When you think of your production servers, you need to imagine them as your car sporting a new stereo in a parking lot with a bunch of would-be burglars milling around outside constantly checking each window and door to make sure you locked it tightly the last time you had it open. Every door, window, or keyless entry system is a potential point of invasion that can fail you. Why do you think those brinks trucks have no windows and the only way in the back is a single, beefy, padlocked door. A Brinks truck may not be convenient to access, but that isn't their goal. You need to control the ways into your server with the same gusto.

I've never kept too quiet about my affection for SeeFusion as a ColdFusion monitoring tool. I use it for debugging, performance monitoring, and basic metrics gathering. Here's an old note on the JDBC URL wrappers that I found myself digging up last week. I don't even think you can find this nugget on the official SeeFusion site.

A few days ago on CF-Talk Greg Morphis asked for a method to find the cheapest combination of phone plans that satisfy a customer's requirements for the number of lines being used and the amount of minutes to share between the plans. At first, I thought the answer could be derived directly, but since the plans and their relative price/minute values are essentially random, they create different price breaks that change as you add minutes and lines. This means one combination of plans might be the cheapest for 500 minutes, but once you increase that to 600 minutes, a completely different set of plans might come into play that are now the cheapest.

I think the bane of development planning can be those conversations where you personify your framework and start debating about what a service should "know", whose "job" a particular operation is, or what the handler should "care" about. This is one of those sort of questions, but I'll keep it brief since I'm more interested in your opinions than my ramblings.