Prasanth's blog

Create shortcut for restarting ColdFusion 8 server

2009-12-09T19:40:00.000+05:30

While developing applications in ColdFusion we may have to restart the CF server occasionally. We have to go to "Windows Services" and then restart the server. This can easily be achieved by creating a shortcut for the restarting process so that you can just click and restart the CF application server without going to the windows services window.

For this, you have to first find out the location of jrunsvc.exe. You can find this by going to Services window (by running services.msc) and open the ColdFusion 8 Application Server. Take the whole path from "Path to executable" along with quotes. Also take the "Service name" (this should be "ColdFusion 8 Application Server").

Now, open a notepad and enter two lines as below.

<"Path to executable"> -stop <"Service name">
<"Path to executable"> -start <"Service name">

and save the file as a batch file with a name of your choice (I prefer restartCF.bat).

So, the content of the batch file as per the example will be :

"C:\ColdFusion8\runtime\bin\jrunsvc.exe" -stop "ColdFusion 8 Application Server"
"C:\ColdFusion8\runtime\bin\jrunsvc.exe" -start "ColdFusion 8 Application Server"

Just double click this file and your CF Application server will be restarted.

Dr. SMS – a m-Health Information System for Kerala

2009-11-16T21:58:00.000+05:30

I just saw information about this useful service from Kerala Government.

Dr. SMS – a m-Health Information System for Kerala

You can send SMS to 9495949000 in the following format to get information about hospital facilities.

More details are on the original link of Kerala IT Mission (Click here). I tried the link for Dr.SMS and it was not working. So thought of posting this in my blog.

The format for SMS are :
1. Find Hospital : Input - > Health <Pincode> <facility>
Output : <Hospital Name, Address, phone>
2. Hospital Facilities : Input - > Health <Hospital name>
Output: <Hospital phone No, Major facilities>

and send SMS to 9495949000.

Of course, the facility is working but only during day I assume. My SMS at 10 P.M was replied at 9 A.M next morning.

Location-Aware Browsing in Firefox 3.5

2009-11-11T20:36:00.002+05:30

   Firefox 3.5 have incorporated the facility to let the websites identify the location of the site visitor. The technique is that, when the user browse a site that use location-aware browsing, Firefox will ask for user consent and send details like IP address to Geolocation service providers and get the location. This may not be accurate in India, but they were able to point out my location accurately to the city :-)

   More details are in Firefox site http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/ where you can also see the demo.

   I will do a demo and post the code on my site later.

Gartner Research note on Adobe ColdFusion

2009-10-09T08:19:00.000+05:30

See the research note by Gartner on Adobe ColdFusion Past, Present and Future.
http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/pdfs/Adobe3112.pdf

Adobe released ColdFusion 9 at Adobe Max

2009-10-06T21:33:00.002+05:30

Folks, for your information, Adobe has officially released Adobe ColdFusion 9 at Adobe MAX today.
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/

Create a twitter reader using JQuery

2009-09-08T23:30:00.007+05:30

The year of JavaScript has come and JQuery is one of the powerful JavaScript libraries out there. We could perform a multitude of tasks using these libraries. I have created a twitter reader that displays a user's timeline using JQuery. The implementation is very simple.

See the code below.

<html>
<head>
<title>Twitter Reader</title>
<script src="jquery.js" language="javascript"></script>
</head>
<body align="center" bgcolor="#181C21">
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
var twitterURL = 'http://twitter.com/users/show/prasanthkumars.json';
$.getJSON("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/prasanthkumars.json?callback=?",
function(data){
$.each(data,function(i, item){
$("<div style='color:#865833'>"+item.text+"</div>").appendTo("body");
});
$("div").filter(function(index){
return (index % 2 == 0);
}).css("background","#1FC8FE").css("width","30%");
$("div").filter(function(index){
return (index > 0 && index % 2 != 0);
}).css("background","#CBF2FF").css("width","30%");
});
});
</script>
<div id="twitterResponseDiv" name="twitterResponseDiv" style="font-family:verdana;color:green;background-color:#CBF2FF;width:30%">
Twitter Response Div
</div>
</body>
</html>

I have included the jquery.js file to the page and then used the getJSON method to load JSON data using an HTTP GET request. On receipt of data, it is looped and the text is displayed in different divs which is attached to the body element.

For showing different colors for alternating divs. I have used the filter function available with JQuery.

References :

http://docs.jquery.com/Getjson
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-API-Documentation

SAAS and other online free services - How to save your data remotely and access from anywhere?

2009-07-05T10:16:00.005+05:30

The new model of software application development cannot ignore the methodology of SAAS that is beneficial for both the customers and companies. In SAAS method, you only pay for what you use, unlike buying the whole suite of applications in which you rarely use options other than a few. If you get MS Office as a SAAS app, you can pay for the Excel or Word and only for the time you use.

Coming to the main point of this blog post, “How to save your data remotely and access from anywhere?” I remember the time around 10 years back when I bought my first PC. The Internet was available only for the elite community at a premium and that too dialup. We have to literally pray for the connection to get successful and pray more for not getting disconnected in between. With a little over 8 kbps max speed, you can browse a lot of static sites and check your mails. Hotmail was the free service that give you 2 MB which was more than enough, and who was out there to spam you?

Things have changed with Google entering the email arena with unlimited storage space. By that time broadband came down to households. Now you have thousands of MP3, hundreds of movies and hopefully very little useful data on your hard disk.

But if one day, your hard disk breaks down or your OS gets corrupted. All the data and customizations you made are lost!!! No. you have a 500 GB backup hard drive and you keep a backup of everything you do in that. You can simply restore everything from the backup. Good idea, but you always have to sync the data, keep the versions and also carry it everywhere you go.

The other way is to store everything, at least your documents, to the web and access from anywhere, anytime, but with an internet connection.

The applications / services noted below can be accessed with Mozilla, which is available on Windows, Linux and Mac.

1. Google Docs and Gears engine (http://docs.google.com)

Create, edit and save your documents using Google Docs. It has a word processor, spread sheet and presentation support. We can also share these documents with friends and track the changes. Also, export them to different formats like pdf, ods, doc etc.

If you are a frequent traveler and don’t get access to net while traveling, you can enable Google Gears support to Google Docs so that the documents are available offline and are synced when we get online.

For using Google Docs you need a Google account.

Similar Services:

a. Adobe Acrobat

2. X-Marks – bookmark sharing (http://www.xmarks.com/)

x-marks provides synchronization facility for your bookmarks automatically. For using x-marks you just need to install the plug-in for FireFox and create and x-marks account. Now you can access your bookmarks from any machine and synchronize it. You also can view the bookmarks online at x-marks site. The add-on is available for IE and Safari too.

3. Online storage

x-Drive was one of the popular online free storage service provider, but have been closed recently after being acquired by AOL. There are more players out there, one is Adobe Acrobat. By creating an account on Adobe, you can get a multitude of features like word processor, free storage, desktop sharing, and file sharing using the Adobe Acrobat AIR application that gets automatically installed along with Adobe Acrobat 9.

4. Calendar

Online calendars are a best place to track your appointments. Google Calendar offers facilities like sending SMS reminder, sending email reminders, XML import and sharing calendar with friends. If you are using Thunderbird with Lightning (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/) plug-in, you can add the Google calendar to your Thunderbird. But you should be online while using this feature. For MS Outlook, Google is providing a free synchronization application (http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=98563) that will synchronize the GCal data to Outlook. Additionally, if you own a Nokia Mobile, you can synchronize the data with all these services using PC Suite.

Sava CMS - first impression

2009-04-08T22:01:00.005+05:30

I tried setting up SAVA CMS standard in my machine. The installation was very easy. Just gave the required setup mappings in the ColdFusion administrator and DataBase and the site was up.

The WYSIWYG editor is cool to use. I tried creating inner pages and links. They are displaying very nice. It even creates a bread crumbs.

Try uploading items to Gallery. It will display very neatly. Click on the item, you can see the implementation of Shadow box.

The team have surely done a nice work in bringing SAVA CMS.

Remove unnecessary blank lines from the ColdFusion output

2009-08-13T21:45:00.004+05:30

ColdFusion outputs blank lines on the data sent to the browser which can sometimes get higher that it will be many times higher than actual output lines. In some cases this will eat into the bandwidth. To avoid this, check the 'Enable Whitespace Management' under 'Settings' in ColdFusion Administrator. This will remove many of the extra spaces, tabs, and carriage returns that ColdFusion might otherwise persist from the CFML source file. Enabling this could lead to a minor performance issue with the CF Server, but compare with the bandwidth gain and decide to use this feature.

OpenSearch - enabling your site with OpenSearch

2009-07-17T22:06:00.004+05:30

You must have seen list of search engines in mozilla search bar (usually to the right end after address bar). There are a list of sites like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia on the list from which we can choose the default search engine. These sites are OpenSearch enabled. The Mozilla browser can directly send search queries from the search bar to these sites. There are lot of sites which are OpenSearch enabled. We can easily identify a site is OpenSearch by looking at the arrow icon on the search bar in Mozilla.

If the site is OpenSearch enabled, there will be glow for the arrow icon

You can click the arrow to see the option "Add " so that the search the site will also get listed in the search engine list. You can search that site by directly entering the search term on the mozilla browser search box and selecting the site from the list of search engines.

More details, the demo and how to enable OpenSearch on the following link http://www.prasanthkumars.com/searchdemo.asp.

Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT)

2009-07-05T16:33:00.001+05:30

25 Reasons Why Someone Should Join Twitter

2009-06-06T17:41:00.001+05:30

One of my friends tweeted these links

25 Reasons Why Someone Should Join Twitter

The Ultimate List of Twitter Tools

Y! = why not = Yahoo

2009-06-03T23:34:00.003+05:30

Just came to my mind the Y! that is usually seen in Yahoo sites. Does that mean Why Not ? I'm not sure... but that will be nice to find out.

How to show blurry images first and then progressively show clear image

2009-04-29T22:30:00.007+05:30


Interlaced	Normal

We have a slow net connection and when we browse our site we can see that the images are loaded line by line from top to bottom. We can change this behaviour by saving the image as Progressive (jpeg) or Interlaced (gif). We can achieve this using GIMP or there are lot of free image editing softwares out there.

The Interlaced image will have a bit more size than normal image, but the user will have a better experience.

Try loading the two images in different window and see the difference.

The Interlaced image will first load the whole image, but the image will be blurred. This will get sharper and finally the clearer image will be displayed.

In case of normal image, the section of image loaded will be sharp, but the whole image will not be loaded at once.

Free ColdFusion CMS

2009-04-08T07:19:00.000+05:30

Sava has released a free CMS in ColdFusion. More details after I try it...

Even adobe don't test site properly

2009-04-02T08:41:00.002+05:30

See the screengrab from http://www.adobe.com/misc/training.html on April 02, 2009. The commented out code is not proper....

A construction in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala that is visible from sky.

2009-03-25T06:50:00.005+05:30

The Photos of Sree Padmanabha Swamy temple from Google Earth.

Easily viewable wallpaper

2009-03-19T22:32:00.006+05:30

Sometimes the icons on your desktop will not be easily recognizable due to the color of wallpaper. Just try this method to blur the part of wallpaper where the icons appear. You can easily view the desktop icons without much effect on the wallpaper. Using Photoshop or GIMP, select a rectangular area where the icons come and apply Gaussian Blur. Now use this image as wallpaper and see the difference.

Eco friendly printing

2009-03-19T22:12:00.003+05:30

Why not save ink while printing? Here is the Eco friendly font that is designed specially to save ink. It is free to download and use. http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html Tip: If you are using mono laser printer, another way to save ink is to change the font color to red. This will reduce the amount of ink used while printing.

Flash Movie always on top in browser

2009-03-10T21:19:00.003+05:30

If you happen to embed a Flash / Flex .swf file in a HTML page and also put a full screen Div over the content, you could probably see that the flash file is on top of the Div even though you set the z-index of the Div. The solution is simple. Add the wmode param while setting the swf Object to the page.
This will make the flash file appear below your Div.

Printer friendly page

2009-03-19T21:39:00.002+05:30

Usually we see links in web pages to show another version of page that is printer friendly. But, we can create a page such that it will display correctly in browser, but while printing, we can decide which all content to be printed. This is achieved with CSS. The method is simple. You create a style sheet such that the content that you do not want to appear in print will be given the attribute 'display:none'. This style sheet is add to you page with an additional attribute media="print". So, when the user choose to print the page, this style sheet will be considered and the content that are given the display:none attribute will be hidden. http://envisionic.com/webtips/user_experience/printer_friendly.php

'Simple' difference between Proprietory and Free software

2009-03-19T21:20:00.006+05:30

See the two images from Visual Studio and Eclipse. While Studio tells 'Close all but this', Eclipse simply tells 'Close Others'.

IT magazine stops print edition

2009-03-16T21:30:00.005+05:30

The magazine I.T from the efy group had sent out his last print issue. In the editorial of the Mar 2009 issue they have informed the subscribers about their decision to stop print and move entirely to web which will be available for free.

The existing users will get an option to get a refund of the remaining subscription amount or switch to another magazine from the group.

IIS very slow after ColdFusion 8 service is stopped.

2009-03-03T20:44:00.003+05:30

This is a technote from my experience. I had ColdFusion 8 server installed on my machine. After I stopped ColdFusion service (change to start manually) and restarted the machine, IIS was responding very slow. I was not aware that CF8 had created this issue. I tried to find the reason using the tools provided by Microsoft (DebugDiag.msi and ApplicationVerifier.x86.msi) and found that the JRun of CF server is making the IIS unresponsive.

The solution was simple. Just start the CF server service on the machine and IIS will be back to normal.

Danger from Space Debris

2009-02-17T22:18:00.002+05:30

As man had reached to outer space, so do the waste. Now the amount of space debris had reached to a serious level that UN had issued a warning about them causing danger to space flights. Space debris often are created by the remains of rockets, parts of satellites and even defunct satellites. Recently, an Iridium communication satellite had collided with a defunct Russian satellite above Sibera. The Iridium communication satellite was a part of the 66 satellites that are used to provide satellite communication.

The debris that fall to earth usually get burned out in outer atmosphere itself, but some metals like Ti will not be burned out and can cause damage to earthly objects. In years to come the amount of debris will only increase which will create considerable safety problems to the ISS.

Prasanth's blog

Create shortcut for restarting ColdFusion 8 server

Dr. SMS – a m-Health Information System for Kerala

Location-Aware Browsing in Firefox 3.5

Gartner Research note on Adobe ColdFusion

Adobe released ColdFusion 9 at Adobe Max

Create a twitter reader using JQuery

SAAS and other online free services - How to save your data remotely and access from anywhere?

Sava CMS - first impression

Remove unnecessary blank lines from the ColdFusion output

OpenSearch - enabling your site with OpenSearch

Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT)

blog of Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT)

25 Reasons Why Someone Should Join Twitter

Y! = why not = Yahoo

How to show blurry images first and then progressively show clear image

Free ColdFusion CMS

Even adobe don't test site properly

A construction in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala that is visible from sky.

Easily viewable wallpaper

Eco friendly printing

Flash Movie always on top in browser

Printer friendly page

'Simple' difference between Proprietory and Free software

IT magazine stops print edition

IIS very slow after ColdFusion 8 service is stopped.

Danger from Space Debris