Basically, I was looking to do a redesign and purge a bunch of outdated content. I also wanted to divorce some of my personal content from my professional image. I've also gotten a few complaints from my friends that they have ceased to understand any of what I'm talking about. I've had TerrenceRyan.com for awhile, and figured it was time to put it to use.

Part of the move was also a switch to Mango Blog from MovableType. I have to say AsFusion have done a great job with it - it's so easy to configure and customize.

Anyway, switch over, and for those that like my personal nonsense there should be more of it coming. For those of you looking for CF information more is coming on that front too.

We run our ColdFusion servers on dual node Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) servers running in IGMP multicast mode. We run it on machines with two network cards. The cluster address is on one NIC and the nodes answer on another. It's the configuration we've come to like after years of working with NLB and port flooding and other anomalies.

I'm installing a new production NLB cluster for Knowledge@Wharton. To future proof it, and avoid upgrades down the road, I'm going with ColdFusion 8 64 bit on Windows 2008 64 bit. I ran through the configuration steps that I always take setting up an NLB cluster, and it worked… sort of. See the cluster address answered if you called it from another host on the subnet that the cluster was installed on. However, if you were off subnet it didn't answer. This is suboptimal for a web server.

I worked with our networking team, and they figured out (from this post: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverClustering/thread/0afdb0fc-2adf-4864-b164-87e24451f875/ ) that if you added a gateway to the cluster NIC, it would work. This is counter to the way NLB has worked before, and generally not best practice. So we opened a support case with Microsoft. After a few tries, I finally got an engineer that was an expert on NLB in 2008, he had the exact cause and solution for this problem: by default IP Forwarding is not enable in Windows 2008. This is the feature of Windows networking that, in the context of NLB, allows responses to requests sent to one NIC to be routed out the other. It's fixed by using one specific command line option.

(Make sure you are using a command prompt with administrative privlidges)

netsh interface ipv4 set int "[name of the NIC]" forwarding=enabled

That's it.

One of the only caveats is that we aren't used to relying on outside services for that sort of mission critical part of our environment. So the thought of our information out a server that we didn't control started disaster recovery talk, and one of the important things to make sure we had was a backup of our content from Unfuddle. Now, they were one step ahead of us, they include the ability to ask for backups, which include svn dumps, as part of the service. They go one step further, and actually have this as part of their API.

Being the automator that I am, I automated requesting a backup, checking to see if it was finished, and downloading it, so that we now have fresh copies of our data every week. In the course of doing that I created an Unfuddle.cfc that provided hooks into their API. I decided to share it, and the backup application on RIAForge for a few reasons:

• I know a few CF'ers are using Unfuddle.
• I figured some non-CF'ers might want to functionality enough to give CF a try

It's not a complete implementation yet. I've gotten done as much I need for the backup application. I'm then starting to fill out the features. If there is a feature you would like from the Unfuddle API, please let me know. In any case, check out Unfuddlecfc.

Another thing I have to say is that the Unfuddle guys did an awesome job writing this API (at least as far as I've coded). There are just all of these little details that make it very easy to use. It's really easy to pass queries, and options to the various REST commands, because it takes those options a few different ways. The other thing they did was make sure that responses are very uniform, so it was really easy to write rules for processing their results. Between the API and the app itself, the crew at Unfuddle is a real credit to Ruby on Rails.

We're still working out what's coming down the pike, but improvements will include:

• A more organized and useful API to the database introspection piece.
• A better template system
• A configuration creator and editor

It's all towards making Squidhead more useful and extendable. Expect new releases soon.

It's powered by ColdFusion 8, and Flash Video. I worked on the backend details: hosting, network configuration, database CRUD. My co-worker Sanjay did the design and UI, and my boss Dave, did the Flash video setup. The time it took us to go from mockup to finished product was very short - we did this much quicker than I had done before for non-personal project. I know it isn't a huge site, but after years of working on nothing but backend systems that never get seen by the public, it was extremely satisfying to work on something that wasn't behind a corporate login.

A couple other things make me happy about this. Squidhead powered backend development, which made dealing with last minute schema changes a snap. It also used the core application framework that I've been developing for Knowledge. It was the first project we did with the new one click build process. It uses unfuddle.com, SVN commit hooks, ANT, and ColdFusion calling ANT to allow for:

• Automatic publishing of SVN checked-in content to a shared development server
• 1 Click publishing of checked in content to a shared development server (In case automatic is too slow)
• 1 Click publishing of shared development space to staging
• 1 Click publishing of staging to production
• 1 Click publishing of SVN checked-in content to development to staging to production

This new model allowed for both a thoughtful develop and review process during development, and was flexible enough to allow for rapid content updates when we were rolling out production.

All in all, it was awesome to use all of the stuff I learned about over the past two years at cf.Objective to do my job.

We recently switched from requiring people to be logged into the site to read our articles to being open, and only requiring logins to comment. Because of the previous restriction and a large amount of our audience being corporate users with cookies disabled, we have URLSessionFormat wrapping all of our internal links spread out over a few template pages, over a few of our sites. Now that we don't have to be as careful about checking logins it would be better to make sure all of our urls are cleaner (i.e. not having the session information appended to it). My boss wanted to avoid having to edit all of those files. So that challenge to me was to figure out how to override c and make sure our urls were clean.

After fiddling with getPageContext to no avail I settled on this solution:

• Grab the page content in Application.cfc:onRequest()
• Replace any reference to the jsessionid in the page.
• Output the page as intended

<cffunction name="onRequest" output="TRUE" access="public" >
   <cfargument name="thePage" type="string" required="true">
      <cfset var pageContent = "">
      <cfset var token = ";jsessionid=#session.sessionid#">

      <cfsavecontent variable="pageContent">
         <cfinclude template="#arguments.thePage#">
      </cfsavecontent>

   <cfset pageContent = Replace(pageContent, token, "", "ALL") />

   <cfoutput>#pageContent#</cfoutput>

</cffunction>

It's not bad, and it doesn't add a tremendous amount of overhead to every page, and would have worked if this was imperative to do. We decided however that string processing every single request was probably not preferable to just finding and replacing all of the URLSessionFormat() references.

• Why did financial entities that survived the Great Depression go belly up this week?
• What do the two campaigns really have to say about the economy?
• What's going to happen next?

If only there was some sort of site that took that sort of economic information from academic and industry experts and distilled it to the answers that you need… Wait a minute, I just happen to work for such a group…

This is my round about way of telling you all that Knowledge@Wharton (My current employer) has a special section this week on the Financial Crisis, and it's powered by ColdFusion and Flash Video.

This is, of course, a combination of two of my personal passions, Adobe Geekery and Cigars, and I just hope it happens.

I was having trouble reproducing an issue that a client was reporting in the flow of a page that was posting back to itself. No matter what I did I couldn't get it to occur on my machine.

I then went over a dump of the cgi scope and noticed they were using Safari. I gave it a try, and BOOM, same problem.

I looked at what was happened, and it looked like the querystring of the last request was added to the querystring of where I was trying to cflocate.

So I was posting to "?method=delete_process&id=1" and cflocating to "?method=list" when I was done. Firefox tried to cflocate to "?method=list" but Safari posted to "?method=delete_process&id=1?method=list". This caused the error, as id=1 was already deleted, and even if it wasn't id=1? was invalid.

The fix was to prepend "#cgi.script_name#" before the question mark.

After a quick search, it turns out that this has come up in Forum over on Ray's site (cflocation & safari).

One of things I found was interesting was the inclusion of an internal document that outlined Adobe's corporate values. It was a pretty interesting window into their overall philosophy, and a clear sign that as a company they are discouraged from wasting people's times in meetings.

Check it out - Driving Adobe: Co-founder Charles Geschke on Challenges, Change and Values.

My session is on Formal Code reviews. I've spoken on them before, so I think I'm going to add a twist to achieve the whole "unconference" vibe. I think after I give my presentation which outlines how to go about code reviews, we're going to go through that process with a piece of code. Granted it won't be a full blown application, but it should give people a chance to actually feel how it works when you're doing it the way I call right.

If anyone has anything they would like to hear or see discussed, let me know.

I'm pretty excited about the move. I'll be joining a great team, it gives me an opportunity to work for a former boss again, and it's a lot easier to point someone to a public site like Knowledge as an explanation of what I do.

I start Tuesday, after a visit to DC this weekend.

As you might know, we create pdf's using ColdFusion for ExportReports.com. One of the new features we are adding is the ability to set the page size (legal, letter, A4… etc.) As page size is a feature, I need to test it. So I need to create a pdf file then determine what its page size is. At first I explored <cfpdf> and its ability to get at PDF metadata. No joy - it turned out that page size isn't one of the things returned in the metadata. Then I looked at <cfpdf>'s ability to get thumbnails of the pages in the pdf. I could use <cfimage> to get the information about height and width of the image files, put that was in pixels and hard to translate to inches. (I tried assuming 300dpi, it did not yield good results.) Then it dawned on me that ratio of height to width could yield helpful answers. I found the dimensions in millimeters for the various page types, created ratios from them, and compared them to the ratio of the dimensions of the thumbnails. Then I had to correct a bit for precision, and it yielded me a solution. Here's what it looked like in code:

<!--- Grab a processable view of the pdf --->
<cfpdf action="thumbnail"
       source="#pdfQuery.directory#/#pdfQuery.name#"
       destination="#dirreports#tn"
       scale="100" overwrite="TRUE"/>

<cfdirectory action="list"
             name="thumbnailQuery"
             directory="#dirreports#tn"
             filter="*.jpg" />

<cfimage action="info"
         source="#thumbnailQuery.directory#/#thumbnailQuery.name#"
         structName="pInfo">

<cfset assertTRUE(validatePaperSize(width=pInfo.width, height=pInfo.height, pageType='legal'))/>

<cffunction name="validatePaperSize" access="private" output="false" returntype="boolean" >
     <cfargument name="width" type="string" required="yes" />
     <cfargument name="height" type="string" required="yes" />
     <cfargument name="pageType" type="string" required="yes" />

     <cfset var ratios = structNew() />
     <cfset var ratioToTest = NumberFormat(height/width, "_.___") />

<!--- These ratios were derived by using sizes in millimeters
listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size --->

     <cfset ratios['letter'] = NumberFormat(279/216, "_.___") />
     <cfset ratios['legal'] = NumberFormat(356/216, "_.___") />
     <cfset ratios['A4'] = NumberFormat(297/210, "_.___") />
     <cfset ratios['A5'] = NumberFormat(210/148, "_.___") />
     <cfset ratios['B4'] = NumberFormat(353/250, "_.___") />
     <cfset ratios['B5'] = NumberFormat(250/176, "_.___") />

     <!--- Fudge precision --->
     <cfif Abs(ratioToTest - ratios[arguments.pageType]) lt .005 >
         <cfreturn true />
     <cfelse>
         <cfreturn false />
     </cfif>    

</cffunction>

So it might not be perfect, but it works for me. Of course, I could just file a feature request with Adobe to add page size to PDF metadata.

I'm pretty excited about the whole thing, and very grateful to the crew at Adobe, especially Adam Lehman, for giving me a shot to speak.

If anyone has any suggestions, or content they would like to hear about, feel free to drop me a line. I don't guarantee I'll do what you say, but I will definitely will listen.