47 posts
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.
Hurry up September...
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.
Sorry for the noise. This is a test to see if the Twitter plugin will send the post title.
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).
After months of having serious issues with Keychain Access hanging my machine for 15 minutes at a time, I finally found the solution. The problem presents itself when you choose to allow a software program to access your keychain after you get the "Software on your computer has changed and wants to access your keychain" dialog. Clicking Allow results in a complete system hang that can only be remedied by a reboot.
Just testing to see if this shows up at Twitter.
Sometimes there's just no other way, and you should just Give Up and Use Tables
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?.