Yesterday I found a fascinating subproject associated with Project Gutenberg. The concept of distributed proofreading is elegantly simple and seems perfectly suited to the Internet.

Each page is in two frames - the left is the scanned image and the right is the text gleaned from the image. The proofreaders job is to verify that the text matches the images. Most pages only take a couple of minutes to proof. And you can just proof one per session if you like. Therefore, this project is perfect when you need a five minute break at work or home. Check ‘em out!

Recently, I was investigating how to integrate CFMX and Java Servlets.

I found that I needed to cycle the CFMX application after each change to my Java classes. In order to make this process less onerous I developed the following ant build file. You’ll notice that the CFMX log files are deleted. This was done so that I didn’t have to wade through large files in order to find the messages related to whatever change I was making at the time. You might also notice that I’ve added a four second delay before each delete task. This delay gives the operating system time to write its buffers to disk and close the files after the service has been stopped.</p>

<project name="dispatcher" default="" basedir=".">

    <property name="cfmx.home"            value="c:/CFusionMX" />
    <property name="cfmx.runtime-log.dir" value="${cfmx.home}/runtime/logs" />
    <property name="cfmx.log.dir"         value="${cfmx.home}/logs" />
    <property name="cfmx.service"         value="ColdFusion MX Application Server" />

    <property name="apache.home"          value="D:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache" />
    <property name="apache.service"       value="Apache" />
    <property name="apache.log.dir"       value="${apache.home}/logs" />

    <property name="login.url"            value="http://localhost/login.cfm?userid=david&password=password" />
    <property name="temp.dir"             value="${user.home}/Temp" />

    <target name="restart_cfmx" description="Deploys Dispatcher servlet to CFMX.">
        <exec executable="c:/WINNT/system32/net.exe">
            <arg value="stop" />
            <arg value="${cfmx.service}" />
          </exec>

        <echo>Sleeping for 4 seconds.</echo>
        <sleep seconds="4"/>

        <!-- delete CFMX log files -->
        <delete>
            <fileset dir="${cfmx.log.dir}" includes="*.log"/>
            <fileset dir="${cfmx.runtime-log.dir}" includes="*.log"/>
        </delete>

        <exec executable="c:/WINNT/system32/net.exe">
            <arg value="start" />
            <arg value="${cfmx.service}" />
        </exec>

        <echo>Sleeping for 4 seconds.</echo>
        <sleep seconds="4"/>

        <get src="${login.url}" dest="${temp.dir}" />
        <echo>Done!</echo>
    </target>

    <target name="restart_apache" description="Deploys Dispatcher servlet to CFMX.">
        <exec executable="c:/WINNT/system32/net.exe">
            <arg value="stop" />
            <arg value="${cfmx.service}" />
        </exec>

        <echo>Sleeping for 4 seconds.</echo>
        <sleep seconds="4"/>

        <!-- delete CFMX log files -->
        <delete>
            <fileset dir="${cfmx.log.dir}" includes="*.log"/>
            <fileset dir="${cfmx.runtime-log.dir}" includes="*.log"/>
        </delete>

        <exec executable="c:/WINNT/system32/net.exe">
            <arg value="stop" />
            <arg value="${apache.service}" />
        </exec>

        <echo>Sleeping for 4 seconds.</echo>
        <sleep seconds="4"/>

        <!-- delete Apache log files -->
        <delete>
            <fileset dir="${apache.log.dir}" includes="*.log"/>
        </delete>

        <exec executable="c:/WINNT/system32/net.exe">
            <arg value="start" />
            <arg value="${apache.service}" />
        </exec>

        <exec executable="c:/WINNT/system32/net.exe">
            <arg value="start" />
            <arg value="${cfmx.service}" />
        </exec>

        <echo>Sleeping for 4 seconds.</echo>
        <sleep seconds="4"/>

        <get src="${login.url}" dest="${temp.dir}" />
        <echo>Done!</echo>
        </target>

</project>