119 posts
I've lost mine, and am trying to find it again. I loved when I was blogging regularly, and being an active part of a thriving community. Over the last few years, that has slipped away from me. I haven't made a blog post in ages, and don't feel like I'm much a part of any community at all.
I do a lot of large processing tasks at LandsofAmerica, and in order to get these scheduled operations to complete in any reasonable amount of time I use the <cfthread> tag to spin off multiple processing threads at a time. Unfortunately, some of these threads take longer to complete than it does to spin up another 5,000 threads in the queue. Once you break that thread limit, ColdFusion to stop accepting new threads and will throw an exception. So I use the method below to make sure that I don't spin up too many threads at one time.
Today I posted on Twitter that I would need to re-evaluate my friendship with anyone who couldn’t make it to cf.Objective(). But alright alright… I’ll still be your friend, even if you don’t make it to cf.Objective. But you should… I just finished working up my schedule, and I’m once again excited to attend a conference. I’ve been “meaning to attend MAX again” for years, but the last few times I’ve been it’s seemed more a social event, and less an “inspire me to build great things” event. But I still remember hanging out with Jared, Sean, Simeon, and “the rest of the gang” after the first cf.Objective() conference I attended.
I have a fairly large Mura installation, with a good number of sites on it. I have some customizations that I’d like to be pushed out across all of the sites in my installation. For example, I’ve changed the way the dspPrimaryNav function works, so that I can prevent child pages from being displayed. Unfortunately, as flexible and customizable as Mura is, there is no good to make global changes to the contentRenderer.cfc without losing those changes everytime you perform an update to your core files.
I had a need to figure out the next billing date after today, based on a known start date and billing interval. Here’s the function I came up with to make it happen.
It’s horribly annoying trying to find a file on your file system when it’s buried folders deep in your project, on who knows which hard drive. In an effort to make this easier I scoured the interwebs for you, and found a solution on StackOverflow.
AJAX: The panacea for all of your Web 2.0 problems...
ColdFusion Builder has finally been launched!
We've had continual issues with our ColdFusion applications locking up on us. I've spent the last week cleaning out huge tables, creating indexes, and tuning queries, but could never seem to track down what was causing the issue. Today I caught it in the act... As the the applications locked up, I ran the following query in SSMS:
More fun with IPs, this time converting them to integers.
I'm working on some SQL to search for data based on IPs and IP Ranges. Doing this with character data in the database is horrendous. When searching through millions of records using JOINs with LIKE comparisons, the performance is completely unacceptable. So I'm working on converting the IP addresses to Binary format to do some (hopefully) faster searching.
I finished the installation of our new CF9 license with just one hiccough along the way. I installed CF9 next to CF8 so that we can move clients over to the new CF9 server one at a time and test as we go. After the file installation is finished, CF9 opens the migration wizard to allow you to bring over all of your old CF8 settings. During this process I got the a monstrous cfdump with the following error:
We do a massive amount of image processing on LandsofAmerica.com. Our image processing scripts take uploaded photos from realtors and create multiple versions at different sizes for use throughout our applications. This has been working without a hitch for ages. Unfortunately, IE8 was released...
Mark Driver from Gartner continues to be impressed with ColdFusion:
I posted a very short note the other day when my ColdFusion 9 New Features title was released, but I figured I should post a more verbose description of the title.
Get 'em while they're hot! The new ColdFusion 9 New Features title at lynda.com is live!
Watch MAX keynotes, streamed live from Los Angeles-register now (go to http://max.adobe.com/online/ )
My tip this morning about the TOP attribute on the cfdump tag has been pretty popular, which makes me wonder what else people don't know about the cfdump tag. In ColdFusion 7 it was just a variable, a label, top, and whether the dump was expanded or not. ColdFusion 8 added the show, format, hide, keys, metainfo, output, and showUDFs attributes.
I do a lot of cfdumps with queries, but always forget to use the top attribute introduced in ColdFusion 8. You can use the top attribute to dump just the top x number of records from your query. When dealing with a wide query 500 rows, dumping the first 10 will give me more than enough information to do what I need to do, without waiting for the browser to finish rendering a huge dump table.
I ran into an issue today where passing a cfcatch between methods returned a "not a struct" error. A quick Google search and I found a timely article on HJCotton.net that described it exactly.
ColdFusion rocks, let me just start with that :)
Not sure why I never thought of this before (and I know I'm not the first to come to this conclusion judging by Google), but I just figured out how to count records in a query based on their value.
I just ran into another goofy Ajax problem with my ColdFusion apps. I have a page using a bound cfdiv to load a form. The form, once submitted, is supposed to take the value of a form field entered on the page and run an AjaxOnLoad event to use that value elsewhere. Here's a simple test to show what I mean.
This is more for myself than anyone else, but I hit an odd snag in ColdFusion this morning. I got an error when trying to create a new structure member using a CreateUUID() function and ColdFusion's shorthand structure notation. The following code fails:
So I've had a problem on a recent project ever since I started using Authorize.net's recurring billing system. While it works fantastically for the most part, I've had issues with canceling subscriptions during their nightly billing process. The issue at hand is that Authorize.net doesn't actually cancel a subscription if a transaction is declined. They leave the subscription active and will just continue to try again and again until the subscription actually ends.
I've been having some serious memory issues with a ColdFusion application that I've narrowed down to CF's image processing functions. Processing no more than 14 megs of images causes a spike of nearly a full gig of RAM while the images are being processed. Here's an example of what's happening when I process images through CF's built in CFImage functionality.
UPDATE: Downloading a copy of CFIDE from a production server that was working like it was supposed to fixed the problem. Unfortunately the CFIDE directories are full of encrypted cf files so I have no idea what the difference was. Move along, nothing else to see here...
This is an awesome bookmarklet that helps get all of the crap out my way when I'm trying to focus on an article. Enjoy :)
Nifty little Web Development Project Estimator.
ColdFusion's built-in AJAX functionality doesn't play well with Meta Data Profiles. Apparently, when the javascript is added to the head of the document, it does an overly simplistic find and replace. For example, this head tag:
This list of Railo 3.0: Magic functions is just about enough to get me to try it :). That along with the concept of completely self-contained (but centrally managed) webs has me slipping a leg over to the other side of the fence.
I just installed Galleon Forums on our internal user admin for LandsofAmerica.com. It's not open to the public yet, but I built integration to keep our Accounts tables in sync with the Galleon User tables. When a new user is added, or a user is updated, the Galleon User tables also get updated. That way we have a "single signon" capability and user don't have to log in twice.
Starting to wonder if I should eschew ColdFusion's built in ajax fanciness for some jQuery goodness. Just means one more thing on my plate to learn...
Nice synopsis by John Gruber regarding copying other designs/applications instead of blazing your own path.
People please... if you ever write this code:
Nice post by Adam Lehman about what's going on with ColdFusion and Bolt
This might be nice for those of us that are color-challenged :)
Nice short article from Hal Helms on what it takes to even start understanding object oriented programming. Just learning the terminology can be excruciating and disheartening. That was my original impetus to create OO Glossary. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to enter my own definitions, or petition the community to help.
I'm gonna be somebody now. I'm now being aggregated on ColdFusionBloggers.org.
Just finally getting around to looking at an update for my Mango Blog, and realized that I'm mentioned in the update notes:
Sorry for the noise. This is a test of the FeedPing plugin for Mango Blog. Just making sure it shows up at Adobe Feeds.
Very relevant search results from Mr. JohnB...
I ran into an odd issue today and I'm documenting it here for my own future knowledge. When searching an XML document with defined namespaces on elements, XMLSearch wasn't returning any results. Take the following example:
Just got my renewal email from the wonderful folks at Adobe. Looks like I'm good for another year as an Adobe Community Expert. I'm hoping to post more smaller tips and tricks here on the blog, and hopefully get even more involved in the Community this year. And hell, I might even make it to MAX (all fingers crossed).
Because my first use of the ColdFusion AutoSuggest control took me 10 minutes to implement. I was doing a cfselect with a bind to load all cities in a state. Unfortunately, with more than 5,000 cities in some states the application was getting seriously bogged down with huge asynchronous http responses in the background.
Gonna have to give this a try soon...
I learned yesterday that SQL Server will tell me which indexes it thinks I need to have. Just use these three queries to get a look at what your SQL Server thinks you should be doing to take care of your queries
ColdFusion's cfselect doesn't support the selectedvalue argument when using binding. I don't like the JavaScript solutions out there, so here's a simple SQL solution.
Just need to keep track of this for future ussage. After a bunch of googling this was the clearest example of doing a proximity search in SQL Server that I could find.
I found the answer to the above problem today at this blog: Marc's Musings: Need a date range in SQL without filling a table?.
I had an odd issue today where I was using AjaxOnLoad to run a javascript, and I was getting an error that the function was not defined. The function and the ColdFusion.Event.registerOnLoad even were both getting added to the page. I could create an anchor tag on the page with an onclick and it would run the code fine, so I was perplexed as to why it was telling me that the function wasn't defined. See if you can spot the problem.
At LandsofAmerica I've been making extensive use of the onMissingMethod() functionality of CF8 to provide implicit getters and setters. This has worked fantastically well, and I'm never going back to explicitly declaring these unless I have to :). But one problem I've had was with using my implicit getters and setters inside my objects. It just didn't work...
I just thought you should know that...
A ploy by Meetup to try and get me to go outside, Unplug your friends is a clever way to let the geek in your life know that they're getting pasty and pale... Get those geeks some Vitamin D!
My brother is a new mac user, and is starting to get into recording and audio engineer stuff I don't know anything about. I know he has lots of big files though, and needs to know how to back them up. So I was telling him about my current backup strategy, and figured I should write up a post about it for posterity's sake.
This is news to me, but it looks like Adobe is discontinuing the FlashPaper...
Today I gave my two week's notice at lynda.com. After 2 and a half years there it's time to move on. I've learned a lot about enterprise application development in my time at lynda.com. Working on CF clusters and SQL Server 2005 upgrades and cluster management. Through all the trials and tribulations (moving to Austin, starting a team, and disbanding a team), I grew a lot and have become a better developer for it.
Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that
This is just a test from MarsEdit to make sure that the Excerpt actually posts into Mango.
Can you help find this man...
This is my first post on my new Mango-driven blog.
I got a little nudge from the Transfer group the other day about my ASP blog for ColdFusion code :). Well this blog has been around since February 2002 (if you can believe that) with almost no architectural changes. I've changed the display a bit here and there, but it's essentially the same ASP code I wrote 6 friggin' years ago...
In my recent adventures with Transfer, I ran into a problem where objects that weren't yet saved were showing up in my cached Transfer objects. Since I don't make mistakes (uh huh...) I immediately assumed this was a bug in Transfer, and went about documenting my problem on the Transfer group.
Continuing work on my top secret app and learning CCT (ColdBox, ColdSpring, and Transfer), I'm going to describe how to handle stamp and stampupdated columns in your tables.
As I'm working with ColdBox, I was reminded just how handy snippets and trigger text can be. ColdBox has a metric ton of snippets available for CFEclipse, most of them with trigger text all ready to go. So I wanted to take a moment to go through how you can create your own snippets and trigger text to speed up common operations
Things have been rough on the work front lately, but I'm starting to finally move forward again. It's been about 6 months since I've actually built anything worth mentioning, and I'm finally starting to get back into it :)
I have a problem, and it's ColdFusion... We're working on some complex object interaction, and moving data in and out of our objects. Part of the "moving in" part involves building out a structure of arguments based on query columns, and then passing them all in via the ArgumentCollection. Unfortunately, ColdFusion doesn't love us here at lynda.com... It's pitching a fit and saying that our IDs aren't of type numeric, when I know damn well that they are (grumble grumble)...
I'm having an absolute bear of a time getting Eclipse to play nicely with Subversion, Eclipse, and an Ant build file. One of the wonderful things about working with Dreamweaver is the great FTP integration. I can upload, download, all that wonderful stuff, with a single keyboard shortcut directly in the IDE. I'm not having any such luck with Eclipse.
As part of my new job, I got myself a MacBook pro and have been running Bootcamp on it over the last few days. All in all the experience is good, but there are issues with Windows running on the MacBook that bother me (bad sound drivers, and the fact that the clock resets on each startup). However, before I installed BootCamp I spent quite a bit of time on the Mac and got over some of my "floating windows" phobias. To that end, I'm considering going all the way and switching to OSX. So to get to my point, is there anyone out there that's recently been through this that can give me some pointers on what I might miss?
That's right, I have confirmed through sources yet to be named (ACE people) that MAX will be this October 22nd to the 26th in sunny Las Vegas. They planned it on my birfday on purpose y'know...
I got back from cf.Objective() late Sunday night (or was it Monday morning) and I have to say it was by far the most educational conference I've ever attended. I attended every session I could (a change for me, I usually skip a particular session time when there's just nothing to see). The full list of sessions I attended is:
I've had several people ask about things that could be done to improve the ooGlossary so that people will start adding new content to the site. For that reason, I've added a Feature Wishlist so that you can add whatever feature you think will make the site more useful for you. So just follow the link, click Edit Page and wish away!
That's right folks. Dreamweaver 8 Dynamic Development is now available at lynda.com. This title uses ColdFusion to teach you all about handling Dynamic Development in Dreamweaver. You'll learn how to install ColdFusion (yes, on the mac too), as well as how to install MySQL and get up and running quickly.
The hardest thing about learning anything OO related is simply getting over the language barrier. Anytime you talk to an OO afficionado, you always end up hearing a term you don't understand. My biggest problem with learning Model-Glue, Reactor and ColdSpring, three things I really want to start using, is finding out what IOC, AOP, DAO, Beans, Transfer Objects, Gateway Objects, and all of the other terms mean, so that I can actually make it all the way through the documentation. Google searches are alright, but I've never had one spot I could go to find out what it all meant.
While I was in Ojai recording the Dreamweaver 8 Beyond the Basics title for lynda.com there were some reports from the Ventura County Star writing an article on lynda.com. They wanted to take a few photos of someone doing a recording, and they ended up using a shot of me on the front page of the Business section of their February 15th article. See mom and dad, I really do do real work :). Click the image for a larger version.
Don't ask me why I never tried this before... I've always just done a <cfoutput>#myVar#</cfoutput> when I needed to find out what a local variable value was. This often meant scattering them all over my page to figure out what piece of code I got wrong... I finally decided I'd just try dumping the local variable scope, and wallah voila! I get a full dump of every local variable on the page, including queries, available functions, the whole bit. I don't know why I never tried that before...
I've been using Jon Block's wonderful online CFC generator for a while, but I always secretly hoped that he was going to create a Dreamweaver extension for it. I decided it was going to happen (he's more likely a CFEclipse user ;), so I did a quick google and found the CFC Bean Generator on the Exchange (thanks for posting about it Rob!)
I finished up the new Dreamweaver 8 Beyond the Basics title for lynda.com on Friday. After 4 solid days in a little sound-proof room, it's time to head back home and catch up on all of the emails and questions from readers. The Beyond the Basics title covers advanced template usage, building multi-column CSS layouts, using some rapid coding techniques in Dreamweaver you might not have known where there, as well as a chapter on getting your feet wet with dynamic development in Dreamweaver 8.
I'm a big fan of virtual directories. I like sharing assets across sites without having to duplicate a bunch of folders. Angela and I were doing some planning for a site and she asked if you created a Virtual Directory in IIS, what would happen if you also had a physical directory of the same name. Well it turns out that if you have a Virtual Directory defined in IIS, the server will completely ignore the contents of any physical directory in the same location. So if you had this:
I never thought I'd evern actually type this into ColdFusion Comment:
I finished recording Dynamic Development with Dreamweaver 8 today for Lynda.com (this time using ColdFusion). I'm not sure when it will be released, but the turnaround is usually just a couple of weeks. Hopefully this will be up right after the new year...
I've always gone through the trouble of setting up a separate full-blown Windows 2003 Server here in my office for doing development work. The reason being that I didn't want to test on the production server, deal with FTP lags when uploading constantly changed files, and I like to keep my sites clean. I don't like testing in a base wwwroot directory and either setting up tons of subfolders or constantly clearing the wwwroot directory to get a site in the root.
If you haven't already, be sure to register for Web Design World Boston. I'll be presenting The ColdFusion Connection: Dynamic Development with Dreamweaver, and my main squeeze will be presenting Dreamweaver 8 Tips and Tricks and Customizing Dreamweaver. Check out the full agenda to see all of the other great speakers.
I've played a bit with Ruby on Rails, but just can't leave my ColdFusion behind, so it was great to see a post on Ben Forta's blog about ColdFusion on Wheels. Rob Cameron announced it on the Cube 6 Media blog today, and I'll definitely be playing with this one over the next few days. My only concern is the need for URL remapping, which I've never dealt with, and will have to find some time to get a handle on, but this is definitely going to be an exciting thing to watch, especially in connection with Joe Rhinhart's recent postings on Arf.
I just upgraded the old server to ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise... yum...
Business Week has a great interview with one of the owners of 37Signals on their design philosophy and why it's a good idea to keep things simple.
Angela and I gave a presentation to the Mid-Michigan CFUG yesterday (well actually Angela gave the presentation, and I just showed some XSL stuff), and I showed everyone how to use the new XSLT visual authoring tools in Dreamweaver 8. They're great and wonderful and everything, but they're really geared towards working with local XML files. The reason I say that, is that Macromedia doesn't offer any solutions for transforming a remote XML file. They allow you to write an XSLT file to transform that remote content, but they don't tell you how to actually pull a little Optimus Prime on it and make that XML human readable.
My little lady was on the tube the other day, and now I'm famous too.
Finally, I can get a good night's sleep :). Cartweaver 2 PHP, a PHP shopping cart solution for Dreamweaver, is now for sale. Get your PHP on, and buy one today!
Rob Brooks-Bilson has a blog post stating that Macromedia will be chipping in on the open source CFEclipse project. It will be good to get some more resources behind such a good project. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with as a team.
Schlomy Gantz has put out a nifty tool for managing Windows services from the taskbar. You can set up multiple snapshots that can turn services on and off at a whim. I haven't tried it yet, but it's on my list of toys to play with this week :)
I spent a great deal of time fighting with something yesterday for no good reason. I was trying to extend the root Application.cfc in my application from an Application.cfc inside a subfolder. Here's what I had in my subfolder's Application.cfc:
Just thought I'd show off, and let everyone know that I've cranked up the geek factor down here in SoCal...
Powered by Detroit is happening this coming weekend. If you haven't already made your reservations, I suggest you do so soon :). The cost is just $349 for the conference, which includes the 2 day conference pass, breakfast and lunch for both days, as well as a DVD of all of the presentations at the conference and $100 off of a Macromedia Certification Exam.
Given my new obsession with CFFORMs, it was great to see that Mike Nimer has just launched a site called CFFORM.com with some awesome Flash and XML style CFFORM tricks and tips. You can submit your own modifications, or take what you need free of charge. I'll definitely be spending some time here as the site grows...
If you're down in the LA/San Diego area, I'm going to be infiltrating the March Mingle on Monday. If you're a Cartweaver'er (or something) just look for me in my fancy Cartweaver shirt and say hello. There are going to be some good giveaways, and there should be a lot of geek-ness going on. You can find out some more details on what's being given away at Angela's blog.
I'm posting this as much for my benefit as anyone else's. Everytime I reinstall CF I forgot how to change this. I love using the dockable CF debugging on my sites. It allows me to have all of my debugging information in a handy little popup window for reference. It's better formatted than the classic version, and I can stick it on my second monitor for reference as I go. However, it steals focus every single time a page loads. So, to disable this, just follow these simple steps:
I've been playing around with the XSL forms in Coldfusion MX 7 and ran into a bug yesterday. If I have a multiple select, then the XSL style sheets don't properly mark each selected value as such. Let's say I have this code:
Well if you haven't heard already (since I'm a little slow these days), ColdFusion MX 7 is now out!
Oh how I love Beyond Compare
It's saved large patches of my hair
It checks my files and keeps me sane
Without it my job would be a pain
I know, I'm slow, but sue me why dontcha? The new Cartweaver (our wonderful ColdFusion shopping cart) has been completely redone, ala Angela.
Just launched a new client site based off of Cartweaver, Draw 3 Lines. The site sells a kit to learn to draw (something I could desperately use), and assorted supplies for such. The site is simple, being geared towards a younger audience, but it definitely sells the product well.
I attended Ben Forta's presentation on Blackstone last night, and got some juicy bits out of it. Here's a brief recap.
Larry Lyons pointed me to a post on House of Fusion that discussed a way to run CFMX or BlueDragon from a CD, which would allow you to send out mini-applications on CD to potential clients. This is somethign I blogged about some time ago, and it looks like CFAnywhere might be the answer.
I've had a CF scheduled task running hourly for a few months now without issue. On the 14th of May, for some reason, the scheduled task ran but wasn't rescheduled for it's next run. There's nothing in the CF logs that I can find that says why it might not have rescheduled. After forcing the scheduled task to run through the ColdFusion Administrator, it then successfully rescheduled for it's next run, and has been running fine since. If anyone has seen this happen, or knows where I might be able to dig for more debugging information, I'd like to hear it.
I'm trying to find out if it's possible to run a ColdFusion app from a CD-ROM. I can't seem to find anything about embedding a web server onto a CD though. I'm about 99% sure you can't do this with ColdFusion MX, but from a few snippets about New Atlanta's Blue Dragon I think it might just be possible. I just don't have the knowledge to make it happen.
You can now view book details directly from the Sales Rank Tracker. Now I don't have to go to Amazon to check the latest reviews or ratings either ;). Just call me lazy, I can take it :)
I'm going bald, and it's all MySQL's fault... (at least I hope it is).
Cartweaver's ColdFusion Shopping Cart version 2.6.4 has been released. This fixed a minor SQL bug and added a few new feature enhancements :). Things is good..... buy or download your update from DWfaq.
Tom Muck's new Dreamweaver MX 2004 Complete Reference is out in stores now :). Pick up your copy today, cause I said so dontcha know...
The latest and greatest Cartweaver 2 update is out, with a bunch of new fixes/improvements, including the ability to enable/disable shipping, sort categories and secondary categories, improved international support for the order form, improved support for Shared SSL and new integration with WorldPay Select Junior, not to mention some great extension work from Angela. All around a great (and rather extensive) update.
I just have to say that I'm loving ColdFusion more and more every day. I've been working on a charting application using CF's CFCHART tag, and by golly that's some sexy stuff. If you've never messed with, do...
If you're running your own CF server, or are hosting with a host who's willing to do a little extra work for you, you're going to love ColdFusion scheduled tasks. It's basically a way to tell CF to run a particular file at a set interval. The called file can run a report, update a database, do an XML grab, anything you want. And then you can tell CF that you want it to save the results of the file somewhere else.
And then some...
You betcha...
I don't know who told them they could put my picture on the cover. I only gave them permission to put it on the inside....
The new Macromedia DRK 4 is ready for to snagged up. Always guaranteed to find some tasty stuff on here :)
That's right... I've had people actually making me work, which is why there haven't been many posts to the blog lately. Needless to say I'm looking forward to getting a few projects wrapped up and out to the masses.