The Byte Stops Here

Just saw this, looks interesting. ColdFusion and Lucene 2.4.

Check out Revorg GOAT Search Solution on RiaForge

My last post was a sad one, so I thought, what's good about all thats going on?

Well, less emails from recruiters is a big one for me. I'm getting maybe 1/10th of what I used to on a daily basis.

What do you guys see as positive?

The situation is quite bad. I've worked hard over the years to build a solid team.

Over the years we've built complex Mach II, ColdSpring, & Reactor based ColdFusion Products in a SaaS model. I'd never want to let anyone from my team go. Unfortunately, the situation is out of my control.

On Friday, we didn't technically layoff or fire, but "closed the position" for two of my team members. One of them was for one of the Sr. Web Developer positions, and a person I've know for years, and one of the nicest guys on the block (not to mention a family man). We had no choice. Our clientele, local and state governments are hard hit due to the financial crisis, and despite growing 30% per year, we had to trim because banks are tighetning up and 2009 looks bleak.

Its not a decision that came easily. I'm still stressed! If we had the money, we'd hire him back up in a second. So while this is bad news for us, it may be good news for you.

Anyone looking for someone to work remote, who is a well known CF developer and all-around great guy? I can provide more details and a strong reference. Let me know!

I used to be a fan of MS SQL Server 2000. It was so easy to get up and running.

But, SQL Server 2005, is another story. To do even the most basic of things, requires, extensive knowledge or ugly workarounds.

We do a lot of merge replication with SQL Server 2005. We added some tables to two-way merges, and the replication failed. as usual, it was due to foreign key dependencies. (By default, SQL Sevrer wants to drop the table, and re-create it with replication properties.)

There is no command that I know of, where you can select the PK, and say, give me all foreign keys that link to this PK. Easy enough Use Case though, right? There are some scripts out there to give similar column names, but those aren't accurate, because they dont have a foreign key reference necessarily.

After some searching, I found this. It was everything I needed. If you guys have better scripts, do share!

select cast(f.name  as varchar(255)) as foreign_key_name
    , r.keycnt
    , cast(c.name as  varchar(255)) as foreign_table
    , cast(fc.name as varchar(255)) as  foreign_column_1
    , cast(fc2.name as varchar(255)) as foreign_column_2
    ,  cast(p.name as varchar(255)) as primary_table
    , cast(rc.name as varchar(255))  as primary_column_1
    , cast(rc2.name as varchar(255)) as  primary_column_2
    from sysobjects f
    inner join sysobjects c on  f.parent_obj = c.id
    inner join sysreferences r on f.id =  r.constid
    inner join sysobjects p on r.rkeyid = p.id
    inner  join syscolumns rc on r.rkeyid = rc.id and r.rkey1 = rc.colid
    inner  join syscolumns fc on r.fkeyid = fc.id and r.fkey1 = fc.colid
    left join  syscolumns rc2 on r.rkeyid = rc2.id and r.rkey2 = rc.colid
    left join  syscolumns fc2 on r.fkeyid = fc2.id and r.fkey2 = fc.colid
    where f.type =  'F'
 ORDER BY cast(p.name as varchar(255))
 

JVM Tuning has been long a favorite subject of mine. Maybe some day I'll share our JVM Settings in full, but for now you need to do two things.

Update to JDK 1.6 Update 10 - Once CF8 came out, people started complaining that their frameworks loaded slowly, initial page loads were long, that CFC generation took a while, etc. The conventional wisdom was to move back down to 1.5, which didn't have these issues. No more. Update 10, which has long been in beta, is now fully launched, and our CFC generation, slow loading issues are nearly gone. Whereas before it would take minutes, it now takes less than 15 seconds. Besides the other benefits of running the latest 1.6, this one rocks. Download info available @ http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp.

Garbage Collection Settings just for Frameworks - We would occasionally notice hiccups, slight slow downs for GC despite our numerous JVM tweaks. No more since adding two lines. More information is available @ Mike Brunt's blog - http://www.cfwhisperer.com/post.cfm/sun-jvm-1-6-heap-memory-behavior-with-coldfusion-frameworks.

The Two JVM Tweaks:
-Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=600000 -Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=600000

Subversion 1.5.3 had enough bugs to warrant a new release two weeks later. See notice below.

---

I'm happy to announce Subversion 1.5.4, fast on the heels of Subversion 1.5.3.

1.5.3 was discovered to contain a regression in 'svn merge'; see CHANGES for more information.

Subversion 1.5.4 is available from:

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.4.tar.bz2

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.4.tar.gz

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.4.zip

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.5.4.tar.bz2

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.5.4.tar.gz

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.5.4.zip

Release notes for the 1.5.x release series may be found at:

http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.5_releasenotes.html

You can find the list of changes between 1.5.4 and earlier versions at:

http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/tags/1.5.4/CHANGES

In case you guys missed this, a new study finds that with each keystroke on a wired keyboard the electromagnetic waves can be read to recover the keystrokes.That means nothing you type, including passwords, is a secret.

Read more @ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10072967-83.html.

I'm back, tired and focused!

I was fortunate enough to be asked to perform an early access review (unedited) of Tariq Ahmed's Flex 3 in Action. While I read through the book, I was side-tracked, and its definitely my bad I didn't get this review out earlier.

The version I have is 648 pages. Yes, its massive. While this can be a bit overwhelming to newbies, the "in Action" part of the title should give you an indication that this book is full of example, and thats a good thing.

The book does a good job of covering some of the history behind traditional web development and where Rich Internet Applications are headed. As Ray Camden mentions in his review of the book, that its also "to see many comparisons between Flex and ColdFusion concepts". Ray's review can be found here.

Take for example, Chapter 1: Introduction to Flex. Some of the topics this chapter covers is:

• The problems that Web developers face
• What Flex is and how it solves those problems
• What are RIAs (Rich Internet Applications)?
• The difference between RIAs and RWAs (Rich Web Applications)
• How Flex differs from the competition (i.e. how to sell Flex to your boss)
• The Flex Ecosystem

As you can see from just the first chapter, that this book lays some solid groundwork for the developer.

Plusses:

• Its written by developers for developers
• Tariq Ahmed's written several great books in the past
• Lots of examples and diagrams
• Provides good foundational and historical background
• Provides a step by step approach
• Talks high-level AND low-level, like Chapter 3: Working with ActionScript, which covers variables, operators, conditions, etc.
• Covers end to end development, from basics to reusability to customization to testing to deployment
• Appendix points you to dozens of forums, intiatives and developer resources

Minuses:

• Size, it may take a while to get through it.
• There is some incohesion between writing styles between authors (typical complaint), which I'm hoping would be resolved in the final version

So go out, and grab a pre-order of the book. More details here.

As many of you know, for e-Commerce, whenever and wherever you touch credit cards, you must be PCI Compliant. But where do you start to find hosts, who have created an environment for you, and are willing to work with you. Besides Google, oops, I mean Scroogle, you can look at the list Visa provides.

Download the list @ http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/cisp_list_of_cisp_compliant_service_providers.pdf.

I'll be covering the ones mentioned for Managed Hosting in forthcoming reviews.

Download: http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.3.zip

Version 1.5.3
(10 Oct 2008, from /branches/1.5.x)
http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/tags/1.5.3

 User-visible changes:
  * Allow switch to continue after deleting locally modified dirs (issue #2505)
  * Update bash_completion to be compatible with 1.5 (r32900, -11, -12)
  * Improve 'svn merge' execution time by 30% on Windows (r33447)
  * Reuse network sessions during 'svn merge', improving performance (r33476)
  * Improve temp file creation time on Windows (r33464)
  * Greatly improve merge performance (r29969, r32463, r33013, -016, -022, -112)
  * Improve file IO performance on Windows (r33178, -85)
  * fixed: merging files with spaces in name (r33109, -121, -369)
  * fixed: incorrect relative externals expansion (r33109, -121, -369)
  * fixed: 'svn mv' hangs and consumes infinite memory (r33201, -12)
  * fixed: correctness regression in 'svn log -g' (issue #3285)
  * fixed: current early bailout of 'svn log -g' (r32977)

 Developer-visible changes:
  * Allow the tests to run as non-administrator on Windows Vista (r31203)
  * Allow out-of-tree build of bindings on BSD (r32409)
  * Translate messages in svn_fs_util.h (r32771)
  * fixed: bindings test for Perl 5.10 (r31546)
  * fixed: building bindings and C API tests with VS2008 (r32012)
  * fixed: svn_ra_replay API over ra_serf (r33173)

Many of you have noticed thats its been quiet around here. Been working on so many interesting new things. Several posts forthcoming!

The PCI Security Standards Council has released a new version of the Data Security Standards today; namely version 1.2.

To download the doc and a list of changes:

• PCI DSS Version 1.2
  
• PCI DSS Summary of Changes (Between 1.1 and 1.2)
  

This is no joke. You should be following this news.

Read more @ http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/24/army/

Ok, trying to be as dramatic as I can be in my title about a new undocumented method in CF8 called "getValueWIthoutChange".

You've seen me post before on how hard is to get underlying session information from CF.

When I saw this blog post by Terry Palmer, I almost had to blink twice. If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, his blog entry has all the details.

I'll be looking at the code closer and seeing if we can't do some interesting stuff with it. For now, read on, and enjoy!