Developer

Rename a Subversion Repository

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The scenario: You have a folder called code-repo where you keep all your svn repositories (let’s assume it is located in the root c:/ on a Windoze system).  You have a repository named xproject.  For some reason you need to rename the repository.  Let’s say it needs to by yproject.  There are 3 steps to rename the repository and retain all the history you have in the repo.

  1. Create an svn dump file of the xproject repo: svnadmin dump C:\code-repo\xproject > c:\xproject.dmp
  2. Create the new yproject svn repo: svnadmin create C:\code-repo\yproject
  3. Load the dump of the old repository into the new one: svnadmin load C:\code-repo\yproject < C:\xproject.dmp

Sweet.

Who’s down with OPPM

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I have struggled for some time now with an expanding workload.  I direct a lot of projects for a couple of different business entities.  Since I have yet to find a way to disrupt the time space continuum and add more hours to the day I am ever searching for ways to stay focused and cram more into a 24 hour day.

Enter the OPPM.

one page project manager for it projects

The OPPM (One Page Project Manager) is the most effective tool I have found yet for project tracking/communication.  The real genius of it is its simplicity.  It literally is a one page document that can be easily interpreted by the boss, the project stakeholders, the managers, or just about anyone.  All you need is about 2-5 minutes to explain it to them once.  Where can I get more information you ask?

The OPPM (One Page Project Manager) website is a good start.

Then buy the book and read it.¬† The one I read is the one specifically geared for IT projects.¬† It’s about 125 pages and you can read it (and more importantly digest it) over a weekend.¬† Actually, once you read the first two chapters of the book you’ll be up and running.¬† Although I recommend reading the whole thing to learn the finer points.¬† I found the analysis of team member personalities very interesting (I’m the one with lots of unfinished books on the nightstand).

“But dude”, you say.¬† “I just dropped a wad of cash on MS Project.”¬† Don’t fret my friend.¬† You probably still need it to manage the nitty gritty.¬† And don’t throw out your Outlook task lists.¬† You can still use them.¬† The OPPM is meant to augment standard project management tools and methods.¬† The power of OPPM shines in meetings when people actually UNDERSTAND what is going on with the project without having to be a PMP.

Get it.  Use it.  You will be glad.

ColdFusion Idol Worship

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When I was a kid I idolized athletes. In college I idolized musicians. As a middle aged dude I idolize superior programmers.

Today I achieved something I am very excited about. I got a couple of lines (and one of those is a comment) of code included in one of Ray Camden’s projects at RIAForge. The project is GoogleCal. It’s a ColdFusion CFC for interacting with Google’s Calendar service. My tiny, wee contribution: helping to submit an “all day” event. It is such a small, small, small, small, small (keep going), minuscule piece of Ray’s project, but just to be able to contribute ANYthing to someone who gives so much to the CF community is freaking AWESOME.

Check it GoogleCal out here.

Using Dreamweaver to work with .cfmail files

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I had a BIG problem recently at a hosting company for a project I work on. They had “something go wrong” during an upgrade to ColdFusion 8 and they lost our site’s settings from ColdFusion 7. Rather than wasting valuable time trying to get them to restore a backup and redo the upgrade I forged on trying to set everything right.

One of the problems I came across was that the hosting company set the mail server to be a different one than what we had for CF7. Why did this matter? Well, there were about 300 messages sitting in the “Undelivr” folder that needed to go out. In each of those messages was the old (now incorrect) mail server info. Since I was under the gun to get the mail out I pulled them all down via FTP to parse through them with Dreamweaver.

I used this article to configure Dreamweaver to edit my extensions.txt file to be able to open and perform search and replace on .cfmail files:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_16410

Here is a what the extensions.txt file looks like:

Dreamweaver\'s extensions.txt file

Once I got all of the .cfmail files updated, I FTP’d them back into the spool folder for re-processing. No dice. ColdFusion moved it all back to the “Undelivr” folder with a cryptic error:

The ColdFusion Mail Spool Encountered An Invalid Spool File In The Spool Directory. The invalid file MailXXXXXX.cfmail was moved to the undeliverable directory.

The next step… Hot Fix. Read about it here.

After the Hot Fix I again dropped the .cfmail files back into the spool folder for re-processing. This time… Sweet Success.

Enabling SSL on the ColdFusion 8 built-in web server

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This tutorial assumes default install location for ColdFusion 8 on Windows XP.

The first thing you need to do is to create a keystore. This can be done with the keytool utility. I used the one that is part of ColdFusion 8.

Open a command prompt.

Execute the following command:
cd C:\ColdFusion8\runtime\jre\bin

Create the keystore with this command:
keytool -genkey -dname "cn=127.0.0.1, ou=CF, o=cfchimp, L=Decatur, ST=GA, C=US" -keyalg rsa -keystore mykey

If you have previously configured a keystore you might run into this error:
keytool error: java.lang.Exception: Key pair not generated, alias already exists

If you got the “already exists” error run this command to list the keystores:
keytool -list -v | more

If you got the “already exists” error run this command to delete the keystore:
keytool -delete -alias mykey

If you got the “already exists” error re-run the command to create the keystore.

Enter in a password when prompted (2 times)

Move the keystore file (mykey) to C:\ColdFusion8\runtime\lib\

Edit the config file C:\ColdFusion8\runtime\servers\coldfusion\SERVER-INF\jrun.xml with an xml editor of choice. This file is VERY sensitive so be sure to not screw up the syntax of it. You should probably make a copy of it before you edit it.


<!-- Uncomment this service to use SSL with the JRun Web Server
Note that you MUST create your own keystore before using this service -->
<service class="jrun.servlet.http.SSLService" name="SSLService">
<attribute name="enabled">true </attribute>
<attribute name="interface">* </attribute>
<attribute name="port">9100 </attribute>
<attribute name="keyStore">{jrun.rootdir}/lib/mykey </attribute>
<attribute name="keyStorePassword">mypassword </attribute>
<attribute name="trustStore">{jrun.rootdir}/lib/trustStore </attribute>
<attribute name="socketFactoryName">jrun.servlet.http.JRunSSLServerSocketFactory </attribute>
</service>

Restart the ColdFusion8 application service.

Create a test page in the ColdFusion 8 wwwroot and opening it in a web browser using: https://127.0.0.1:9100/testpage.cfm

You should be good to go.

REFERENCES:
For some keytool commands: http://www.instantssl.com/ssl-certificate-support/server_faq/ssl-server-certificate-java.html
Adobe instructions: http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/using/ssl_with_cf_web_server/ssl_with_cf_web_server03.html

SVN Global Ignore Pattern

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Here is an SVN Global Ignore Pattern that you might find useful:

._* .project .DS_Store Thumbs.db WS_FTP.LOG _notes _vti_* *.LCK

You implement it in the Windows world using TortoiseSVN’s settings tab. It looks like this:

For the mac you need to edit subversion’s config file:

pico ~/.subversion/config

Uncomment the global-ignores line and modify it to look something like this:

global-ignores = ._* .project .DS_Store Thumbs.db WS_FTP.LOG _notes _vti_* *.LCK _sources

Coldfusion Administrator (CFAdmin) Improperly Framed

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Has anyone ever logged into the Colfusion Administrator to find it improperly framed? Once you click a link in the outermost frame the problem goes away. Initially, it looks like this:

Coldfusion Administrator (CFAdmin) Improperly Framed

If you have seen this (and know how to fix it) PLEASE let me know. It has looked like this on our server at work since CF6 and I have finally grown weary of it.

Thanks!

Save, Format, View Dreamweaver Search Results

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For as long as I can remember I have wanted a formatted, printable report of Dreamweaver search results. Since Dreamweaver’s “Save Report” of the results pane is an xml file I have always been too lazy to pursue it. I have finally put forth a little effort to generate one using XSLT. XSLT stands for XSL Transformations. XSLT “transforms” XML documents into other formats, like XHTML.

Download the search_results.xsl file here. Unzip it. It is the file that will perform the styling of your XML results file. Hang on to it for now.

Open Dreamweaver’s “Find and Replace” window (Command + F). Enter your search criteria and click “Find All”.

.DW Finder Window

In the “Results” pane click the save icon.
DW Results Pane

You can accept Dreamweaver’s default file name or give the file a name related to your search. I’ll call mine Post.xml. Save it in the same directory where you put search_results.xsl. Open Post.xml (or whatever you called it) with Dreamweaver and add the one line of code annotated below with the red arrow.

XSL code

Now open your Post.xml file with a web browser such as Safari. You should see your search report formatted as follows:

Post.xml

You now have a nice printable report complete with results total.

*** UPDATED 2/27/2015 ***

As a security measure Chrome blocks access to local files. You must open Chrome from the command line with a flag to allow access to local files.

Follow these steps to allow local file access in Chrome on the Mac:

  • If you have Chrome open, close it
  • Open a terminal window
  • Execute the command: 
    open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app --args --allow-file-access-from-files
  • Once Chrome opens select ‘File > Open File’ and browse to your local xml file
  • Voilà

DOS .bat files (What I learned from writing a subversion backup script)

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Comments
REM Comment Style 1
:: Comment Style 2
Set a variable
SET myCat=Dante
Output a variable
ECHO %myCat%
If then Else statement
if %yCat%== "Dante" (ECHO MY CAT) ELSE (ECHO NOT MY CAT)
Output a command’s result to a file
dir >> log.txt
Split a command across 2 lines (use ^ at the end of the line)
ECHO This is line one and ^
this is line 2.
Two commands on 1 line (separate with &)
echo command 1 & echo command2
List only directory names and no info
dir /b /ad
For-in-do (For every item do something)
FOR /F %%G IN ('dir /b /ad %repodir%') DO ECHO %%G