The Byte Stops Here

Major Flaw in CF9 - May Break Code! (Part 2)

2009-11-02T10:11:15Z

Sami Hoda

I have submitted comments from the previous post detailing the issue as Bug # 80552 inside Adobe's Bug Tracker. To get this fixed, please vote!

Major Flaw in CF9 - May Break Code!

2009-10-30T11:10:29Z

Sami Hoda

As part of our upgrade to CF9, we started doing regression testing on our local boxes. My co-worker Joseph Lamoree found and blogged about a flaw he found in CF9 that brought our app to a halt. Serious, no joke.

Here is the issue in some detail. If you want to take a look at a MXUnit Test Case, then head over to Joseph's blog on Posterous for more details as well.

I have two files, local.cfm and local.cfc.

Local.cfm has the following:

Local.cfc has the following:

When running this on CF8, I get the following output:

When running this on CF9, I get the following output:

First off, CF9 is killing firstName and lastName. It seems when setting local to a Struct return from a function to start off, those values are quickly killed.

Why is this a big issue? Well, in frameworks like Mach II, you can start with:

What we see is that we have to do a structAppend, appending local to the values we want from the function...

Seems to me that any cfset local = is being ignored more or less. That is why:

If you dump this, it behaves like the 2nd line never happened. It shows the value for local.x. But this way, any function call to set values to local also get ignored. I think if the programming ignored the structNew(), but "appended" values from other functions instead of ignoring, this would everyone happy.

Must Read: Teaching CS @ Universities - Great Article

2009-10-27T12:10:58Z

Sami Hoda

Joel Spolsky writes an excellent article/blog entry called "Capstone projects and time management". Its about a topic I'm very passionate about, and that is the teaching of Computer Science or Computer Information Systems at universities.Great read.

UCLA Study: The Internet Is Altering Our Brains

2009-10-20T12:10:16Z

Sami Hoda

Fascinating article. Read more @ http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,568576,00.html.

Hilarious Video - A Day at the Office

2009-10-16T04:10:56Z

Sami Hoda

Blocking Traffic from China - Thoughts Needed

2009-10-12T11:10:13Z

Sami Hoda

I've been reading my logs more thoroughly for the past few data and I see a lot of bad traffic. Couple that with CFFormProtect, which tends to block SPAM posts dozens of times per day. Most of the traffic is coming from China unfortunately.

Now looking at my Google Analytics, I do think there is some legitimate traffic from China. For my work, on the other hand, we blocked ALL traffic from China, since we don't do business there and see no need for traffic from there.

However, as a blogger, what do I do? What can I do to conserve server resources without kicking out what may be legitimate readers? What have you done? Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.

CF9 Doesn't Like Mango Blog

2009-10-09T07:10:07Z

Sami Hoda

Well, I upgraded my server to CF9, and there were both some immediate and subtle hiccups working with the latest build of Mango Blog. I've mentioned some of these in the forums, but here they are.

First, the site would not run. I got: "Error: Object of type class java.lang.String cannot be used as an array". I narrowed down the issue to: "cfset to = arraylen(linkCategories)"

The issue was inside \tags\mangoextras\LinkCategories.cfm on Line 14. I basically put the code inside a catch/try and on error set "to" to 0. Not sure if its accurate, but it work, the site load.

This sparked my curiousity. I cleared the error and ran through some basic stuff. The cfformprotect plugin threw an error. This one I'm not 100% certain is CF9 related, or just an error related to the code there.

This one threw: "Element RAWDATA.COMMENT_NAME is undefined in DATA. "

Going further, I ran CF9's Code Analyzer, and found a whole bunch of stuff.

The first and the last one are especially interesting. ArrayFind is a reserved name and "location" as well.

I'm sure there is more!

ColdFusion 9 - 50% OFF

2009-10-05T11:10:48Z

Sami Hoda

Ok, now that I've got your attention, this is how I calculate the savings.

We have dev (besides each developers local environment), staging, and UAT environments for code before they hit production.

Before, we would have to buy CF Entrprise for Dev, Stage, UAT, and our Prod Boxes. But guess what, with ColdFusion 9 has some great EULA changes as highlighted by Terry Ryan.

So besides the fact, that if I had a duplicate of my prod environment for disaster recovery purposes, I could use my prod licenses on those boxes, I can now share my prod licenses with "development, testing, staging" servers.

It 99% clear, and another post by Terry tries to clarify. From what I can tell, I no longer have to buy extra licenses for servers that don't get much hits.

This is one of those things I brought up during with Adam Lehman a while back, and glad to see it implemented with CF 9. Woo-hoo!

ColdFusion 8.01 Cumulutive Hot Fix 3 Update (and Pain!)

2009-09-30T03:09:26Z

Sami Hoda

I didn't see this advertised anywhere, but it seems the CHF3 was re-released on 9/16/09 with some fixes.

The changes can be found @ http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/511/cpsid_51180.html.

Either way, with the pre-9/16 version or the post-9/16 I am seeing errors occasionally on our servers.

The errors say: "coldfusion.runtime.J2eeSessionScopeStub cannot be cast to coldfusion.runtime.J2eeSessionScopeStub" and they match the one found by Terry Palmer @ http://cfteeps.blogspot.com/2009/09/hot-under-hotfix.html.

Does anyone else have any experience with this?

MS-SQL Tip: Creating A Comma Delimited List From a Column

2009-09-30T03:09:07Z

Sami Hoda

A lot of times we take functions like valueList for granted. When it comes to SQL Server, if we wanted to do something similar, we have to jump through a lot of hoops.

Fortunately, I stumbled upon an article covering different techniques on MS SQL 2008, 2005, and 2000.

Take a look, you won't be disappointed.

Defragment Firefox!

2009-09-07T06:09:31Z

Sami Hoda

Did you know you can defragment firefox... what you would really be doing is cleaning up its internal database, but it works!

More details here:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/09/06/optimize-firefox-performance-via-defragmentation-add-on-applications/

Amazing SoCal Fire Photos

2009-09-03T01:09:07Z

Sami Hoda

Half GB ColdFusion App Open Sourced By Defense Info Agency

2009-09-02T04:09:52Z

Sami Hoda

I'd like to see this! Written in CF8, with tons of unique features!

Has anyone seen this app? Looks like you have to jump through some hoops to get a copy.

Hiring Woe #1 - Building Apps from Scratch vs. Maintenance

2009-09-02T03:09:32Z

Sami Hoda

Ok, as promised, I'm covering some hiring issues I've had over the past couple years.

One of the first things that comes to mind, when looking at a developer's experience, is whether they have had any experience building things from scratch, or is most of their experience in just maintaining existing applications.

Now, don't get me wrong, the issue isn't actually that simple. If you read Andy Singleton's blog post (of Assembla fame), he talks about how the number one developer qualification, in his opinion, is being able to build from scratch.

On the other hand, maintenance has its own benefits. You get to see the application grow over time, understanding and work on its weaknesses, respond to client feedback and re-work/refactor to improve etc.

The reason I bring this up, is that during the interview process, I ask about the applications they have worked on. A lot of times you will find contractors who jump from one new app to another, and with no sense of what happened to that, how it progress, whether what they built created value, or even actually solved the business problem it was built for. This is an extreme, and just building from scratch with no long term perspective is a negative in my book, no matter how good an "architect" you were.

To other group I often find, is people who have just maintained apps. They might also be contractors who got brought on to maintain an app, or people who originally built and stayed long into the maintenance phase. The problem I find here is that often times, contractors especially, will say: "Well, we just maintained it. We had to adopt to the coding standards (or lack thereof." Basically, there was little innovation. They were not allowed to rock the boat, re-factor heavily, or even understand why the app was built in the first place. I often ask this group, what their experience is with frameworks, and the few that know what I'm talking about, mention that the client saw the benefits of transitioning to one, but they never did anything. The large majority who maintained apps come back and say, "framework??"

One word of advice: If you're maintaining an app, and you have no experience with using a framework, at least spend some time on the side working on them, and be familiar with them. If you are just maintaining apps, and stuck in your little world keeping the status quo, then I can't work with you. That ain't life on the bleeding edge, right. ;)

So whatever your case, understand where you are. Trying to build apps from scratch, but also stick with them for some years before you move on. These are the people who are often the most balanced: they can speak to client needs over time, the evolution of the app, and even the dire straights of being stuck in maintenance mode. If you are in one extreme case or the other, look for an opportunity to try the other extreme and come towards the middle.

Verity Indexing for SQL Server - Some Tips

2009-09-02T03:09:07Z

Sami Hoda

We've been using Verity for years. Needless to say, there is a reason I don't have hair on my head. :)

I can't wait to move to Solr. But in the mean time, we made several enhancement to our indexing that I wanted to share.

First, we have close to 30,000 records (many with large text fields) that get indexed almost hourly. These records are constantly being updated.

Every several days, we would have corruption or locking issues. We decided that we would do a full purge and re-index nightly to fix this issue.

In doing 30,000 records, Verity would freak out. I mean, before we could simply load all into memory via CFQuery, and pass it to Verity. That soon became unwieldy, not because of memory issues (another topic), but because Verity would throw up.

So the first thing we did was look up an industrial strength SQL script to page through the records. Here is the process we use:

Purge Index
Use Special SQL Script to grab 500 records
Update Index
Grab next 500
Update Index
Repeat steps 4 and 5 till we get to our record count
Optimize

This works like a charm. Well, until last night when we started getting errors from the database. We do lots of SQL Server replication (another topic!), and it seems the tables we were indexing were throwing dead lock errors. Basically SQL Server 2005 found two processes asking for a lock on similar data and killed our index process. First off, we use the (NOLOCK) flag next to each table in our query. That should have prevented the issue. I found so many search results of people complaining why SQL Server is just plain not smart enough to handle simple locks issues like this. Anyways, I digress.

To resolve the issue, I added two additional lines to the SQL query pulling the data:

SET DEADLOCK_PRIORITY HIGH
SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED

Hope this helps folks having similar issues.