Easiest way to upgrade your ColdFusion JDK

I just got a new laptop and have been setting up my local dev environment. After installing IIS and ColdFusion ( 8 and 9 ) I wanted to bump the JDK past the class loader issues with pre 1.6.0_10. I figured I'd go with the most recent ( 1.6.0_18 )

This is a simple process and I'll outline it here. This is the same on Win XP, 2003, Vista, Windows 2008 and Windows 7.

Download the JDK: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

Choose the appropriate edition ( I'm running 64bit Windows and CF8 ) so 64 bit edition for me. Make sure you get the JDK not the JRE.

Install the JDK and take note of the install directory. I left it all as default and the install folder is: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_18

Browse to you CFADMIN and select Java and Java Settings:

Replace the Java Virtual Machine path with C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_18\jre

Save this and restart your CouldFusion services.

Log back into the CFADMIN click Settings and Summary and confirm the java version is now 1.6.0_18.

 

And that's it.

Got my iPhone

So I decided on the iPhone after my post a few weeks ago. I got the 16gig 3gs and I really like it. I think all iPhone owners are only to happy to show off there phones because once your used to it it's a really slick interface and while I knew of the features but untill I got my own I just didn't realize how slick.

I asked the question of how well I can connect my work email ( exchange ) and gmail side by side and I'm impressed it works perfectly.

The browser is really great and now that I am back in Melbourne the Metlink app comes in real handy so I also love the app store. While on the train on the way to work ( which is where I am right now ) I can listen to music ( or in this case a podcast CFHour rift now ) and I can blog at the sam time. I was told Twitterific was the best Twitter app but I think I like tweetdeck.

What I dont like so far is not a whole lot basically the battery life could be better 2 full days is streching it but then again it is a small computer and that acive sync won't sync across my notes. I was informed about a neat trick for notes here it is:

Make a contact in Outlook called NOTES and in the notes section put the notes you need access to while out and about. Pretty simple really and not a bad compromise.

So what apps should I be using that I'm not let's hear what you got!

A small gotcha with cfexecute

This might get alot of people when running cfexecute consider this simple example of passing the result of the command dir back to ColdFusion:

<br /> <cfexecute name="c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe" arguments="/c dir #expandPath('.')#" variable="dirResult" /><br /> <cfdump var="#dirResult#" /><br />

It won't work. Why not? Because timeout is missing. It won't error on the cfexecute call but it will never get a result so dirResult wont exist.

<br /> <cfexecute name="c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe" arguments="/c dir #expandPath('.')#" timeout="10" variable="dirResult" /><br /> <cfdump var="#dirResult#" /><br />

While my example is Windows specific the timeout attribute is required when calling *nix command aswell.

Automake - aclocal: command not found

I was setting up a new server and compiling some apache conectors when I came across this error:

me@server.com: make
cd . && aclocal
/bin/sh: aclocal: command not found
make: *** [aclocal.m4] Error 127

Where does this come from and how do you fix it?

It's part of Automake . To fix it on Debian/Ubuntu:

apt-get install automake

and CentOs

yum install automake

Or you can download and set it up here.