1 Pixel Out

I thought I’d blog about this because I haven’t found any mention of it anywhere else on the web.

I was working with CFFILE today and the tag kept throwing the following error while attempting to move a file:

Attribute validation error for tag CFFILE.
The value of the attribute source, which is currently "C:\JRun4\ser...\cfusion-war-tmp\uploaded-file.dat", is invalid.

I must’ve spent half an hour trying to figure out why the path in the source attribute was invalid. The path was correct, the file was there, everything about the source attribute was fine!

I finally decided to check the other attributes just in case (yeah, I know, I should’ve done that much much earlier). It turned out the destination path was pointing to a folder that didn’t exist. So it wasn’t the source attribute that was invalid but the destination attribute. I did a few tests and I found out that the only invalid value of the destination attribute that actually throws a meaninful error is an empty string. Any other invalid path throws the source attribute error.

Note: This was on CFMX7. No idea whether this also happens on other ColdFusion server editions.

I’ve added support for Gravatars to 1 Pixel Out. If you have a gravatar, leave a comment, I’d love to see it in action.

I have just released version 2 of my layoutManager plugin for the Mach-II framework.

Fixes and enhancements:

• Fix for nested layout events
• Whitespace optimisation
• Set custom content types and character encoding
• Forced download option

I’ve always wanted to be able to simulate a slow connection on my local dev machine to test Flash apps that load external media and data files. Tonight, I finally spent some time looking for a solution and found this great Apache module: mod_bandwidth. This module is the perfect solution to my problem.

The following settings are ideal for testing Flash loaders for external images.

LoadModule bw_module modules/bw_mod-2.0.53.dll

BandWidthModule	On
BandWidth	all 25600
BandWidthPacket	1024

Note: The above settings are for a Windows machine and the module is for Apache 2.

Update

Turns out this is a much better solution. See Richard Leggett’s comment.

This is one of those scary things that are not supposed to happen: The entire Google web presence seems to have disappeared from the Internet! Google.com, google.co.uk, Gmail, … All gone! It confused me so much that I assumed my connection was down and I rebooted my router. I then tried other sites and realised that the impossible had happened: GOOGLE IS DOWN!.