devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

I’m still quite amazed by this, but apparently Darron Schall is working on a VNC client implemented in Flash and Flex. Granted there has been a Java applet to do the same thing for quite awhile, but the power that this could give an enterprise would be quite amazing!

For instance, one could write some sort of ColdFusion app for administering and monitoring servers, but it would only display servers available to the roles which a logged-in user belonged to (via LDAP/Active Directory integration), as well as store metadata about each server, the applications which were on it, etc. You could also write various “probes” for each server which could also poll for CPU utilization as well as custom application probes and have a fully unified monitoring and management platform which was all web based.

Now we just need a Flash/Flex based telnet or SSH client for routers and Unix servers without any sort of window manager (or maybe such a client already exists)…

Seems like there have been quite a lot of Flex 2 posts since Max, so I’ve only been skimming over them since most of them are roughly the same. I just happened to notice one today on Tim Buntel’s blog which goes into detail about why Flex 2 should be exciting to ColdFusion developers– check it out!

A good write-up is in the TextDrive blog about how to optimize Rails’ resource usage.

Sean Corfield is starting to help steer the development of CFEclipse and is looking for feedback on some of the main features which are missing from it that you might miss in other editors, or might have just never seen in an IDE altogether. If you have anything you’d like to see in CFEclipse, I’d recommend posting comments about what is missing from it from your perspective. Keep in mind some of the things you might want are in the nightly builds or have already been done (RDS support is coming soon for instance). Also, keep in mind that the goal of CFEclipse is not to replace Dreamweaver or implement other design related features, it’s more of a programmer friendly IDE to use for programming in ColdFusion.

If you have bug type issues, as usual you should enter bugs and small feature requests at the Tigris project site. I try to constructively report anything I come across which I can repeat or features that I haven’t seen requested before and they are always very responsive.

Today I wanted to grab the latest revision of Model Glue in hopes of checking out something which is fairly intriguing to me, Coldspring integration. I’m unable to do this from my workstation, so I SSH’ed to my FreeBSD box at home (the server which you’re reading this page from) to grab it via the Subversion command line client.

One annoying thing about doing a checkout of a Subversion branch is that it also grabs all of the .svn directories which contain the history of changes. This is fine if you plan on committing changes to the code base, but not if you just want a working copy of it. These directories can get quite large and take up an incredible percentage more space than the code. To get rid of these directories before SCP’ing the code to my workstation, I used this command to clean out all of those directories (from the root directory where I pulled down the code):

[code]
find . -type d -name ‘.svn’ -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rdf
[/code]

This cleaned out all of the cruft that I didn’t need, and I was able to grab it without needing to gzip it first. Hopefully this helps someone else faced with a similar problem.

Update: Even though the same thing can be done with an svn checkout command, this command is still very useful when you’ve created new code and added it to svn, but then refactor/move it before you check it in. You can delete all of the .svn files and directories, and then add the directories/files back into subversion again without it getting angry at you.