Doug Knudsen next on the Flex Meetup

Doug Knudsen of Universal Mind will be presenting tonight on the Online Flex Meetup . His topic is on Drag n Drop in Flex and how pretty much anything can have these features. If you are new to Flex this is a must see. If you're very experienced, you may be surprise some the details of Drga n Drop.

To rsvp and attend the meeting simply go to..

http://ria.meetup.com/10/calendar/10708654/

 

Flash Camp Atlanta Survey

Andy Powell has posted a survey to gain more information about potential attendees for Flash (Flex) Camp ATL.  If you would like to help shape the direction of the event, please fill out the following survey:

CF8 and FCKEditor Security threat

In a recent SANS posting, they identify a vulnerability in some ColdFusion installations. It involves the richtext feature found in cftexarea. This feature actually uses an open source application called FCKEditor. The FCKEditor has functionality to handle file uploads and file management but this feature should be disabled in the version embedded in CF server. The problem lies in that in some cases the connector that runs this feature is actually turn on.

Is your connector on? Go to..
CFIDE\scripts\ajax\FCKeditor\editor\filemanager\connectors\cfm

Look at config.cfm and see if the connector is on.

If left on, this means a hacker might be able to directly call the filemanager system to upload files and take control of the server. FCKEditor has had some history on being exploited by this type of attack.

Solutions:
1) Turn off the connector so that the filemanagement and file upload features can't work.

2) To be completely safe, delete the entire filemanager directory found under "CFIDE\scripts\ajax\FCKeditor\editor". The embedded version of FCKeditor for CF doesn't and really shouldn't use this feature. So removing those files completely is the safest thing to do. Be mindful that updates to CF might re-introduce those files and naturally re-open the problem.

 

Understanding Healthcare Lean Six Sigma's Seven Categories of Waste

Sometimes you need a pattern, a framework for rules which identify the next step. In staged improvisation, one key rule is to always accept an offer by a team mate. In other words to always say yes, this simple rule...

Creating An Exploded View Of Flat Hierarchal Data Using Coldfusion

One of the things that I have been looking at lately is how to handle hierarchical data in an efficient way. One of the ideas that has made the most sense was to store the hierarchical information in a flat table structure with references to a parent item in each row. In a very simplistic view of the data, we could look at the data as an associative array with some random data:

flatTable = StructNew();

flatTable["1"] = "root";
flatTable["2"] = "1";
flatTable["3"] = "1";
flatTable["4"] = "1";
flatTable["5"] = "2";
flatTable["6"] = "5";
flatTable["7"] = "3";
flatTable["8"] = "3";

This is a nice representation of my table as I can easily reference any member without worrying about the depth of the hierarchical structure. However, there may be times when I need to explode the structure into a more fleshed out structure. To accomplish this, there are several scenarios for parsing the structure. [More]