath(".")#/images/bailey-rgb-800x600.jpg" 
   timeout="30" variable="msg" />
  </cfcatch>
</cftry>
<!--- Image can now be read --->
<cfimage action="info" source="#expandpath(".")#/images/bailey-rgb-800x600.jpg" structname="cmyk" />

RGB Image

So here is the new image of Bailey that is now RGB and all the Profile information removed. The coloring of the image changes slightly when you convert it to RGB from CMYK, but so far I haven't found a way to get it any closer. You can also resize and get the image info with Imagemagick, but I am doing that with CFIMAGE. In hopes that I can one day just comment this out and all the operations will work consistantly. Maybe Adobe will fix that in the next release so this can all be done in CFIMAGE.

Hope this helps out others struggling with the same issue. This works well ( I have converted thousands of images) on Linux and OS X. I haven't tried it on windows, but I would assume it would work by either calling it directly or wrapping it in a BATCH file. If anyone tries it on Windows let me know.

Vote for CFIMAGE to convert CMYK to RGB

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:55:13 GMT

Vote for this Bug / enhancement Fix

Feature Request Form

We work with a lot of CMYK formatted images for our clients. Their original photography comes from the studio as CMYK Jpegs. They need to be converted to RGB format for use on our Internet sites so we can't use CFIMAGE to create thumbnails or smaller photography. The only choice we have is to use Imagemagick on the server for all of the image conversion or convert it with Imagemagick and then Resize with CFIMAGE.

If you are in the same boat please vote it up or put in a feature request.

Hello World! - Mango Blog Update

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 00:57:38 GMT

Hello! and welcome to my blog. This is my first post just to see how things are working.

Migrating over to Mango Blog. Will have some of the old content up shortly. Then I will take a stab at making the updates more regularly.

Defaulting cursor to the first input box with jQuery

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:35:14 GMT

Here's a short and simple javascript using Jquery to put the cursor in the first text box on a web page. I added this to one of our sites to make sure the cursor starts in the different forms / search boxes on all the pages of our site.

<script type="text/javascript"></script>

It's using Jquery to find the FIRST : INPUT tag with a TYPE="TEXT" on the page. Then it selects it to move the cursor.

mySQL Updates from more than one table

Fri, 01 May 2009 04:00:00 GMT

I can never seem to remember the mySQL syntax for JOINED updates when I need them and the mysql documentation on their site doesn't help a whole lot. Then I always forget what the exact phase to google for. (Joined updates, multi-table updates, updating from one table to another, etc..) I found some great examples over on the electictoolbox that makes it dead simple.

So I am posting it here as a reminder later on , and in case someone else was wondering how to do it and couldn't find it.

ELECTRICTOOLBOX JOINED UPDATE EXAMPLES