It seems working with EXIF like a game of whac-a-mole. Everyone have their own standards and when you settle one, something different show up some other place. To be fair to EXIF standards, this is not unique to EXIF. Even simple dateformat() are all over the place. CF9 and 10 ImageGetEXIFMetaData() function use metadata-extractor-2.4.0-beta-1 by Drew Noakes and current version is 2.6.4. (more..)

I had to move couple of CFM server into AWS from our data center and there were quite a lot of scheduled tasks were in those servers.  With CF version update between old servers and new servers there weren’t an easy way to transfer CF administrator settings. A settings import and export function in CF admin would be a nice tool, even though there is infrequent need for something like that. (more..)

In the previous post I talked about how to send emails using Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) SendRawEmail call and fetch the message-Id assigned to the email by Amazon mail servers. With that ID in hand, if the mail bounced back into our email box, we can use CFPOP to fetch that mail, fish out the message-id and update our mail table. (more..)

It is quite easy to use Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) with ColdFusion, just use CFMAIL tag and send mails out thought Amazon SMTP. Also bit more difficulty we can use SES API to do the same thing too. Now, why? The biggest advantage, probably the only advantage of using the API instead SMTP call is API call returns the "message-id" assigned to our emails. This simple ID is immensely useful for tracking down emails if they bounces. (more..)

I was trying to connect to EC2 API this weekend and it left me feeling rather weary. I was not trying to do a heart surgery, but just to format a string in a particular way and encoded it. No matter what I tried AWS slammed me with the error: The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your AWS Secret Access Key and signing method. Consult the service documentation for details Here Amazon explains their Signature Version 2 format. (more..)

Unexpectedly knocked my head on a pretty ugly "bug" yesterday - not sure actually if that is a CF bug or not - but I guess this is something that CF should have handled, so I am tentatively blaming CF bellow. Quick Google search revealed people have been complaining about this since 2005 (I'm on CF9). I was trying to FTP into a folder and figure out new files/folders that has been created within last hour. (more..)

Spelling checking is another function I wish ColdFusion supported out of the box. This Christmas day I took over the adventure of writing a spelling checker with pure ColdFusion, so it could even works in shared hosting environments, but gave up the journey in the middle of writing a bloom filter realizing I was taking a wrong way. Unlike other adventurous, I got discouraged by my first mistake and turn into Java. (more..)

I been working on few applications that use CSV files quite heavily. I wish people will move into something more sensible like XML to transfer data, but CSV seems to have some magical qualities everybody seems to like. But ColdFusion do not have native function dedicated to dealing with CSV files. Option 1: have capacity to read a properly formatted CSV into a Query object and it is quite fast. It took 5 tick counts to read my CSV file of 700 rows and return as query. (more..)

I had a task in hand this week, populate a PDF form with million(s) of records, save them, create books of 200 pages and send them to the printer. This is an ongoing daily process. So I had to fine tune everything like a fine car to run faster and not to hog up the server at the same time. Now this had unexpected consequences on me. This become my Heroin addiction without any euphoric benefits. I was not able to sleep. Drank coffee by the pints. Read half of the internet. Almost. (more..)

When I was new to programming, "regular expressions" is something that intimidated me for quite some time. All those squiggly lines, slashes, and brackets made me fallen in love with it. It was lengthy and comprehensive regular expression tutorials that scared me. Regular expressions are like Italian cooking. You start with a few essential ingredients, but you can mix them up in a correct order to create a complex dish. (more..)