JohnBs personal blog

I just managed to get it from the Swiss mirror if others are still having problems getting it - some servers had errors when you tried to download it, this one has it and it took about 40 seconds to grab.

The IM gateway in CFMX7 really is cool!!! - I took great delight showing .NET programmers the simplicity of the implementation this afternoon at work. We’re a mixed environment where I work, MS on servers and the desktop, MS SQL Db’s, ASP.NET CRM environment, desktop finance/procurement application (with Java-Servlet Exec web end) and then CFMX7 for our intranet (standard) and internet (enterprise) sites.

The simplicity of the IM/SMS gateways has gotten everything thinking how we could employ them in our environments. One option is for monitoring and alerting. Because of the diverse platforms we may look to implement a webservice messaging gateway so various applications can post into a CFMX hosted webservice to forward alerts via the IM/SMS gateways. It’s probably something I’ll look into implementing into my cfhealthmonitor tool too! All in all, exciting times! I’ll repeat myself - if only event gateways were available in a limited form on CF Standard!!

A collegue brought this site to my attention earlier this week, sitevista.com. It really is worth reading about the services (when it comes out of BETA) they can offer you - pretty much an entire test suite of visual/accessiblity tests for your site. Video’s of page loading on different connection speeds, cross browser compatability tests even down as far as a colour blindness test! I think the price is going to be reasonable too - I recall seeing around the $30 per month mark.

If you’ve not played with the IM functionality in CFMX7 you’re missing out on heaps of fun! Matt Woodwards article, here walks you through the process - remember it’s Enterprise Edition only but works fine if you’re using a developer edition locally for testing!

I think it’s a great shame that the standard version of CF7 doesn’t allow developers to use perhaps ’selected’ event gateways in their applications and only allow custom gateways to be used on the Enterprise edition.

I can’t believe i’ve only just discovered mod_rewrite!! I’ve been busy converting various links around my site to nice friendly links despite being Fusebox/BlogCFC under the hood…

Here are a few tweaks made so far; Categories are now available via /category/categoryname.cfm. Full RSS feed now /full.rss, Short RSS feed now short.rss.RSS Feeds are available as /categoryname.rss.

I’ve just noticed MS have posted another Beta 1 of their antispyware tool, available here.

Mind you, i’m not totally relying on the MS tool, I just ran a Search and Destroy search and that found spyware on my computer!!

From later this summer BBC Radio 1 will be available in the USA on Sirius satellite radio. Up till now you could listen to on demand ‘Listen Agains’ from the various shows on the BBC site but on the Siruis network they will offset program times so the breakfast show is in the morning and the drive time show is in the evening so you’re not listening to the breakfast show at midnight! If you’re into new music and fed of commercial advertising (provided Sirus don’t insert this) then it’ll be worth checking out!

I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to make sure my production CF servers are happy. As long as they’re serving pages via HTTP and processing CF code then we’re happy - or are we? We all know there are factors that can bring production servers to their knees - and i’m not just talking about poor code either, I’m talking mail servers, db servers and such like.

Common things like checking the mail ‘undelivr’ folder, making sure mail servers are contactable and that DSN’s are available are all menial tasks which can take a while to click through the various screens in the administrator or a file manager to verify their status. It sucks, it waste’s time, so i built a tool :).

I built a tool that uses a CFC on any remote CF server to expose a heap of stuff, amongst stuff I use the admin API to retreive and verify DSNs, retreive the registered mail servers (and then cheat using the service factory to verify them as then admin API doesn’t provide a facade for that ). There’s another part to the tool that calls the webservices and then displays it back to the user, here is what it looks like so far;

Anyway - it’s a work in progress, more to come soon!

There i was busy coding an app and I did a fairly routine CFDUMP, <cfdump var=”#host#”> ran my page and didn’t see what I expected. Instead I saw the hostname of the server I was talking to - which puzzled me. I had in fact typo’ed and should have cfdumped ‘hosts’ which I was expecting to be a dump of an XML packet. It turns out that a number of the CGI variables are accessible without their http_ prefix. Obviously <cfdump var=”#host#”> gives the same result as <cfdump var=”#http_host#”> (assuming no other in a higher priority scope!) and <cfdump var=”#cgi.http_hosts#”>. Not scoping my Cfdump meant that CF searched all the scopes it usually does and found a match just without the http_ prefix.

Not that it’s particular important - but just something to watch out for. I’ve confirmed it on CF6.1 (Solaris) and on CF7 (Windows) where i came across it initially.

Another hour goes by….another bug submitted to MM. It seems that deleting log files from within the CFMX administrator is a little flakey if not a nonstarter. In restoring all these car files I’ve ended up with a heap of log files listed but I can’t get rid of the things without deleting them from the physical disk. It prompts ‘Are you sure you want to delete?’ but when you click OK it just refreshes the page.

EDIT: And further to that you need to stop the service to be able to delete the files!