A great article over at Linux.com describes the steps to set up Apache using chroot, a way to set up a mini filesystem within your linux file tree structure separate from your other files. This is in case you get cracked through the apache user, the cracker is still in “chroot jail” meaning they can’t see the rest of the file system to then try to escalate their privileges.

Read the article here.

It should also be possible to install Jrun / ColdFusion in this situation, as long as Apache and Jrun folders were both in the root chroot folder (such as /chroot mentioned in the article). After chroot and Apache are set up using the instructions above, just use the apache user as the runtime user for jrun, and install all files within the /chroot folder. This would also mean you wouldn’t have to implement the ColdFusion sandbox security, because the system would handle a lot of that for you.

When I figure out all the steps, I’ll post an update here.

Crossover Office 3.0, a commercial Wine project that allows you to install and run Windows applications under Linux, was released a few weeks ago. I just installed the trial version on my laptop (a dual boot Windows 2000 and Mandrake 9.2 on an HP nc6000) and installed Dreamweaver MX under it (Dreamweaver MX 2004 is unsupported at this time). Below is a screenshot of Dreamweaver MX running on my laptop.

Installation went flawlessly — after insert of the Studio MX CD-ROM, all I did was fire up Crossover Office 3.0, clicked “install” and chose Dreamweaver MX. The installation went without a hitch and it was installed in a couple of minutes. Crossover then simulates a Windows reboot and adds Dreamweaver to a menu called “Windows Applications” under the menu.

Good things — the code completion, RDS, and other Dreamweaver nicities that work fine under Linux. The menus were snappy and file I/O was very good.

Bad things — I got several javascript errors when I tried to move between the tabs of files that were part of my Windows partition that I pulled the test CF files from. I have tried other files that were local to the Linux partition and still get that error, but I still get this error. With a paid version of Crossover office, though, you get tech support that could help this issue.

I have also installed Flash MX and Adobe Photoshop 6.0 under this new version with no problems (Photoshop runs like a champ). You can install Internet Explorer 6.0 if you want (for testing), MS Office XP including Outlook XP, Visio, and many other Windows applications under this application.

So for those of you who run Linux and don’t want to run Windows every time you run Dreamweaver, this is a good, inexpensive ($40) solution.

Screenshot 1
Dreamweaver MX running on Mandrake 9.2 under Crossover Office 3.0

I use the browser Firefox, so I wrote a search plugin to search through Macromedia’s livedocs for specific ColdFusion tags and functions. How it works is simple, it queries Google with the “site:livedocs.macromedia.com” option and then uses the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search button to return the first results only (which is why you get weird results if you type in something like ‘fred’). Let me know if you have problems with it, it seems to work OK if you type in the correct name of the function or tag.

Click here to install

After install, you can look at the source under <firefox-directory>/searchplugins/livedocs.src. Suggestions are welcome!

Update: There is a new version for CFEclipse and Snips (1.1.8) on the CFEclipse project page. This adds a bunch of great features, better code completion, method view for components, better help, and more snippets.

There is a link to good instructions on installing and using CFEclipse on the cfeclipse page by Nathan Strutz. However, I couldn’t find documentation on how to install the snippets, so here is what I did (tested on Windows 2000 Pro, Mandrake 9.2, and Mac OS 10.3):

1. Installed Eclipse (3.0 M8): www.eclipse.org. Run for first time, then shut down.
2. Downloaded CFEclipse here and Snips here.
3. Unzip com.rohanclan.cfml_1.1.8.zip to <eclipse-directory>/plugins (e.g., on my Windows box, C:\Program Files\eclipse\plugins). Create a directory to hold the snips (I chose C:\Program Files\eclipse\plugins\snips\) and unzip the Snips_1.1.8.zip to that directory. Follow instructions for associating .cfm/.cfc/.html files in Nathan’s tutorial above.
4. and open Window > Preferences > Workbench > Editors > CFEclipse. Go to “File Paths” and put in the path to the snippets directory (in my case on Windows: C:\Program Files\eclipse\plugins\snips\). Then hit “Apply” and then “OK” at the bottom. I found I had to close Eclipse and fire it back up to get it to recognize this option in Windows.
5. Start Eclipse again, and switch to the CFML perspective (Window > Open Perspective > Other … and select “CFML”). You are now ready to code.
6. You can now create a new project and open a directory with your CFML files and code away. (See Nathan’s site for more details).

There are a bunch of plugins besides the ones on Nathan’s page. I have used the C/C++ ide using Cygwin for Windows or g++ for Mac/Linux, Quantum for Oracle SQL development, and a bunch of others.

Eclipse works on Mac, Linux, Windows, whatever, and is a great code editor for a variety of programming languages, including C/C++, Java (most used for), Perl, PHP, and others.

There is a good article in CFDJ that describes how to generate PDFs on the fly using Apache FOP on any OS. Previous solutions I have seen only run on Windows.

Read the article here.

Here is a great, comprehensive article going over the various graphics algorithms and how they are implemented. Very detailed read.

Read the article here.

Ok, this is an older Brandon Purcell article, but it I had need for it recently to figure out some stuff, so here it is again.

Read the article here.

There is a good, comprehensive article on crawling the web with HTMLParser and Lucene. It goes into some depth on how to create java objects that crawl, read, and then index web sites. I was thinking of combining this with some sort of java ColdFusion CFX tag that would use this. When I do, I’ll post it here.

Read the article here.