Last night, I attended the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group. The subject was “CFMX on Unix and Linux” and you can view the archived preso here. Big ups to Stephen Erat from Macromedia for putting this together, it was informative and well done. It’s very convenient to be able to head home and attend this meeting without having to drive somewhere. It also allows me to open my mail and do other things while listening to the preso. Breeze presentations work well for this type of thing. Stephen’s presentation covered a nice combination of beginner and advanced material, and I will definitely attend these meetings in the future.

This week, I have been configuring a new app server, which will be dedicated to running our scoring and syndication efforts. It is also the first server in our farm that is running CFMX 7. So I had just gone through three days of server work on this exact topic prior to the meeting. For a variety of reasons, I had decided that, in addition to going with CFMX 7 for application specific reasons, which I will get into later in this post, we would be better off with the Multiserver configuration of ColdFusion. This will allow us to sandbox apps in various CF instances, which makes good sense in the environment that we are in. The install went pretty well, although the documentation from Macromedia, which I read thoroughly before doing anything, is not very good in my opinion. I found mistakes, which I plan on documenting and getting to Macromedia, and much of the docs assume you are installing the single server configuration. The MultiServer specific documentation is sparse. I'm guessing that I am supposed to consult the JRun documentation for some of this information, but the CFMX documentation should point me in that direction, not assume that I know where to look.

The installer is pretty well written though, and doing the actual installation went very smoothly. In fact, the documentation inside of the installer does a great job of walking you through things. However, once you have installed the Multiserver version, gotten it configured to use whichever Web server you are running, and gotten it running from the command line, you realize that something which is in every other version of ColdFusion is missing if you install with this option. Macromedia supplies no scripts to start JRun and ColdFusion automatically at system startup. I thought to myself yesterday, no problem, there has to be documentation of the best practice way to do this on MM's site. After about an hour of searching I realized that this was not the case. I made a comment on Stephen Erat's site, and he pointed me to Greg Stewart's experimental scripts for doing this. In my opinion, this is not a solution to the problem, I want the vendor to tell me what they recommend. I know I can write my own shell script to start this configuration, but I find the fact that Macromedia didn't think to supply one of their own, or any guidance for that matter, bothersome. At the very least, there should be a technote. After all, they supply a method of doing this for every other version of their product. I very much would like to see that oversight fixed.

My single biggest issue with CFMX 6.1 has been Query of Queries, and our team had great hopes that the typing issues we had constantly run into with Query of Queries would be fixed in CFMX 7. It seems, based on our testing, that the typing engine itself has not changed, which is to say that if you do not specifically type a column (which is new functionality in CFMX 7), it arbitrarily assigns a type to each column based on some data inspection. This data inspection is not documented anywhere, as far as I can tell. So the Macromedia solution to the issue was not to fix the typing engine, but rather to add the ability to type columns upon query creation. I'm not sure that this is the right solution to the issue. In addition, we have seen behavior where the typing engine assigns a type of "null" to a column. This makes operations involving that column problematic. I would think that the default type would be some sort of string, like a varchar, but this does not seem to be the case. This ends up making Q of Q not nearly as useful as it could be. I know, of course, that there are other, alternate, complex data types that I could use for these operations, but I attempt to map data that fits into query objects to queries.

Even so, we are looking forward to using CFMX 7 moving forward. There is a bunch of new functionality that is a good fit for us in there, and we plan on exploiting it. I figured that I would document the two things I have run into so far for Google and others who might run into them.

My buddy Nathan is doing a pretty cool promotion to make more contacts at SXSW. Find Nathan Steiner, win free music. Nathan and Arturo do great work, so you should want to talk to him anyway.

Ars Technica has a solid review of World of Warcraft today.

Z*TRIP is one of my favorite DJ’s, without a doubt. He is very innovative, and is a solid live performer every time I have seen him. His major label release is due to come out April 26th, but there are three preview tracks up on the Web now. In addition, I learned on his site that he will be playing Coachella. Sweet.

The Evens is Ian MacKaye, from Fugazi and Minor Threat, and Amy Farina. If this review is any indication, I’m going to really enjoy this when it comes out.

Massive World of Warcraft patch released. They’ve edited all the classes, and made a ton of adjustments that should make the game more enjoyable.

Gridface has some lovely photographic desktops for your wallpapering pleasure.

Nine Inch Nails tour dates announced. Two Atlanta shows in May. New CD to be released May 3rd. I’m trying to trim my expectations back a bit, they are quite high.

Veer: Capture Personality.

The March Atlanta Flickr Meetup is tonight. Fellini’s on Ponce at 7pm.

As a beta-tester of his intial podcast practice, I can recommend Scott’s entry into the podcast fray. Good tracklist.

PimpZilla (Theme for Firefox)

Liz Foreman over at Lost Remote has a post about the noise her television makes when her next door neighbor synchs his Blackberry. This issue is not limited to Blackberries, but seems to happen with any phone that does data. In my case, both my Color Sidekick and my Motorola Razr cause the problem. I go into a conference room for a meeting with my phone in my pocket, and the speakerphone in the room makes the noise, much to everyone’s chagrin. I am at my desk listening to music from my laptop, and it makes the noise. I get in my car, and the speakers make the noise. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more people commenting about this, it’s really annoying. It’s gotten to the point that I no longer bring my phone to meetings because I don’t want to hear the noise anymore.

Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil lets you stream the output from applications other than iTunes to your Airport Express. Honestly, I don’t know why Apple didn’t just include this in the Airport Express, it makes sense, but it’s nice to finally have a solution for this. I haven’t used it yet, but will be testing it out this evening.

Monkey Steals the Peach (via)

business2blog: Flickr, Yahoo Deal Rumored I don’t know enough about what Yahoo is at this point to say anything about whether this is a good fit. It would seem obvious that Google would be a good fit, but you never know. I just hope that, whomever does end up with Ludicorp, they let Flickr continue to grow and prosper.

I finally got around to seeing Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle last night, renting it for 4 dollars on my Comcast’s in demand service, which I am rapidly becoming addicted to. It’s a funny, witty movie that contains many in jokes if you can look beyond the Cheech and Chong veneer that it is wrapped in, which is juvenile and sophomoric at its worst. It’s one of those movies that crammed a lot of things and subplot lines into a regular sized movie, yet it doesn’t feel rushed or overly crammed. Naturally, it is one of those movies that will appeal more to men than women, and probably men in the demographic age-wise of early thirties down to teens. I went into it with medium sized expectations, one of my co-workers sang it high praises, despite the fact that he doesn’t like most of the comedies that I love, including Seinfeld and Napolean Dynamite, to name two, this one hit the mark squarely. I recommend it as a guilty pleasure movie on a weekend night in, or on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Warning, it may make you crave a White Castle burger, and that may be problematic in many parts of the country.

Still, I can't see purchasing it on DVD, I doubt I will watch it a second time, and I am trying to be more selective about what I do purchase on DVD. I woke up one day and realized that I have bought a lot of movies on DVD that I will never, ever want to watch again. (thus the birth of the box of DVD's to get rid of in the near future.) Things like this make me feel really stupid and wasteful, and so, instead of beating myself up over them, I'm trying not to do them.

I had today off from work, and spent the morning and early afternoon doing constructive things like going to the gym, so I’m a little slow on the uptake and posting about Hunter S. Thompson’s death. He obviously got most of his press for Fear and Loathing, but I liked Hell’s Angels more. In fact, I just re-read that book about a month ago, after over ten years, and it resonated as much as it did the first time I read it. It’s so sad how dark talented people can be.

Readers in urban areas may find I Park Like An Idiot to be a useful resource. I don’t endorse defacing other people’s cars, but some people need tough love.