Wedding Photos

This weekend our wedding went off with out a hitch. The weather was fantastic and people were even better. Aside from being graced by so many family members and friends we had fenomenal luck with all of our vendors.

Our friend Rich Ortiz was amazing and was joined after dinner by Chris and Chris on guitar and drums. If you've never heard of Rich Ortiz, I recommend you look into him. He is worlds above the other famous contenders in the same market that he would sell into and I expect to be able to really brag about having him play at our wedding someday. Melissa and I also chose our first dance to be one of his original songs, "Further".

By complete chance we ended up finding our Photographer Louis (Forever Platinum). Louis was a complete professional and extremly fun and easy to work with. Our event planner for the wedding said he was one of the nicest guys and great to work with. He even made me look almost respectible. It was a pleasure!

We have tons of photos coming, but he quickly posted up a few on his blog the night of the wedding, he also had an LCD screen that he used half way through to show earlier shots during the wedding. That was a fantastic teaser for what we are about to receive. Until then here are just a few select ones...

0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 12:18 PM : Friends / Family

Eclipse Ctrl+Shift+R Blis

There are dozens of Eclipse shortcuts that I use, many more that I know of that I just don't use. Ctrl+Shift+R has always fallen into the later category. The last few days I've been using the "Open Resource" shortcut and I'm finding it very efficent. The more my projects list grows, the more files I have and the more projects I have that interact with each other; the more sense it makes. Now that I'm mostly in the habbit of grabbing that key combo Vs looking to the nav bar I've seen an improvement in my workflow.

My Top 3 Eclipse Shortcuts

My Top 3 CFEclipse / ColdFusion Shortcuts

This is all pretty basic stuff, but I'm amazed at how many people use Eclipse, yet don't actualy know how to use some of the most basic helpers...

@Brandon: Thanks for fixing my typo :)

1 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 12:43 PM : ColdFusion | Debugging | Development

Engagement Photos

For friends and Family I'm posting a few photos that were taken by my photographer this evening. I'm getting married in 2 weeks. All the photos can be found on the next page to save those who don't care :) I'd really like to thank Louis (Forever Platinum) for the pictures tonight!

Read more...

2 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 10:01 PM : General News | Friends / Family

Standard ColdFusion Install and Multiple Virtual Websites

Over the last 4 weeks I've seen some odd issues where the wrong page will be served up by my VPS with HostMySite. I at first attributed it to IIS, then the some weird header molestation when Apache didn't fix it. Thankfully when I posted about this issue yesterday, joshua cyr was quick to post up an old TechNote from MX6/MX7.

In short the problem is with the cacheRealPath attribute in jrun.xml. Almost 100% of the time I install the multi-version instance of ColdFusion; however my VPS is the single instance default install. Why does this matter? The multi or j2ee installs of CF8 default this attribute to false, whereas the default install sets it to true. This results in InstanceA being able to mistakenly server up InstanceB's Index.cfm file causing lots of fun issues when you have multiple virtual web servers (IIS/Apache) and template caching turned on....

0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 11:17 AM : Hosting | Server Config | Development

Very Strange Error and Request For Help

I have several ColdFusion sites on the same VPS box. SiteA (this blog) has a CFLOCATION in the "/index.cfm" file that points to "/blog/". SiteB about once a day will start throwing 404 errors. When your go to www.SiteB.com i get the index.cfm file from SiteA (this has been verified with a dump/abort); that cflocation tries to send you to /blog. Except magically it's in the correct folder now and /blog doesn't exist. It is very important to note that while I'm currently running Apache 2.2 on windows, this happened on IIS as well. This event is what caused me to switch to Apache thinking it was IIS Stability issue. The problem goes away instantly on a reboot of either service respectfully.

My folder structure is as follows:

Hard Drive Root
      wwwroot
            SiteA Base Folder
                  Blog
            SiteB Base Folder

My Apache setup order is

1. Default Virtual Host
2. SiteB Virtual Host
3. SiteA Virtual Host

The last time this error occured I outputed the client header information (from CF) and everything looks as though it should. Despite the fact that I was getting content out of the base folder for SiteA, I was in fact calling correctly for SiteB. If someone was to explain this error to me I think I would call them nuts.

Can someone PLEASE help me with this?

6 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 12:56 PM : Hosting | Server Config | ColdFusion | Debugging | Development | General News | Microsoft

HostMySite Contacted me about my review on their VPS

So the long winded title says it all. A couple days ago I wrote a review about my experience with HostMySite.com's lower end VPS package. I was basically completly unimpressed with the initial roll-out of my VPS image and it's config settings and I briefly covered a few of the things I needed to do in order to get my apps running right.

Well yesterday afternoon HostMySite took the initiative and had someone call me! I'm not sure how high up the food chain the person I spoke with was, but I believe he sayed he was in charge of maintaining the VPS servers. In short he wanted me to give him my take on the configuration changes that they needed to make and in our short 21 minute phone call covered changes that should be made to IIS, MSSQL and ColdFusion. I also made some alternative software load suggestions.

He said he would give me an update at some point and if I get one I'll post it here; thumbs up to HostMySite for at least taking a small step forward. Like I said on the phone, if they were to make these changes I think they would have happier initial customers who thought they were getting a much better product and as well as a cut in support calls. I know my issues alone generated several support tickets.

2 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 11:24 AM : Hosting | Server Config | ColdFusion

Barbecue Bar Code Generator Wrapper for ColdFusion

I needed to generate some barcodes in a ColdFusion app and I wanted to use Barbecue, which is an open-source java library that makes the whole thing pretty simple. I found a couple other wrappers out there for older versions of the library, so I thought I would post up my own wrapper that is for the more updated version. This was tested against Barbecue 1.5 beta 1.

Included in the download is my wrapper jar file for CF and an example of how to use it.

Barbecue Bar Code Generator Wrapper for ColdFusion

1 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 6:51 AM : ColdFusion | Java | Development

Non-Stop Calls From "Domain Registry Support"

For a few weeks now I've been getting calls from Domain Registry Support I've been unable to get them to stop calling me as of yet but I find this scam interesting. So far I've had angry phone calls where they get mad when I confront them to hang ups. So far only one has spoken any english past about a 5th grade level and they are getting real annoying. I haven't actualy made it far enough to figuer out what their full scam is..

I've always gotten a random phone call from them, but this is like number 5 since early last week! Apparently this company pays no mind to the DNC list or they think they don't apply.

1 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 12:29 PM :

Review: 2 Months with HostMySite VPS

After months of issues with HostMySite's shared hosting and issues related to their inability to not rekick my server 15 times a day I moved 2 of my sites to their lower end VPS hosting package. I looked long and hard for alternative solutions, but it was hard to compete with their prices and to be honest they have had the best customer service sales and support wise I've ever experienced with a hosting provider. The test sites include this blog and a new application that I will be doing a seperate press release on in the coming weeks. Mango Blog has it's own framework and my new venture is a decent size MachII ColdSpring application.

Considering HostMySite just rolls out images of only 3 seperate completly non customizable VPS package, I was completly suprised by how absolutly poor and pathetic the initial setup of my site was. My VPS has limited HD space and only 512 megs of memory. MSSQL, ColdFusion+IIS were setup as if they were running on seperate boxes with tons of memory. Simply starting up my blog site took so much memory that if something crashed, there wasn't enough left for either ColdFusion or IIS to even start back up.

I also suffered from major IIS stability issues; for some reason a secondary IIS site (the one for my new app) kept crashing. It would throw no errors and would partially work, but the root folder of my site would for some reason go to a different IIS site, which got me a 404 due to my blogs cflocation.

Last night was the first time in 2 months I've been completly happy with my VPS and some of it involved doing things that HostMySite wasn't too keen on.

1. Tune MSSQL memory usage
2. Tune ColdFusion JVM args
3. Disable mail server website (Google Hosts all of my company's mail services)
4. Disable SmartStats completly
5. Disable IIS Admin, Windows FTP and IIS www
6. Install Cerbus FTP (half the mem usage of iis admin and ftp)
7. Install Apache with a VERY trimmed down and tuned out config file

I know Apache on Windows has it's own issues and HMS tech support apparently has religious issues with it, but the new setup breaths so much better and as of now I currently have 178ish megs of free physically memory which is huge considering I only have 512 to begin with. Prior to 100% of all these changes, I was lucky to have 5-20 free megs...

So at the end of the day, after tutoring and HMS staying late after school I give them an adjusted grade of A- after their initial grade of a C. I plan on reaching out to them in the coming days to inform them how piss poor their default roll-out is, but I'm guessing nothing will be done any time soon... I know that a VPS is already geared towards the knowledgable, but with 15 minutes they could at least configuer IIS, MSSQL and CF8 JVM args to something that doesn't fall over and die.

Anyone else using HMS VPS? What have your experiences been?

3 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 7:01 AM : Hosting | Server Config | ColdFusion | Reviews | Development

Read text files one line at a time with ColdFusion

This is a pretty basic use of the how to capitalize on ColdFusion / Java, but I recently had to show someone else how to do this as well as use it myself today to parse a very large CSV file.

<cfscript>
    var f = "";
    var endOfFile = false;

    f = createObject("java","java.io.FileReader").init(arguments.csvFileLocation);
    f = createObject("java","java.io.BufferedReader").init(f);

    while (NOT endOfFile) {
        line = f.readLine();

        if (NOT isDefined("line")) {
            endOfFile = true;
            break;
        } else if (len(line)) {
            // {LINE PARSING CODE HERE}
        }
    }

    f.close();
</cfscript>

5 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 11:38 AM : ColdFusion | Java | Development

Thrice Baked Wedding Invitations

Some of you who know me, know that I'm getting married soon... Yesterday I ran into an issue that I felt was worthy of a short story. My girlfriend and I are trying to do a modest wedding and are keeping costs down where we can; one of the places we cut back was on wedding invitations and rsvp cards. We stopped into Michaels and picked up 3 DIY packs that should suffice our 100+ crowd of adults plus children and created them in MS Word. I have an small-office laser printer in my home office that prints faster than I thought was possible and it was WAY easier than I ever expected and we only spent $100ish dollars.

So 2 days after we printed them all and put them aside I get a call during the day: "Honey what are we going to do? All of the wedding invitations are still wet, and they smudge at the smallest touch!". When I got home that night and surveyed that they were in fact not drying that she wasn't nuts, I came to the most obvious conclusion that any sain purson could: "Lets put em in the oven".

Click Read More for Directions and Pictures!

Read more...

2 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 1:19 PM : DIY | General News | Friends / Family

Import MySQL into MSSQL (free/easy)

I needed to move several medium size MySQL backend apps to SQL server 2005 and did not have a cool tool for doing it. I found a way that was suprisingly easy... To do this you will need to install the ODBC drivers for your version of MySQL; I'm using MySQL 5.

Then in your SQL Management Studio, modify and run the following code.

EXEC master.dbo.sp_addlinkedserver
    @server = N'MYSQL',
    @srvproduct=N'MySQL',
    @provider=N'MSDASQL',
    @provstr=N'DRIVER={MySQL ODBC 5.1 Driver}; SERVER=127.0.0.1; DATABASE=db_name; USER=user; PASSWORD=pass; OPTION=3'

Then write seperate scripts that contain an instance of the following pieces of code per table in your MySQL db. In my case I had about 40 tables, so I wrote a ColdFusion job to do it smartly and added SQL to drop the target table if it existed.

SELECT * INTO [target_mssql_db].dbo.[target_mssql_table]
FROM openquery(MySQL, 'select * from mysql_db_name.mysql_tablename')

One of my apps had some tables with LOTS of rows, so I also set my script up to only run 5 conversions at a time to avoid timing out MSSQL locks. This should also work on MSSQL 2000 and I'm sure at least a few versions back of MySQL.

3 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 2:24 PM : ColdFusion | SQL | MS-SQL | Development

One of the best MotoGP races in years

I know many of my readers are more technical and I haven't blogged on anything non-motorcycles in a while but I had to post about the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix MotoGP race on Sunday. After some marked improvements to Casey Stoner's Desmosedici GP9's electronics the 2007 world champion has been completely unstoppable in the last 3 races. Seven time world champion Valentino Rossi even joked before the Laguna Seca round began that he would have to shoot Stoner in order to stop him.

In an amazing show of talent and aggressiveness from both riders, Rossi was able to finally stop the train that is Stoner. Knowing full well that if he let Stoner stay in front for long that he was pull away, Valentino made multiple daring and aggressive passes in order to maintain his lead providing for some of the most exciting and breath taking racing the sport has seen in many years.

The wheel to wheel race was brought to an end though when Casey Stoner ran wide in lap 24 of 32 and dropping his bike in the gravel. However the duo had been racing so hard that they had already obtained more than a 25 second lead on third place. So while Stoner was unable to re-challenge Rossi, he was still able to retain second place.

If you've ever wanted to check out a MotoGP race, I would highly recommend looking into this round and if you follow the "Read More" link you can view some video from YouTube.

Read more...

6 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 7:01 AM : Motorcycles | Racing | Reviews

Batman: The Dark Night Review (no spoilers)

In short: The Dark Night continues what I think Batman should have always been: Dark, gritty, sadistic and ugly. Heath Ledger steals the movie with an amazing representation that makes Jack Nicolson's version look like a cotton candy parody.

Soon after Ledger's passing and reading early reviews of "The Dark Night" I was sure that his acting was being exaggerated as some sort of tribute to him. After all, the acting and storyline in Brokeback mountain won tons of awards and accolades; but in truth it sucked and if wasn't for the premise and social mind job would have been straight to video...

At first I was not in favor of Heath's voice, but after several short dialogues I was convinced it was just what was needed... Ledger’s physical acting was immense; his ever so slight facial adjustments, the way he walked and even held a knife was phenomenal. He even pulled off some full theater audiance laugh grabs while never leaving his dark character. The storyline behind the Joker was also perfect. No BS story no cause to fight for... nope he just enjoys to fuck with humanity and test people and their limits!

So while Christian Bale plays to a T the tortured hero and Aaron Eckhart plays a nailed Harvey Dent / Two-Face and Michael Caine plays my favorite butler; the movie is definetly stolen by the lead villain The Joker!

My only bad comments pick out two things that matter not to the story or movie that much…

• Christian Bale’s voice when he is in Batman persona is too gruff and altered. Next to the Joker he sounds overplayed in a number of dialogue exchanges.
• Maggie Gyllenhaal has stepped in to replace Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes… To be honest I don’t think she pulled it off. She didn’t have the elegance that Katie did and somehow she managed to look horribly aged (she's only 30) and kind of ugly in a number of scenes.
  

Read more...

4 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 3:58 AM : Reviews

Review: SixSixOne Core Saver (Crash Tested)

In May 2008 my desire to get chest protection was heightened after a fatality at the race track involving a bike Vs rider collision. I did lots of looking and finally settled on a couple of products by a company called SixSixOne that seemed to meet most of my criteria

• SixSixOne Core Saver
• SixSixOne Pro Bomber Shorts

My initial reactions to the Core Saver were positive. Professional construction and good seems, It felt comfortable to wear and didn't seem to affect my riding position or any body movements. The shorts feel a bit odd at first; you wear them high to protect your hips. While they look a little funny, I have found them comfortable to wear and they do instantly appear to give me protection in places where I feel the thin hard armor in my Alpinestar suite lacks.

Crash Testing
This past weekend (7/4/08) I crashed during practice at Summit Point T4 in the rain/wet. Speeds were estimated between 90-100mph in the downhill slightly off-camber right hand sweeper. I downshifted a hair to late and after several tank slapper Esq wiggles/save attempts I was fairly violently thrown to the pavement about 10' short of the apex.

I took the full weight of the crash with my right shoulder and top right portion of my chest. After looking at my MRI images I feel fairly confident in saying that my new SixSixOne Core Save is what kept me from breaking both my collar bone and my shoulder blade. Instead I walked away with a fractured shoulder blade and some minor fluid build ups... I'm also pretty sure I would have a bruised keester and hips since I ended up hitting both pretty hard. I ended up leaving the track backwards in an upright position. Due to track conditions there was a drop off and my tail bone hit the ground pretty damn hard. Aside from a swollen thumb and my shoulder I have no other injuries.

A feature not highlighted on the spec sheet very highly is the padding on top of the shoulder. It’s a very think and firm padding that I know worked with the shoulder armor in my suit to help dampen my fall. Between this padding and the chest protection that I had no intention of testing out so soon, I definitely feel much safer at the track and on those weekend mountain runs. This armor will definitely be seen on me every weekend going forward.

The Bad / Areas of improvement

• The Core Saver's back protection is not as full length as I think it should be. That is why I believe I would only recommend this to racers who also plan on wearing the Pro Bomber Shorts in junction with the Core Saver. The Pro Bomber shorts have a continuation of the back protector that meet up fairly closely. It Provides fantastic tail bone protection. That said, I still think SixSixOne should increase the back protector length
• While there is a kidney belt, some improvements could be made in this area. For road racing I don't think it's much of an issue, but for cross use, such as off-road, snowmobiles and motocross, it would be a nice addition.
  
• Venting: I don't get it, there are these nice vents on the front of the Core Saver, but you just cover them up with the strap for the kidney belt? This doesn't seem to have any ill effect, just a "duh" kind of comment...

Review Low Down

• Highly recommend the Core Save to any street rider and the Core Saver + Pro Bomber Shorts to any racer.
• Won't win you sexiest racer if you get caught wearing just the shorts.

Read more...

1 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 2:32 PM : Motorcycles | Racing | Reviews

Remote Desktop Key Binds/Shortcuts

FireFox 3 has Infinet Loop Protection

Weather API? I need history...

Al Gore is a Windbag

FireFox Record Not Looking Good: Service Unavailable

Be a lemming; download FireFox 3 Today

Transfer: <property> and <manytoone> don't play well together

FireFox in Search of Guinness World Record

Motorcycle Road Racing Update

My new family addition (5wk old Boxer)