Digital Rewind

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.

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.

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

Web Icons

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:48:50 GMT

I am forever doing admin utilities for our web projects, CMS, Link managers, Photo Uploaders etc. With my limited art/fireworks skills I could never make anything that looked right :P. The other day I found a great website for icons. There are a ton of them and they look really nice. if you are art challenged like me check them out.

Check them out : FAMFAMFAM

MYSQL Slow Subquery using IN

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:00:00 GMT

I finally found the correct information today to figure out why some kinds of subqueries take forever to come back in mysql. If you are using a subquery with a MYSQL IN() like this:

select o.ack,o.product from orders o where o.ack in ( select distinct ack from orders where status in ('Shipped','Cancelled') group by ack having DATE_ADD( DATE_SUB( now( ) , INTERVAL DAYOFMONTH( now( ) ) - 1 DAY ) , INTERVAL -3 MONTH ) max(status_date))) order by o.ack, o.line

It takes a few minutes to return a result. If you take the same query and reorder it to put the subquery in the from with a join it comes back almost instanty :

select o.ack,o.product from orders o inner join (select distinct ack from orders where status in ('Shipped','Cancelled') group by ack having DATE_ADD( DATE_SUB( now( ) , INTERVAL DAYOFMONTH( now( ) ) - 1 DAY ) , INTERVAL -3 MONTH ) > max(status_date)) old_o on o.ack = old_o.ack order by o.ack, o.line

It's interesting on MSSQL that the IN() subquery syntax is much faster.

Here's a link to the bug report:

bugs.mysql.com/bug.php ( Thanks Jeremy Pointer )