Dan's Shorts

REFinding your voice

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 12:57:00 GMT

I've lost mine, and am trying to find it again. I loved when I was blogging regularly, and being an active part of a thriving community. Over the last few years, that has slipped away from me. I haven't made a blog post in ages, and don't feel like I'm much a part of any community at all.

Easy Thread Throttling in ColdFusion

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:55:00 GMT

I do a lot of large processing tasks at LandsofAmerica, and in order to get these scheduled operations to complete in any reasonable amount of time I use the <cfthread> tag to spin off multiple processing threads at a time. Unfortunately, some of these threads take longer to complete than it does to spin up another 5,000 threads in the queue. Once you break that thread limit, ColdFusion to stop accepting new threads and will throw an exception. So I use the method below to make sure that I don't spin up too many threads at one time.

Meet me at cf.Objective()

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:33:00 GMT

Today I posted on Twitter that I would need to re-evaluate my friendship with anyone who couldn’t make it to cf.Objective(). But alright alright… I’ll still be your friend, even if you don’t make it to cf.Objective. But you should… I just finished working up my schedule, and I’m once again excited to attend a conference. I’ve been “meaning to attend MAX again” for years, but the last few times I’ve been it’s seemed more a social event, and less an “inspire me to build great things” event. But I still remember hanging out with Jared, Sean, Simeon, and “the rest of the gang” after the first cf.Objective() conference I attended.

Installation Wide contentRenderer for MuraCMS

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 16:44:00 GMT

I have a fairly large Mura installation, with a good number of sites on it. I have some customizations that I’d like to be pushed out across all of the sites in my installation. For example, I’ve changed the way the dspPrimaryNav function works, so that I can prevent child pages from being displayed. Unfortunately, as flexible and customizable as Mura is, there is no good to make global changes to the contentRenderer.cfc without losing those changes everytime you perform an update to your core files.

Calculate Next Billing Date

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:37:00 GMT

I had a need to figure out the next billing date after today, based on a known start date and billing interval. Here’s the function I came up with to make it happen.

Show in Finder in Eclipse

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:28:00 GMT

It’s horribly annoying trying to find a file on your file system when it’s buried folders deep in your project, on who knows which hard drive. In an effort to make this easier I scoured the interwebs for you, and found a solution on StackOverflow.

ColdFusion 9: AJAX Controls and Techniques

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:06:00 GMT

AJAX: The panacea for all of your Web 2.0 problems...

ColdFusion Builder Essential Training Launched

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:58:00 GMT

ColdFusion Builder has finally been launched!

SQL Blocking and Client Variable Purge

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:50:00 GMT

We've had continual issues with our ColdFusion applications locking up on us. I've spent the last week cleaning out huge tables, creating indexes, and tuning queries, but could never seem to track down what was causing the issue. Today I caught it in the act... As the the applications locked up, I ran the following query in SSMS:

Convert IPs to Integers

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:07:00 GMT

More fun with IPs, this time converting them to integers.

Convert IPs to Binary

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:09:00 GMT

I'm working on some SQL to search for data based on IPs and IP Ranges. Doing this with character data in the database is horrendous. When searching through millions of records using JOINs with LIKE comparisons, the performance is completely unacceptable. So I'm working on converting the IP addresses to Binary format to do some (hopefully) faster searching.

Error when Upgrading to CF9

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:49:00 GMT

I finished the installation of our new CF9 license with just one hiccough along the way. I installed CF9 next to CF8 so that we can move clients over to the new CF9 server one at a time and test as we go. After the file installation is finished, CF9 opens the migration wizard to allow you to bring over all of your old CF8 settings. During this process I got the a monstrous cfdump with the following error:

IE8, ColdFusion, and Color Profiles

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:28:00 GMT

We do a massive amount of image processing on LandsofAmerica.com. Our image processing scripts take uploaded photos from realtors and create multiple versions at different sizes for use throughout our applications. This has been working without a hitch for ages. Unfortunately, IE8 was released...

ColdFusion Continues to Impress

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:48:00 GMT

Mark Driver from Gartner continues to be impressed with ColdFusion:

New Training - CF9 New Features

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:03:00 GMT

I posted a very short note the other day when my ColdFusion 9 New Features title was released, but I figured I should post a more verbose description of the title.

ColdFusion 9 New Features

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:51:00 GMT

Get 'em while they're hot! The new ColdFusion 9 New Features title at lynda.com is live!

Watch MAX Keynotes Live!

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:05:00 GMT

Watch MAX keynotes, streamed live from Los Angeles-register now (go to http://max.adobe.com/online/ )

Everything you didn't know about cfdump

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:10:00 GMT

My tip this morning about the TOP attribute on the cfdump tag has been pretty popular, which makes me wonder what else people don't know about the cfdump tag. In ColdFusion 7 it was just a variable, a label, top, and whether the dump was expanded or not. ColdFusion 8 added the show, format, hide, keys, metainfo, output, and showUDFs attributes.

CF Tip of the day: Speed up dumps with TOP

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:33:00 GMT

I do a lot of cfdumps with queries, but always forget to use the top attribute introduced in ColdFusion 8. You can use the top attribute to dump just the top x number of records from your query. When dealing with a wide query 500 rows, dumping the first 10 will give me more than enough information to do what I need to do, without waiting for the browser to finish rendering a huge dump table.

CFCatch Not a Struct

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:04:00 GMT

I ran into an issue today where passing a cfcatch between methods returned a "not a struct" error. A quick Google search and I found a timely article on HJCotton.net that described it exactly.