I was trying to do face detection with ColdFusion and JJIL Java library last week. Today I gave Jviolajones library a stab and it turn out quite well. It misses some faces, occasionally returns false positive results, but overall it did pretty good job. My final goal is to create thumbnails of image cropped around faces, not rather crucial face detection. Jviolajones seems to be a good candidate for that. (more..)

I was trying to do face detection with Faint Java library and noticed quite disappointingly it only works with 32bit processers. Looking elsewhere found the JLIL Java library build to do face detection in mobile applications and also quite a nice blog post by Richard Nichols. It was a good start. I suggest you to read that post first since I build a new copy of JJILCore.jar with Richard's updated codes. (more..)

If you have administrator access to your server, it is better to have server wide error handler than setting up individual error handlers on each application. It is easy to manage and you do not have to set it up over and over again. IronGate is easy to install as the Site-Wide Error Handler. Download IrongGate, unzip into your web site and browser to it. It will prompt you to the installation wizard. (more..)

IronGate is a ColdFusion Exception Manager software that helps you to keep track of errors occurred in your applications and provide you with all possible information you need to sort them out. When an error occurs in your application anytime anywhere, IronGate logs the families ColdFusion error message for you and display a friendly error message to the user. Also send you an email if you wish. Not only that, it also records all available surrounding variables and server statues. (more..)

It seems working with EXIF like a game of whac-a-mole. Everyone have their own standards and when you settle one, something different show up some other place. To be fair to EXIF standards, this is not unique to EXIF. Even simple dateformat() are all over the place. CF9 and 10 ImageGetEXIFMetaData() function use metadata-extractor-2.4.0-beta-1 by Drew Noakes and current version is 2.6.4. (more..)

I had to move couple of CFM server into AWS from our data center and there were quite a lot of scheduled tasks were in those servers.  With CF version update between old servers and new servers there weren’t an easy way to transfer CF administrator settings. A settings import and export function in CF admin would be a nice tool, even though there is infrequent need for something like that. (more..)

In the previous post I talked about how to send emails using Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) SendRawEmail call and fetch the message-Id assigned to the email by Amazon mail servers. With that ID in hand, if the mail bounced back into our email box, we can use CFPOP to fetch that mail, fish out the message-id and update our mail table. (more..)

It is quite easy to use Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) with ColdFusion, just use CFMAIL tag and send mails out thought Amazon SMTP. Also bit more difficulty we can use SES API to do the same thing too. Now, why? The biggest advantage, probably the only advantage of using the API instead SMTP call is API call returns the "message-id" assigned to our emails. This simple ID is immensely useful for tracking down emails if they bounces. (more..)

I was trying to connect to EC2 API this weekend and it left me feeling rather weary. I was not trying to do a heart surgery, but just to format a string in a particular way and encoded it. No matter what I tried AWS slammed me with the error: The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your AWS Secret Access Key and signing method. Consult the service documentation for details Here Amazon explains their Signature Version 2 format. (more..)

Unexpectedly knocked my head on a pretty ugly "bug" yesterday - not sure actually if that is a CF bug or not - but I guess this is something that CF should have handled, so I am tentatively blaming CF bellow. Quick Google search revealed people have been complaining about this since 2005 (I'm on CF9). I was trying to FTP into a folder and figure out new files/folders that has been created within last hour. (more..)