Old Henry Churchill
Another new cigar, smoked at alternative happy hour, and reviewed today. Read all about it, after the jump.
Continue reading "Old Henry Churchill"
April 2007 Archives
Nutter Gets Endorsements
I find it a convenient coincidence that both the Daily Pennsylvanian and Philadelphia Magazine waited until after I revealed my endorsement to reveal their endorsements for Nutter.
I got this via America's Hometown.
By the way, I'm now the #6 result for the search term "Michael Nutter."
Adobe Made me Obsolete
It looks like with the Scorpio tour in full swing, the NDA is up on certain aspects of ColdFusion 8. (I'm still going to tread lightly though.) But according to this article from the downloadsquad, Adobe finally revealed that they went and added Exchange Integration to ColdFusion.
Up until now, the only game in town was using Webdav to communicate with Exchange. I've been pushing the little bit I know about it for the last year.
I've never been happier to be out of a line of work ever. This stuff is tough to write and fickle to maintain. Microsoft doesn't make it any easier by breaking stuff when they push out updates.
I've been working with it in the Beta tests and I can categorically say: Adobe has made it truly easy to interact with Exchange. Short of working in .Net, there is no easier way to programmatically interact with Exchange than with what the ColdFusion team achieved here. This is to say, having worked with .Net, there is no easier way to programmatically interact with Exchange than with ColdFusion 8.
I have some ideas for best practices of working with Exchange from ColdFusion when we can all talk more freely about it. In the meantime if you get a chance to get on the Beta trial give it a chance; it will knock your socks off.
My Mayoral Choice
If you just want to cut to the chase, my choice is Michael Nutter. Michael Nutter has my vote for mayor in the 2007 Democratic Primary (or as I like to call it, the actual vote for mayor that matters.)
If you want to hear my reasoning, here you go.
Despite having no real knowledge of the race before researching it I had a vague preference for Nutter before I began. I probably picked it up without thinking from my blog reading. But as I researched, I started to see a guy who actually thought about public policy, and the effects that policy can have on the city. Policy defined here for these purposes being the all encompassing actions and statues that a governmental body has influence over, as opposed to "plans," "Initiatives," and "programs" which are just usually media attention catchers. This is not to say that Nutter doesn't have Initiatives or programs, he does, but he also has policy ideas.
He's running against Mayor Street, which I definitely dig.
Nutter is familiar with the way Philadelphia government works. He was an effective member of city council who actually got ethics reform passed, and tax reform through before Street vetoed. Those are tough pieces of legislation to get passed in Philadelphia. I see this in sharp contrast to Brady and Fattah who are well connected to the Philadelphia machine, but not the governance. This is also a contrast with Knox, who had, as far as I can tell, one job in city government.
Nutter also is pushing for an immediate addressing of the crime problem. This is in sharp contrast to Evans, who has plans, and talked about education being the solution. (It's a long term solution yes, but we need a band-aid in the meantime.)
I could go on. But I think I don't want to bash the other candidates. Nutter is the best guy for the job. I'm voting for him. I think you should too.
La Aroma de Cuba Monarch
Had a new cigar for the first time in awhile tonight. Let me tell you all about it, after the jump.
Continue reading "La Aroma de Cuba Monarch"
Twitter's System Maintenance Page
I would like this image to be Wharton's new maintenance page. I wonder if Bob would go for that.
Top Code Review Issues
I figured I would blog about what I've been seeing during code reviews lately. Maybe someone else has been seeing too, or seeing other issues. I've omitted problems that deal with our shop's internal best practices, and tried to stick with things that would apply more globally. If I over applied something let me know. It's a long one, so more after the jump.
Continue reading "Top Code Review Issues"
Michael Nutter
Initial Impressions
I think the phrase "policy wonk, but no charisma." I think I absorbed it off a blog somewhere.
Actual Research
"My name is Michael Nutter, and this is the saddest day of my life."
Or so my TV series based on Michael Nutter would start.
Leaving his perennial heart-broken appearance aside, Michael Nutter's got a lot going for him. He's a lifelong Philadelphia resident who went to Wharton and then stayed here. After a career in Investment Banking, he went into public service. He was a councilman the gaping maul that is the Philadelphia 4th district. He quit to run for mayor.
He's been described as a "maverick." He's been at pretty strong odds with the Street administration for the past 8 years. He's got strong policy based ideas. He championed a bill to repeal the business privilege tax only to see Street veto it. He's pushed a lot of policy through, including the quixotic ethics reform package.
I don't agree with his martial law idea for the heavy crime areas. It does sound a little draconian. But I don't live in one of those areas. If the people that live in those neighborhoods vote for him, they'll be saying they're okay with it.
I also don't like that he's on the list of the DLC's 100 to watch for 2003. But let's face it; he's a Democrat who went to Wharton. He's automatically going to be loved by the DLC.
I came into this exercise liking Nutter the most. As of now he seems to me to be the most qualified candidate, who's in a distant second in even his own polls. (In others he's down by more)
He's an extremely qualified policy-wonk, lacking charisma, and trailing? That's just my kind of underdog.
I'm not going to say I'm voting for him just yet though. I haven't dismissed Brady or Fattah yet. I've got a sum-up post left to write.
Tom Knox
Initial Impressions
This guy started TV commercials early and often. That says to me he's rich and a long shot.
Actual Research
Okay, there isn't he usually voting information to found on this guy, because, he's never held an elected office before. He did work in government before - he was a deputy mayor under Rendell who seemed to be charged with cutting costs. He did so by going after some low hanging fruit - office space costs. He also saved the city money on health care. That just smells a little fishy to me, since he sold his company to UnitedHealth Group at some point in there. It could be industry contacts and relationships allowed him to save the money. However knowing Philly, it was some sort of backroom deal that involved Knox and his friends making some money, and conversely there are a bunch of city workers who are getting the shaft.
Of course I have no evidence for this at all. I have no real idea about the quality of a city worker's health plan.
But I do know that Knox made his money from payday loans. If the above contained a slice of sketchiness, this contains the whole pie. I know people use this service, and there is a market for this sort of thing. But I don't have admire the people who make money off it.
Couple all this, with a lack of real ideas, I can't say that I'm going to vote for him.
Bad news for me: he's leading in the polls. Good news for me: He's be advertizing for a couple months now. Hopefully his lead will start wearing off.
Running a ColdFusion Shop Part 4
I received an email today, that reminded me of a topic I wanted to throw up on my Running A ColdFusion Shop series.
The email:
Subject: Mail Queues Need Attention
Body: Hoth Spool could be backed up.
| query - Top 1 of 1 Rows | |||
| DATELASTMODIFIED | DIRECTORY | NAME | SIZE |
| 04/17/2007 05:43:54 PM | C:\CFusionMX\Mail\Spool | Mail22186.cfmail | 719 |
To unblock spool:
Drain stop node(wlbs drainstop)
Restart Cold Fusion Service.
Restore node (wlbs start)
Make sure before doing this that the node is actually backed up.
One or two messages in the queue does not a blockage make.
But depending on the number of items and length of their stay, you can make the determination.
What this email reminded me to say was: DRY isn't just for code.
We had this problem a while back. Every once in awhile, the mail queues on a random one of our ColdFusion servers would back up. The mail would remain stuck until the server was restarted. Developers and users started getting pissed about their application email being delayed.
The short term solution was to check the queues every once in awhile. Once the problem stopped occurring, we stopped checking... until it happened again. We looked for a hotfix, to no avail. We did this a couple times, and each time we got burned when we stopped being vigilant.
Finally I said "Screw it; I'm scripting a solution to it." I started checking to see if files were in the spool directory of all of our servers. Then I had to make sure that the files had sat there for a little bit instead of just having been written there. Finally I had to send an alert with the needed fix.
No big deal, it's not advanced programming, it's not even particularly good code.
The point here is that it was running in a scheduled task... since I wrote it in 2005 (and restarted it earlier this year.) We had this problem again today, and nobody outside of my team noticed.
So what's the point of this besides a little bragging? Don't do things by hand that you can automate and forget about, or DRY isn't just for code.
Mayoral Debate
I'll get back to my nugget articles on each of the candidates this week. But I caught the mayoral debate today, and figure I would add my impressions of it to my thought train.
Mostly the debate just reinforced my prejudices. Nutter impressed me. Knox didn't. However I did have my opinion altered slightly. Once again, Brady performed better than my previous belief about him. Fattah's stock also rose. Evans disappointed me.
Overall I think Nutter did the best. He didn't bobble anything; he was steady, coherent and measured throughout the entire debate. He had the most concrete plans and suggestions. They were concrete, but I didn't disagree with them complete. I'm not sure his martial law plan is a good one, but it was the most concrete plan put forward. I also like that he said the ballsy-est thing in the debate. The exact quote was :
"296 black men were killed in the city last year. If the Ku Klux Klan came in and killed 296 men we'd see a different kind of action going on in Philadelphia right now."
- Quote Taken from "The Next Mayor Blog"
It might have been practiced, but no one else said anything quite as bold.
On a side note, can someone get Nutter a puppy or something? He seems to constantly look like his dog was put to sleep earlier that day.
Fattah also did well. I saw him as having a higher delta between his highs and lows than the other candidates. His closing was incoherent. For the most of the rest of it, he was very good, but have the occasional vague bullshit answer. He had the second most impressive statement in my mind, and the most common sense to boot. He suggested that to help reduce gun related violence, we should encourage the D.A. to give out plea deals to people who give up illegal gun dealer information. It's simple, common sense, and completely doable.
Brady did a couple things I liked. His closing was at the first glance very emotional, but vague. But as I thought about it, he was pointing to a result of "a safer Philadelphia" instead of just saying how to get there. He also took the time to defend all of the other candidates from Knox's bashing of insiders, which might have been showmanship but if it was, then I bought it. On closer inspection, he seems to be a bit long on the emotional appeal, short on the concrete ideas.
Evans harped on two things:
- Philadelphia should be one of the safest big cities in the country
- All good things could be accomplished through leadership at the top.
I assume that he thinks this person should be him. He really didn't say that much to convince me of that.
Knox was incoherent throughout the debate. There was this whole question about him forgiving a "loan" that he lent to his campaign. It was a confusing, weird question. It resulted in a rambling confusing answer. His one bright moment was when he was asked about the airport leasing option and gave the answer that there was a limit of 5 airports that the federal government would allow to be leased; only one of them could be a hub, and Chicago has already petitioned. Additionally the proposed profits would have to be shared with the airlines. Great! For one moment Tom Knox woke up and answered a question. The rest of the time, he was pretty much a zombie.
If I had to go just on the debate; it would be Fattah or Nutter. My brain says Nutter, my heart says Fattah.
I'll add it to the rest of my information, and come up with a decision later. If you want to watch the debate it's available on the 3 CBS website.
Chaka Fattah
Here's my third in my, Philadelphia Mayoral Race 2007 series.
Initial Impressions
Nothing bad to say, but I feel like he's really good at winning his (my district) but that's all I know about him. Oh and his wife is Renee Chenault-Fattah.
Actual Research
Chaka Fattah is currently the US Representative for PA 2nd district. He's been there since 1994. He got there from knocking out the incumbent representative, Lucien Blackwell, in the Democratic Primary. Knocking out an incumbent Democrat in Philadelphia, in a primary? I thought such feats were impossible. Blackwell was the mentor of the current mayor, John Street. I don't know this for sure, but I would think that would give him some enemies in the current administration. (Which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.) But that's my inference; I've seen nothing to back that up. In fact, I've heard rumors that he and the current administration get along very well.
He's got good ratings from labor and other traditional Democratic base organizations. His positions seem to put him in the same exact ideological place as Bob Brady, although some seem to stand out a bit. He seems, looking at his Project Vote Smart questionnaire, to be unable to place any priorities on spending. Additionally he gets some flak from law enforcement types for openly calling for a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Personally, I don't care on which side of the case he takes. That he did at all is a big detraction as, for the most, part professional politicians that get involved in that case tend to be crass opportunists, whether you are calling for a new trial, or condemning St. Denis for naming at street Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal. (Or naming a street Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal for that matter.)
I have no idea how he would do as Mayor. I don't think that a legislative position in DC makes him a strong candidate for an executive position like mayor. And frankly, if I was going to vote for congressman, at this point I like Bob Brady slightly better. But having had this thought, I think I have to say that so far all of the candidates I've looked into are found wanting.
Running a ColdFusion Shop 3
For Reference: Part 1 and Part2.
It's been awhile, but I've finally got more to say about all this.
Backup
In the last one of these, I told you to back up your system. Maybe not directly, but it was there. Okay, so I didn't say it. I'm saying it now. Backup your machines. Do a tape backup, export to an external drive, do anything. Just backup your machines.
Backup Configuration Files Separately
Independent of a backup solution that takes care of your whole system, I would also recommend backing up configurations to separate location, in their current format. Meaning, don't put them on a tape, don't ship them off site. Just keep them somewhere you can access them. Why? Coldfusion is pretty light. CFML sites are comprised of pretty small files. Odds are, if you have a systems failure, it very well may be faster to rebuild a system from scratch then it will be to get a system backup restored and working. Rebuild your server, reinstall your webserver, and reinstall ColdFusion, all while getting the CFML files from backup. Then use configuration files you've stored elsewhere to restore both your webserver and Coldfusion to its old state. By this point, the CFML files should be out from a restore.
There are other uses for these files. You can use this method to clone your boxes, for clustering for example. Additionally, the ways they are broken up make it easy to share certain areas of configuration between machines. The most useful of these is neo-query.xml, which has all of your datasources on it.
Anyway, you probably want to know where all of these are:
- ColdFusion configuration information is stored in xml files, in [CfusionRoot]\lib.
- IIS XML configurations can be exported from the IIS Manager
- Right Click website
- Choose "All Tasks"
- Choose "Save Configuration to file."
I'm sure that Apache has something to handle this too. But I don't have any experience with it.
Backup Certificates
If you are using SSL certificates, back them up. They are a pain in the ass to manage. If you lose one without a backup you have to depend on the Certificate Authority to get your SSL service back up. Better to just have them ready to go in case of a problem.
Again I can only speak authoritatively about IIS, but:
- Go to IIS Manager
- Right click your SSL secured site
- Choose "Properties"
- Go to "Directory Security"
- Under "Secure Communication" hit the "View Certificate" button
- Choose "Details" tab
- At the bottom "Copy To File"
That will bring up the "Certificate Export Wizard." I usually choose the default options, with one exception. I choose "Yes export the private key." It's less secure, so you want to make sure you store them somewhere safe, but you'll be able to do this again with a certification created from a backup with the private key.
That's all I got this time around. Sorry it's all backup related. Nothing happened; I was just collating tips for building a new Coldfusion box in our environment, and realized that these were all pretty important to doing that
Dwight Evans
Here's my second in my, Philadelphia Mayoral Race 2007 series
.Initial Impressions
Who the hell is Dwight Evans?
Actual Research
Who the hell is Dwight Evans? Other than his campaign site, there is almost nothing about him floating out there in the Interether.
Okay, that's not quite fair. He's a state representative. He's been a candidate for mayor, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor before. I guess he doesn't his current office.
Project Vote Smart is the only site with any independent information about him. And even that doesn't have any position statements from him, just reports on his voting record and interest group ratings. From what I can tell, he's a moderate Democrat for Philadelphia. His campaign site does give voice to the crime wave. It also addresses education and other normal election time issues. No mistakes, but there's nothing that makes me want to vote for him.
Dwight Evans might be the best candidate out there but I have no idea. Other than his own efforts to publicize him, I hear nothing about him. He's got a decent blog, with the right tone (someone from the campaign is the voice instead of just churning out press releases.)
The lack of third party information about what he stands for, and his tendency to run for any office he can, makes me think that I'm not voting for him.
I'm coming to cf.Objective 2007
I just found out I get to go to cf.Objective this year. Woohoo.
Airline tickets, hotel room and conference reservation are already booked.
Bob Brady
Here's my first in my, Philadelphia Mayoral Race 2007 series. I started to do this all for one blog post, but researching just Brady took me pretty long. I figured if I broke it up, it would be much less daunting.
Initial Impressions
I associate him with the whole shady machine town Philly. I have no reason for doing so, it might be completely unfair, but there you have it.
Actual Research
From what I can tell, Bob Brady actually is a machine town operative, who came up from, and is still heavily involved with labor. He's extremely connected within the local Democratic Party. ABSCAM is mentioned in his Wikipedia entry. But he wasn't implicated in any of it from what I can tell. In fairness, I think if you lived in Philadelphia in the 70's, ABSCAM is mentioned in articles about you.
Open Secrets shows that his money comes first from individual donors, then from PAC's. It also shows that he gets more money from labor then business. Someone on his campaign bothered to fill out a Project Vote Smart questionnaire. (This is a good thing to me. His staff at least makes a nod towards transparency.) As listed in Project Vote Smart, his positions are pretty straight down the line what you would expect from a Philadelphia Democrat. On The Issues backs up that his reported positions match his votes. His campaign site starts on the crime issue, but also reaches into Education, and Housing and the Business Tax issues. (See that Scott?)
Researching Brady made me more favorable towards him. Not sure if it's enough to vote for him yet, but it's not impossible that I will.
Philadelphia Mayor 2007
I'm trying to wrap my mind around the mayor's race for 2007. It's especially important since the primary is in May, and baring some sort of political miracle, the Democratic Primary is the mayor's race.
I haven't seen a good breakdown of the candidates. I've read individual voices denigrate the candidates, but they tend to be strongly opinionated already. I have no strong opinions, just vague ones.
So, I'm looking at the candidates and trying to figure out for whom to cast my vote. I figured I would share my process with anyone who was interested. I'd also point out, that it's very likely that I'm an idiot. So feel free to point that out.
I started, where all intellectual endeavors of the late Noughts start, Wikipedia: 2007 Philadelphia Mayoral Election.
The candidates:
General Impressions
Bob Brady - Vaguely against - I associate him with the whole shady machine town Philly. I have no reason for doing so, it might be completely unfair, but there you have it.
Dwight Evans - Neutral - Who the hell is Dwight Evans?
Chaka Fattah - Neutral - Nothing bad to say, but I feel like he's really good at winning his (my district) but that's all I know about him. Oh and his wife is Renee Chenault-Fattah.
Tom Knox - Vaguely against - This guy started TV commercials early and often. That says to me he's rich and a long shot.
Michael Nutter - Vaguely for - I think the phrase "policy wonk, but no charisma." I don't know where I got it. I think I absorbed it off a blog somewhere.
Actual Research
I'm going to do each of these candidates in more detail. I will do so alphabetically and separately. Expect more later.
CFUse CFTry CFCatch
I was in a code review earlier last week, and someone said that they didn't like using <cftry> and <cfcatch>. When we as a group investigated further it was revealed that they had used it "incorrectly," experienced problems for doing so, and labeled the try catch model as bad, instead of the implementation. So I figured I would quickly go over my opinions of what you should be using them for.
To start with, the incorrect usage of <CFTry> was wrapping it around a troublesome page, so instead of visibly erroring, the page would just silently fail. To add insult to injury, there was an error in the cfcatch block which caused the whole thing to throw an application level error anyway. This was, to put it mildly, a flawed use of <cftry> and <cfcatch>.
In a nutshell, the <cftry> and <cfcatch> model in ColdFusion is for handling expected errors, as opposed to handling unexpected errors. ColdFusion has a pretty good system for handling unexpected errors - a combination of <cferror> tags, and use of onError in the application.cfc. So wrapping an entire page in <cftry> to catch any error that may come up is not only the wrong thing to do, it's also pretty redundant.
In my opinion <cftry> and <cfcatch> should be used to handle errors around small pieces of code that have the potential to error in predictable ways. For example here is a line of code from one of my applications:
cfset Wsdl = "<webservice URL>" />
<cfset displayBrainstorm = FALSE />
<cftry>
<cfinvoke timeout="1" webservice="#Wsdl#" method="AuthorInfo" returnvariable="BrainstormStruct">
<cfinvokeargument name="username" value="#url.username#" />
</cfinvoke>
<cfset displayBrainstorm = BrainstormStruct.IsAuthor />
<cfcatch type="any">
<cfif FindNoCase("stub objects", cfcatch.Message)>
<cfset createObject("java","coldfusion.server.ServiceFactory") .XmlRpcService.refreshWebService(Wsdl) />
<cftry>
<cfinvoke timeout="1" webservice="#Wsdl#" method="AuthorInfo" returnvariable="BrainstormStruct">
<cfinvokeargument name="username" value="#url.username#" />
</cfinvoke>
<cfset displayBrainstorm = BrainstormStruct.IsAuthor />
<cfcatch type="any">
<cfrethrow />
</cfcatch>
</cftry>
<cfelse>
<cfrethrow />
</cfif>
</cfcatch>
</cftry>
In it you'll notice I'm doing a webservice call. In my experience webservices can have issues with the skeleton ColdFusion creates to consume them, especially if details about the webservice change. However, my application has little control over this webservice. So I wrap the call to the webservice in a <cftry> block, and if my expected error condition occurs, (something with to do the skeleton, or "stub objects") I reset the webservice and try again.
You'll notice that if it isn't a "stub objects" problem, it assumes that it is some other issue, and rethrows the error so the application error handlers can tackle the problem. Why, because it is an unexpected problem, not an expected one.
In conclusion, I'm not speaking for all programming languages, but at least in ColdFusion <cftry> and <cfcatch> should be used to handle error that you can predict. The shouldn't be your default error handling technique, and like a <Cflock> or a <cftransaction> they should surround as little code as possible.
