About a month ago, I published a post about my Vagrant boxes for Railo and ColdFusion. After the last month of being in talks with Rakshith Naresh, the product manager for Adobe, I finally have complete approval to release my ColdFusion box. Since I’m releasing the ColdFusion box, I figured I’d take down the old post, update the boxes and make a new post.

Vagrant

Vagrant is great! I’m not going to go into detail about Vagrant, besides to say that you should be using it. If you aren’t using it, then something is wrong with you.

Railo Box

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Railo CFML interpreter. Without Vagrant, I’d have to run Railo, Nginx and MySQL locally on my laptop, and if I switch computers, I’d have to have an environment built there, too. Vagrant let me build a single Railo environment that I can share with other computers and developers.

Downloading the box

To download the box, just run this command from a terminal after installing Vagrant:

vagrant box add railo https://s3.amazonaws.com/davejlong/vagrant/railo.box

After downloading, use vagrant init railo in your project’s directory to initialize a new VM and vagrant up to start the machine.

What’s included

The Vagrant box comes with most of the software that I use daily and require to start a Railo project:

• Railo*
• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit
• RVM & Ruby 2.0.0 (to install dotfiles and use some cool system tools)
• My dotfiles specialized for Vagrant boxes
• Preconfigured port forwarding on Railo port to 8080

*latest version as of 14/05/2013

ColdFusion Box

My ColdFusion box was built with the same intentions as my Railo box: to allow developers to quickly setup a development environment without knowing a lot about servers.

Downloading the box

From terminal run the following command after installing Vagrant:

vagrant box add base https://s3.amazonaws.com/davejlong/vagrant/coldfusion.box

To initialize the box run vagrant init coldfusion from your project’s home directory and then start the box with vagrant up.

What’s included

• ColdFusion 10 update 10
• Apache HTTPD
• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit
• RVM & Ruby 2.0.0
• My Vagrant Dotfiles
• Preconfigured port forwarding on ColdFusion port to 8000

Extra - Git for all configs

I wanted to mention that I keep all of my builds on GitHub for anyone who’d like to play with the config. In any of the directories you can run vagrant up to pull down the box from Amazon S3 and start it up. You can even check out my base box that I use to build all my other boxes from.

TL;DR; With the -x flag Vim will encrypt whatever file you open with a passphrase.

Did you know that Vim can encrypt files?

That’s right, one of the awesome features of Vim is that it supports encrypting text files simply with the -x flag.

Lately I’ve been searching for a better password manager to use. I’ve used 1Password on my Mac, Password Gorilla on my Linux machine and some other program that I can’t remember right now on my Windows machine. They all work great for basic username-password style accounts, but what about my server logins, ssh keys and the various other authentication methonds I use? The only application that supported these well enough was 1Password, but I didn’t particularly want to buy it again to run it on Windows, and there is no 1Password client for Linux. To add to the havoc, I also wanted access to everything on my Android phone.

After deciding that the combinations of password managers wasn’t going to work for me, I began to look for an alternative. It had to work across Mac, Windows, Linux and Android and support authentication utilities outside of just username-password methods. I also wanted to be able to dump whatever kind of information I needed to in with the password: IP, hostname, services installed for quick access, etc. It was amazing how quickly I found Vim as an option; in fact I stumbled upon the option as I was looking at someone’s dotfiles (I wish I could remember who’s so I could credit them). In the dotfiles I say a setting to use Blowfish from within Vim:

My password file is very simple, because I don’t have to conform to a specific format. The only thing I do is put whatever name I want to call the authentication data and then indent the actual information, so my password file looks something like this:

I just drop that in Dropbox and poof! My Password manager is everywhere Vim is, which is everywhere. I have access to my passwords on all my desktops and my phone.

I’ve been focusing a ton on building the Recruitics Analytics platform over the past six months, and I’m really proud of the platform that we’ve built. After reading a blog by Jamie Quint on the Future of Analytics, I’m thinking that event based analytics is far more impressive and easier than page based. The Recruitics analytics tool is very specialized towards tracking views and applicants on job boards, and similar to Google Analytics, if a client wants to tell us the job id or whether there is an applicant, they set flags in the embedded JavaScript. With an event based system, they could just call functions against the analytics library to mark a view to a job, or an applicant to a job.

Event based analytics are definitely going to take over the market that is currently run by page based analytics systems and application and website become more interactive.

Read the full article on Jamie Quint’s blog

So it was announced a couple days ago that Opera, the least popular of the top four desktop browsers, would be switching it’s rendering engine from their own Presto engine to Webkit and Chromium. While Robert O’Callahan gripes about the “sad day for the web”, I think this is a great thing for both designers/developers and users alike.

One thing that has help developers and designers back from building super rich interactive web sites and applications has been that when you get into testing, there’s always something buggy with at least one browser. CORS, for example, wasn’t available in Opera until version 12 according to Can I Use. With this announcement it means that frontend developers have one less rendering engine to worry about.

For users, it will mean that more rich applications will become available and with three major companies working on building the WebKit engine, this will mean less bugs, more security (especially with Opera coming to the game) and more innovative features.

Read the full announcemnet on Opera’s Press Release