JohnBs personal blog

At last we’re purchasing FusionReactor to keep a watchful eye across our CF Servers. I ran into a problem whilst installing it because we run CF as a domain user account and not the default System account on windows.

If you install FR out of the box, restart your CF server (i’m running on Jrun4 instances here) then it’ll fail to start. The reason is that it needs a couple of permission changes, firstly your service account needs to have read/write permission to the FusionReactor installation folder (default c:\FusionReactor) also FR stores its license key in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Prefs - i didn’t have this branch present so for the short term i added my service account to my local Power Users group so it could create the branch - on returning post installation the branch was created as my service account so i could remove it from the power users group. Now when i restart the instance it starts ok. I’ve been in touch with Intergral and they should be adding this to their FAQ shortly.

Last week my VMWare virtual machine ran out of disk space - I’d only given it 8gb when i created it so it was my own fault. I had all sorts of trouble (basically me being a moron) expanding it so I thought I’d add it here for prosperity.

I ended up creating a duplicate of the existing virtual machine disk so i had two bootable machines - I used the vmware-vdiskexpander.exe to convert and expand the virtual disk to the new larger size. I then created a new virtual machine pointing to the OLD virtual machine disk but attached the new large virtual machine disk as a slave. Once booted into the old disk I used diskpart.exe (ships with Windows) to expand the disk to make full use of the space - if you look in disk manager you’d see unallocated space where the disk was expanded but the partition was expanded to use it. Once expanded, I attached the new expanded disk back as the primary and rebooted - deleted the temporary VM attached to the old disk - Job done, all without opening cases, connecting up disks!

I work for a property company and we’re constantly on the look out as how best to enable our visitors to search for property - I’d love to hear from folks who have used the web for searching for property and how they found the experience and to offer any suggestions as to how it may be improved. Also, if you’re looking at any property company website do things like mortgage calculators and other ancillary ‘widgets’ make sense or are there better places, ie banks etc where you’d use them in preference…

I was at the checkout of my local DIY superstore and noticed a memo to staff sitting next to the till (i have eyes like a hawk). In short the memo said that they were loosing £5500 a week in ’shrinkage’ - i presume that equates to stock that they can’t account for as the memo went on to detail steps to ensure the till item count matches the customers count etc….geez, that’s £286,000 a year ($550,000 for my american friends) and that’s just one store!!! If that’s an average across all stores it’s around £143 million for the company a year! Glad that’s not my business!!!!

I got to play with FusionDebug for the first time the other day and i’ve got to say i’m impressed. Since the year dot i’ve lived without step debugging in ColdFusion - it’s always been present in Visual Studio but we were always limited to dotting CFDUMPs around cf templates to aid in debugging. No more…or rather, I’m just catching up!

FusionDebug 2.0 was released not so long ago, I never saw v1.0 but the sales team at Integral say that 2.0 is leaps and bounds better that the first release.

Anyway, my first playing with it was with a Fusebox5 application i was building - I’d set it all up as the instructions say and all worked great, even going cross project in Eclipse to a project of CFCs - as i stepped through code it jumped between my open projects in Eclispe. Anyway, at one point i put a breakpoint in a layout file and that caused FusionDebug issues with looking up the source code - due to the parsed files that Fusebox uses. So i pinged the FusionDebug mailing list and found out about a feature of Eclispe I never knew about - linked folders in projects. It’s only accessible via FILE > NEW > FOLDER and then you click the Advanced button you enter a folder alias but then a path to the folder. In my case, I removed the existing ‘parsed’ folder and added a new parsed folder linked via a UNC path to the parsed folder on the file server - and now when i debug FusionDebug is all happy as it has access to the source code that it requires.