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Our friends at Webapper are giving away free copies of SeeFusion (an awesome ColdFusion server monitoring tool) to the first 100 200 people to take their survey on ColdFusion consulting. Go check out here: http://www.webapper.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/25/coldfusion-survey/ UPDATE: Webapper is now going to give away SeeFusion to the first 200 people to take their survey. Can't beat that!

I threw some AdSense ads on my site the other day. I don't think I'll be getting rich any time soon though. I'm up to 58 cents so I figure I'll be seeing a check from Google in about 8 years. :) Anyway, while troubleshooting an error in my blogCFC I noticed I kept getting each error E-mail three times. Looking at the User Agent showed that "Mediapartners-Google" was hitting every URL I hit twice. Incidentally, I have two Google ads on every page of my site.

Some time ago GoDaddy manged to get the IP address of my VPS in their little black book and began refusing to receive any mail which originated from it. Unfortunately for me, I use GoDaddy for my E-mail hosting and that meant I stopped getting all E-mails that were sent from my server. A couple weeks ago I got around to calling them to see just what was going on. I would rather mud-wrestle a large sea-sick crocodile before repeating this tedious conversation with their bumbling excuse for tech support. Here are the details of my correspondence with them.

My coworker found this interesting little SQL Server behavior today that was quite startling at first glance. It's like punching 2 + 2 into your calculator and having the result come back as 5. After pin-pointing the cause for the behavior, it ALMOST makes sense... except for the fact that it doesn't make sense at all. It involves a randomized sub-select and table variables.

Well, now that ColdFusion 9 is officially out the door (it's still hard to believe), have you thought about what you want to ask Santa for CF10? We're going to double digits, baby-- so it'd better be good! Yeah, I know-- who do I think I am? Honestly, I still feel like a kid after Christmas with enough new toys to keep me busy for a while. Even so, I can't help but wonder what's in store. Once again, I have found clues in Adobe's own words via the latest version of the ColdFusion Evangelism Kit.

Matt Woodward pointed out this Slash Dot article today about the accidental release of code from the Sequoia Voting Systems and a web site dedicated to studying that code. Apparently the Election Defense Alliance obtained a copy of the election data for Riverside County, California. It came in the form of a Microsoft SQL Server backup that was SUPPOSED to have all the code such as stored procs and triggers redacted. I wandered over to the "Sequoia Voting System Study Project" and scored me a copy of the data.

Tags like CFHTMLHead, CFAjaxProxy, and CFAjaxImport don't output their content into the regular ColdFusion output buffer. Instead they put their contents into a special header buffer which is dumped into the beginning of the output right before the request is sent back to the client. But what if you want control over where their output goes? CFSaveContent doesn't work on these bad boys. And even worse, <cfcontent reset="yes"> doesn't get rid of their output. The other day I got bit when trying to return the HTML of a rendered view via a proxy in ColdBox as a JSON string. The JavaScript output of the CFAjaxProxy tag was being appended to the beginning of the response and causing the result to not be valid JSON.

My friend John dreams 3 or 4 get-rich schemes every week. Most of them involve technology, and he generally tries to talk me into helping him with them. He can never be dissuaded from the belief that each of his brainstorms are nothing short of an entrepreneurial pot of gold. These revelations, of course, come despite the fact that he has virtually no programming experience and even less start-up capital. Most of his recent ideas have all been centered around the new Google Android phones and the ability to write apps for them. After listening to him babble about Android app development for several weeks straight, I decided to download the Android SDK and play around with it.

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.