Ben Forta | Blog

Blog posts made in November 2012

Pete Freitag (of HackMyCF.com fame) has updated his excellent ColdFusion Server Lockdown Guide for ColdFusion 10. Adobe has published the updated ColdFusion 10 Server Lockdown Guide and it is now online.

HTC features a nice built-in SMS backup / restore feature on its phones. From within the SMS app you can export messages to a .hbk file, and then you can import that file (on the same device or another) to restore. It's all explained in this support page. Simple, right? Well, nope! That page neglects a key step without which restores will fail because the device will not see any available backup sets. For restore to work you must create a top level folder named "sms_backup" and save the .hbk file there and then attempt the restore, as that is the only folder the restore utility looks in.

Posting this one so that I have it for future use.

The folks over at Fig Leaf Software are offering a Free ColdFusion 10 jQuery Mobile Tutorial, a 50 page PDF with lessons and exercises.

The Dr. Dobb's 2012 Jolt Awards are out, and PhoneGap was among the winners in the Mobile Tools category.

The Adobe Translation Center enables users all over the world to contribute translations for Adobe products and services, including some of our newest offerings like Edge Inspect, Edge Animate, PhoneGap Build, and Brackets. So far, almost 700 community members are translating and approving strings for 34 different products. More details on the FAQ page.

As you may have noticed, my website recently underwent a significant facelift as explained in a blog post made a couple of days ago. In that post I also noted that as part of the update I rewrote much of the code "to use ColdFusion for what it does best, and to stop using it where it no longer makes sense to do so".

Obviously, a statement like can't be left unexplained, and indeed, the first few comments on that post asked me to do just that. The truth is that when I wrote that post I did start to explain what I meant, but as the explanation grew it felt out of context for that post, and so I planned a follow-up. This is that follow-up.

With any luck (and with the cooperation of the DNS gods) you should be reading this on my new and improved personal web site. This is the first complete redesign of this site in over a decade, and I'm really pleased with how it has turned out.

This site has evolved slowly (OK, it's worse than that, I know) for more than a decade. It started out as a resource for ColdFusion developers, and then turned into a support site for my books. And now it's both, and more, and perhaps most importantly, it's a playground for me to keep playing with coding, development ideas, and new technologies. Or at least that's what I had been trying to convince myself. The reality is that the site was stuck in a time warp, the web circa late '90s or so, complete with nested tables for all layout and alignment, embedded font tags and explicit sizing, images containing formatted text, ugly sprawling JavaScript that I had little control over ... you get the idea. And honestly, I did start work on a revamped site more than once. But between the back-end code, the design, the weight of pages, and more, I never seemed to like where I ended up, and so, well, the old site worked and so it lived on. Until today.

Create Now Live is your chance to be one of the first to hear what's next in the Adobe Creative Cloud. See what's next in Photoshop, explore ways to take your design skills from print to online and mobile, learn how teams can work better together with Creative Cloud, and be inspired by Adobe evangelists and leaders in the field. Create Now Live will take place on December 11, 2012, starting at 10:00 am PST. Registration is required, and when you register, you'll receive a code for a $300 discount on a full conference pass to Adobe MAX 2013.

If you've been wanting to seamlessly sync the files on your desktop with your data storage on the Creative Cloud, here's some good news for you. The Creative Cloud Connection is now available. It currently supports Mac OS 10.7 and 10.8 and Windows 7 and 8, and is available immediately to all Creative Cloud users. You can also visit the Creative Cloud Connection forum with questions or comments.

We've just released a security hotfix for ColdFusion 10 running on Windows, this fix addresses a possible DoS threat when using IIS. This can (and should) be installed using the ColdFusion 10 Administrator update option.