Just recently I found myself needing to verify if a server I was working on - which required image manipulation - was actually running in headless mode. On Linux servers, graphical user interfaces (GUI's) aren't usually running because they take up additional resources (like memory) and server administrators usually want to give all the resources they can to actual server processes rather then a GUI which they only use occasionally. However, the JRE that ColdFusion engines run on needs the window processing engines in order to perform graphic manipulation - image resizing, rotating, etc - all require image processing libraries.
The following code bit allows you to see if your CFML engine (Railo, OpenBD, or ACF) is actually running in headless mode. This is useful if you're debugging a pesky image processing problem and you want to make sure your JRE's access to the XORG libraries aren't the problem.
Vivio buys a lot of RAM. I mean a LOT of RAM. We like the Kingston brand, as they tend to be reliable and function well for a very long time.
Vivio is currently working on building another platform server, so I thought it might be interesting to create a post showing the massive amounts of memory that we put into these things. Here are a couple pictures of the RAM we got for just ONE of our platform boxes. These are the boxes that we split up into VPS accounts.
This last one shows the model number, which, for those who are interested, is this:
Thunder loop credit: "Arctura" from their "Spectacular Nature" series on the Free Sound Project
Precussion uses one-shots on woods and several base drums. The instrument loops (various piano. trombone, vibraphone, french horns) were created by me using digital instruments and various effects. I use one ambient synth generated from the "Morphine" VST (you hear it clearly at the end).
I've experenced this problem many times on both Ubuntu and Linux Mint, and I've had to go research this problem several times each time I encountered it. (I can never remember where to find it.) So, I'm writing it down here in case I ever need it again, or perhaps someone else out on the Net is experiencing this same issue and hasn't figured out how to fix it.
The problem is that whenever I used SSH to get a remote terminal to another computer, I would occasionally get a long delay before SSH would prompt me for a password. Once I logged in, the connection was very fast, so I knew it wasn't a network problem. It had to be something related to the servers I was connecting to. This perplexed me for a long time.
After much research, I came across this post, by a fellow with the username "gpowers01", right close to the bottom:
So... I tried it. I added the following line to my local /etc/ssh/ssh_config file:
GSSAPIAuthentication no
... and VIOLA! No more stinking pause. Thank you "gpowers01"!
For the record, I did try the SSH DNS thing that's mentioned in the post too, but that's never worked for me. Maybe it's because my NAT doesn't suck, but the GSSAPI thing works for me every single time.
So... the next time I go to look for this, I won't have to go any further then my own blog. And perhaps I may help someone else out too. The Interwebs are cool that way. ;)
Recently I had a project that required that I have a Windows icon associated with it. This didn't seem too daunting to me at first, because I know that the image editor I was using could save images in the "ico" format I needed. .ico files are used for things like websites (favicon.ico) and program executables. In my case, I was creating a program executable, and I needed to create an icon for it once it was compiled.
The "icoutils" is a free project that can be used to both create ico files or it can be used to extract images from ico files. The "icoutils" home page can be found over here: http://www.nongnu.org/icoutils/
While I am personally okay with compiling things, I did find that "icoutils" was in my local software repository, (I'm currently using Linux Mint), so you can probably find it in other repositories as well (I haven't checked).
"icoutils" Online Documentation (or Lack Thereof)
While I was happy to find that there was a free utility to create ico files, I was disappointed because I couldn't find online documentation *anywhere* about how to use it. I ended up looking at the source package and seeing that the source creates 3 utilities, none of which are actually named "icoutils". Instead, the three utilities that are created are "icotool", "extresso", and "wrestool".
Since I installed "icoutils" via my repository, I could run each command followed by a "--help", which was nice because it provided me with some basic usage information. I also found that "info" worked, so "info icotool" provided some good documentation on how to use it. There were no actual command examples, so I had to figure out the hard way which command sequence was necessary to create an actual ico file, but eventually I was able to figure it out. So... I thought I'd document the process here.
Using "icoutils" to Create a .ico File
After reading a bit about .ico files, I found that .ico files are actually a grouping of several different files at various resolutions and color depths. bundling up all the image files into a single "ico" file allows that file to become larger and smaller depending on how it's used. For example, the favicon.ico has a smaller image that is used in a browser's favorites list, and a larger version that is used as a desktop icon. The same rule applies to an executable file. If the executable is shown in Windows Explorer's "list" view, the small icon is shown, where if you use "tile" view, the larger icon is shown.
With this in mind, I had to create several iamges in order to create my icon. I chose to create the following resolutions: 16x16, 32x32, and 48x48. I created each image and saved each one as a .png file. I did this using The Gimp, which is a free image editor that I use on my Linux Desktop. Next, I used the "icoutils" tool called "icotool", to bundle the images together using the following command:
The following code bit allows you to see if your CFML engine (Railo, OpenBD, or ACF) is actually running in headless mode. This is useful if you're debugging a pesky image processing problem and you want to make sure your JRE's access to the XORG libraries aren't the problem.
