Achievement Earned!

At the end of 1977 (even though I was pretty small at the time), my dad took me to see the first movie of one of the greatest franchises of all time.

Today, on December 22, 2019, I did this...

I took MY son to see the last Star Wars movie in the series, and I completed an achievement that has been 42 years in the making. 

For my non-spoiler review, I liked it. It wasn't as good as any of the original 3, and definitely not as ground-breaking as that first one, but it was a good wrap-up for the series.

PSA: ColdFusion 2018 Update 7 Released - Security Update

This morning, Adobe released Update 7 for ColdFusion 2018 Server with a Priority 2 Severity Rating (Install Soon [within 30 days]).

It addresses a Privilege Escalation vulnerability on Windows machines: see APSB19-58 and CVE-2019-8256. Non Windows machines are not affected.

The update can be performed automatically through the CF Administrator, or the manual hotfix can be downloaded from HERE.

Adobe also recommends that you update your JDK/JRE to the latest version.

Advent of Code 2019

As usual, I'm late. Advent of Code has started on December 1 every year since 2015, yet somehow, I always end up behind. I've done a few of the exercises from previous years, so I want to at least get through some of these for 2019 while they're actually going on.

As this is now December 5th, I've managed to make it through Day 3. Or at least the first half of it. As of right now, Day 6 goes live in about 2 1/2 hours, so I need to do a little bit of catching up.

The first couple of days weren't too tough. Day 2 was a bit of a brute-force solution, and I think Day 3 is shaping up that way so far. My initial solution for Day 3 Part 1 took over an hour to complete! I want to make this a bit smoother and faster.

Regardless, I want to try to keep up with these. Or at least complete all of 2019. And then go back to previous years. Some of these puzzles aren't ideal for ColdFusion, but these are still some pretty good exercises.

So I need to catch up.

Happy 28th Birthday, Linux!

 I'm pushing Publish a day late, but this message probably had one of the largest impacts on geekdom. 28 years ago, Linus Torvalds publicly announced his "hobby" project that "won't be big and professional". Umm... I'm thinking that was an understatement.

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID:
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

The Eagle Has Landed!

“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” - Neil Armstrong

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong spoke his historic words to a crowd of quite nearly everyone within view of a television. 50 years ago today, after a 4-day trip, Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon.

Humans have done some amazing things throughout history; far too many things to even try to list. But the one achievement that I think stands far above them all, was sending a manned rocket in the direction of our nearest satellite 240K miles away, depositing two of its passengers on the surface of that object and then bringing them all home. The accomplishment itself was not only impressive, but it also massively inspired pretty much the entire world.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins were incredibly brave to do something that we didn't even know could be done. They strapped into the 11th iteration of the Apollo launch, with some very hard lessons learned in the previous 10 launches. The three of them, and everyone else that worked on the Apollo program, are true heroes. They showed all of us that, if we put our minds to it, we can turn science fiction into science fact.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." -JFK (Sept 12, 1962)

It took just under that decade, and Kennedy wasn't there to see it come to pass, but we did it! It truly was a giant leap for all of mankind. And it was all done with less computing power than a RaspberryPi has.

May the Fourth Be With You!

First off...

... and sadly this past week we lost one of the most loyal and lovable original characters. Chewbacca's inner spirit, Peter Mayhew, passed away at 74. So I think we should all dedicate this Star Wars Day to him.

Happy Pi Day 2019!

In honor of Pi Day 2019, it looks like we've got a new record.

Emma Haruka Iwao of Google has smashed the previous record for calculating digits of Pi and has pulled off an ultra-meta feat. She calculated Pi out to 31,415,926,535,897 digits. 😎

Adobe ColdFusion and Oracle Java

I have pretty much stayed out of the discussion, because I, frankly, don't currently have much of  a dog in this fight. Oracle threw the ColdFusion world into an uproar with their announcement that they were changing the way Java was licensed. I think it was one of those things where few people really realized how much of an impact it would have until it became a reality on January 1, 2019.

One of the biggest improvements to ColdFusion was it becoming a JVM language. However, that move seems to be creating a lot of confusion. Charlie Arehart has written a ton about Oracle's announcement. As have many other big voices in the CF community.

Earlier today, Adobe announced that they've somewhat come to a resolution for ColdFusion and using Oracle Java. And a big Thank You to Rakshith and the rest of the team for following up with this.

Apparently Java SE 8 and 11 will be supported for Adobe ColdFusion without having to fork over some extra bucks to Oracle. And Adobe is updating both CF2016 and CF2018 to use Java 11 by some time in February 2019. And they seem to be sticking by Oracle.

That does seem to leave CF11 and lower users in a bit of a spot, but I'll be honest. If you're still running ColdFusion 11, you may have more issues than what JVM version you're running. It's probably time to look at some kind of upgrade. I know that ACF can be relatively expensive, but I truly don't understand the belief that CFMX is still a viable system. It may work like it did when written, but

1. it was released almost 15 years ago, 
2. there are easily demonstrated Metasploit attacks against it and 
3. let's not even talk about the OS that it's probably running on. It might be time to move into more modern web development and quit contributing to the belief that CFML is "legacy".

All in all, it may not be a bad idea to move over to Amazon Coretto or OpenJVM or some other non-Oracle JVM. Considering that ColdFusion is pretty tightly coupled with the JVM, I think some sort of JVM will still be pretty necessary for quite a while. I'm not sure of the best option, but I think this definitely put a ginormous plus in the column of switching to a non-Oracle JVM.

I'm not currently managing any CF Servers, but it's probably still time for some intense Google-Fu.

Welcome to 2019!

Welcome, everyone, to 2019!