Brew Coder

To frequent adventures using DotNet with ColdFusion

2011-08-04T10:08:00.001-05:00

Adventure: Your CF and DotNet code are working great and talking on your dev server and integration server but not on test or production? Error says "Class xxx not found in the specified assembly list". Even though you can call built in dotnet methods, so the CF .Net integration service is working, you can't call any of your assemblies.

After comparing, trying and reading many, many, many things. The final solution was to uninstall and re-install the CF 8 .Net integration service. There is an install on the Adobe ColdFusion product downloads page. I found the solution on this forum post.

Free Sci-Fi & Fantasy stories for e-readers

2011-07-22T11:34:00.002-05:00

GigaNotoSaurus (the webzine, edited by Ann Leckie) publishes one longish fantasy or science fiction story monthly. Longish meaning longer than a short story, and shorter than a novel.
giganotosaurus.org

Not another adventure using DotNet with ColdFusion via the side agent

2011-07-22T11:13:00.001-05:00

Adventure: SVN fails to update the code when deploying to a server
Remember to stop the ColdFusion .Net service when doing an svn update. It hangs onto the DLL like candy in a 3 year old's hand. Stop the service, svn update, start the service. You should build this into your deployment process if you are able, ANT, powershell or batch files work well. Or you could use those nice MS deployment tools. We'll get there but we're still converting.

Yes, more adventures using DotNet with ColdFusion

2011-07-08T09:54:00.001-05:00

Adventure: Method not found!
When you get the error "method was not found", pause and take off your CF typeless hat and put on the hard typed language hat. The one with the big HTL on it. Even though in CF a number might be a string, the java proxy will convert it to a number. I was trying to set a CF variable holding a number into a dotnet property of type string and kept getting the "method not found". After a javacast to string it worked. The java proxy must have hard typed it to a numeric.

Yes even more adventures with DotNet and ColdFusion

2011-06-29T08:38:00.001-05:00

Adventure: pre-build and post-build events in Visual Studio
This adventure is more of a work flow improvement. Now I had been pointing my CF code at the Visual studio project's bin folder for the assembly. I do this using ColdSpring and a config object that has blocks of settings per environment. So on local dev I point at the project but on integration, test and prod I point at an assembly (dll) that is with my CF package folder structure. So on my laptop it uses the dll in the project so every time I build (restart the ColdFusion .Net service first) I get the new code. However I am not testing the deployed assembly in the CF package and I had to copy it from my VS project when I wanted to release that version.

I used a post build event in VS to copy the dll from my project to the CF package with something like this.

copy /y "$(TargetPath)" "C:\YourWebSiteDir\notWebRoot\dotnet"

Next I said why am I restarting the ColdFusion .Net service by hand.

Pre-build event:

Net stop "ColdFusion 8 .Net Service"

Post-build event (after the copy event):
Net start "ColdFusion 8 .Net Service"

So now I just build in VS and services are restarted and the dll updated in my CF source code.

ColdFusion 9 issues with SBS Sharepoint and other sites.

2011-06-29T08:06:00.000-05:00

I had helped someone install CF9 on their web server and we choose all sites when asked what IIS sites to connect it to. They had several IIS sites for their MS Small Business Server and one CF site. The CF site worked and we called it a day. A few days later they contacted me saying the SBS Sharepoint and other sites where breaking and the MS tech support thought it was ColdFusion. Well I had not heard of this before but went out to help. It seems that the CF 9 install adds a wild card IIS handler mapping for "*" so all requests go through CF. When they turned of the CF application service images were broken until they removed the wild card mapping. Why CF 9 needs a wildcard mapping I do not know.

Even more adventures with DotNet and ColdFusion

2011-06-08T08:28:00.001-05:00

Adventure 6: no automatic ToString() on DotNet string properties
I have some string properties in my dotnet poco (or transfer object) and I map them to my CF business object. But if the dotnet property is null the set fails in CF saying the parameter to the CF versions set method was not passed. So wrapping the get on the dotnet poco with the CF function ToString() solves this. Its as if CF can't convert the dotnet null to an empty string with out some help. No biggy, just interesting.

More adventures using DotNet with ColdFusion

2011-06-07T07:38:00.002-05:00

Adventure 4: What to send across the boundary.
When you instantiate a DotNet object in CF its always a good idea to dump it to see how the proxy changed any method names. Well the vendors wsdl I am working with has about 60 classes, enums and interfaces. Not very abstracted. In several cases a property would be one of two different depending on the results of the web service call. And they did not inherit any base class. I had to inspect the type and then cast the property to use it. Ouch. So instead of passing back nested business objects, enums and other dotnet fun stuff I decided to make a poco with all the information I needed. Boiling down about 7 to 10 objects and enums into one object with about 25 properties including some for exception messages.

Adventure 5: Who is the web.config for? Not ColdFusion.
In Visual Studio I had setup Fiddler as a proxy with https termination so I can see my soap call that are SSL. I had done this in the web.config. Well once I started calling the assembly (dll) from CF Fiddler stopped seeing the calls. Hmm. Come to find out the web.config is for IIS. Solution: the web service objects expose a proxy property you can set at run time by creating a WebProxy object. Warning: if the proxy is not available, fiddler running, it will not work. So this is just for debug.

Adventures using DotNet with ColdFusion via the side agent

2011-06-03T12:09:00.002-05:00

I have a project were the web service of a vendor would not work with the Apache Axis 1.2.1 that CF uses.
However I was able to call it via dotnet. So I decided to use the CF to .Net integration. I'd used it before but rebuild my dev machine since and forgot some of the glitches.

This is all for ColdFusion 8.01 and .Net 3.5 framework. CF 8 does not work with .Net 4 and we are not on CF 9 yet.

Adventure 1: the java.lang.ClassNotFoundException error.
For starters if you are running the multi-server install the process that creates new server instances has a huge fault. It does not copy the dotnet proxy config to the created CF server instances. Find in the master cfusion instance this file, dotnet_coreproxy.config, and copy it to the same location in your server instance.

Adventure 2: unable to copy file [your assembly dll] another process is using it.
For development in CF I pointed at the dll in my projects bin directory. However once you invoke it from CF the CF .net side agent service locks this so when you recompile in Visual Studio it will error. Restarting the .net side agent service temporarily breaks the link.

Adventure 3: .net exception passed to CF = java.lang.ClassNotFoundException
Passing some exceptions back work just fine but if the exception has nested objects that CF does not know how to find to proxy it will error. Even if they are in my assembly. They must not be in base .net library that CF is using. I have not found a good solution other than creating my own object to pass back to CF.
Update: I implemented an exception processing function that catches several types of exceptions like SoapHeaderException and pulls the information out and adds it to a poco I created to simplify what CF has to deal with.

To kill explorer.exe or not

2011-05-10T22:19:00.001-05:00

Yeah, I wouldn't say I've been missing it Bill...I killed explorer.exe and I have no task bar, no desktop, no context menu's. I just have what ever apps were already running and alt+tab baby! Clean and mean, focused.

In the beginning there was a large AS$ file that I knew was probably a little large. Well, uh, dude your head exploded. Then my system froze like a tear on a snowman. The pacifist in my decided to wait and just let things work man. Then about 30 seconds later I said KICK IT! Then proceeded to try and stop the file load.

1. ESC, the go to button, the number one EXIT button.
2. Alt+F4, its not just a good hacker name, its the second EXIT.
3. Task Manager, no not my list of crap to do. The master of the tasks your enslaved cpu does for you. This is the EMERGENCY EXIT, or as noted in the menu sometimes its called end process or the more direct 'kill".
4. Previous to this you might have had a semblance of a shell or kernel. Now, you've got the power, at least the power button. The kill switch, the hammer, the plug, the terminator, the lack of electrons, or EJECT.

After 1, 2, I did 3 and killed explorer.exe. Come on man! This hog of a cpu must go. Oh its so worth my time, DELETED!

Cool, I have no task bar now, or menu or context menu. What's cool is I still know how to navigate the apps and tabs within the apps. Alt+tab between apps, ctlr+tab between tabs, tab or alt your way to selection.

Thank you to Bill Gates and his team for making an OS that is not to shabby. Just don't block the EXITS.

Did I mention I have no shutdown functionality. Z power button it is! Grid off.

Pintley Is to Beer as Pandora is to Music

2011-02-17T23:13:00.001-06:00

Wow, have you checked out Pintley. It is what Pandora is to music lovers. Pintley lets you score the beers you have tried and changes its recommendations based on what you like or dislike. Pintley has great facebook integration also.

Bread Helmet Guy

2011-02-10T08:32:00.002-06:00

Put the SyncToy in the DropBox - cheap backup

2010-12-15T09:23:00.000-06:00

I recently, okay finally, installed Dropbox. I was investigating cheap backup options for the small amount of data my in-laws needed backed up. So I setup DropBox on their computer and I used Microsoft SyncToy to mirror a bunch of file locations to the MyDropBox folder. I setup the mirror to run at login and gave them a desktop shortcut to run it on demand. All for free. I even setup the wall to flip around when ever they say "Let's go to the cloud".

Lift Bridge is Hiring – Brewmaster

2010-09-30T14:59:00.000-05:00

Lift Bridge is Hiring – Brewmaster

Not that I qualify, except in my dreams. Just passing it along.

Huge ASP.Net vulnerability

2010-09-29T16:12:00.002-05:00

If you run asp.net and have not seen this you need to read it.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS10-070.mspx

Mayo Clinic is looking for senior .Net developers

2010-09-29T11:08:00.000-05:00

My team is hiring dotnet developers. Check it out. Rochester is a great place to live.
http://rmn.craigslist.org/sof/1971692842.html

Fall harvest is coming

2010-08-21T20:06:00.000-05:00

Looks like a good sampler pack for the Samuel Adams Fall Harvest pack.

Brewing, cleaning and all grain?

2010-07-22T19:36:00.003-05:00

Some say brewing beer is like cooking, if you can follow directions you can brew beer. One big difference is you usually eat what you cooked fairly soon. A 5 gallon batch of beer might be around for a while. So its very important that after the beer cools below 170F you are very sanitary. Here are a few of my brew day tips.

Tip 0 - Clean it. Something can not be sanitized unless its clean. Use a good cleaner. I also recommend switching cleaners every few batches. I feel this makes sure any bugs don't develop a resistance and if one cleaner lacks in an area then the other might make up for it. However one good cleaning product might work also.

Tip 1 - Use a good sanitizer! I use Star San from Five star chemicals. It sanitizes very quickly, about 30 seconds. The foam will sanitize also. You can re-use it until its soiled or the PH drops below 3.2. You can spray it on gas connections and if they bubble then you have a leak. I usually have a tub of sanitizer sitting next to me so I can dip things in.

Tip 2 - Cover it! After you sanitize something like a carboy, wort chiller or bottles you should cover them. I use aluminum foil or plastic wrap. Minimize pet traffic and air flow if you can also.

Tip 3 - Chill fast. Once you are below 170F you are at risk of contamination. Chill quickly with a wort chiller or an ice bath. If using an ice bath make sure you have plenty of ice. Cooling works best if there is a good temperature differential.

Tip 4 - A healthy fermentation can make up for some sanitation issues. Its a competition between your yeast and other stuff so favor the yeast.

National Homebrew Conference

2010-06-29T21:45:00.002-05:00

NHC 2010 was awesome.

In General:
Registration went fast and the sessions were well staffed. The commemorative beers and meads where very good. Having a jockybox for clubs to use for serving at the hospitality suite was very nice. The vendor selection in the hospitality suite was great. All the staff were very helpful and ready to serve you.

Sponsors and Vendors: wow there were some great swag in the hospitality suite. Five star chemical and Sam adams had some of the best.

Blichman Engineering, More Beer and Sabco all had awesome displays of brewing gear.

My best session: the Mead tasting panel. Wow, getting to taste 6 honeys and 6 meads was awesome.

I was unable to attend Sat. but hear the dinner and award ceremony where awesome.

My personal highlights:
Meeting the king of IPA (tasty) at Burger king
Meeting the brewcasters from the Brewing Network including Chad's dad and Terrance the black. Most brewcasters are taller than they appear on video.
The Whites from White Labs where very nice and smiled a lot.
Getting beer from John Mauer from Rogue.
JP spraying beer radio all over Justin's face. Guess you should have worn those goggles I sent you for burning man.
Pro-brewer night was awesome, wow, some great beers. I do wish more breweries sent actual employees rather than distributor reps.
Ginger snaps are really great for breakfast
Finding out Jamil once designed paintball equipment.
Meeting who ate all the pies, great guy.
Club night was off the hook! Wow some nice club booths and beers.
Having Sean Paxton liking my brewers crackers that were his recipe!

Everyone was very friendly and the hotel and staff were awesome.

The CF awesomeness of Ben Nadel

2010-05-12T20:55:00.002-05:00

I'd just like to say that Ben Nadel has done a heck of lot for the CF community. Many of the people on my team including me have used or referenced his code samples over and over. His recent reMultiMatch() regEx post is another "spot on Ben". (reference to a youTube video)

New Employee Starter Kit

2010-04-01T08:43:00.003-05:00

At work we developed a way to help new employees get all the office supplies they need in one step.

ColdFusion Contractors Wanted

2010-02-09T10:17:00.004-06:00

We are hiring some ColdFusion contractors. Skills in OO, web services, xml, MSSQL, Model-Glue, ColdSpring are all desirable. These are senior positions. The positions will most likely be at least a year if not longer. Post a comment if you would like to apply or need more info.

Change vs Progress

2010-02-02T07:55:00.003-06:00

When does change become progress? Is progress planned ahead of time? Does change just morph into progress at some point? Or is it only in reflection that you can say progress was made? Our shop is converting technologies and I'm trying to figure out if we are making progress or just change. Its early yet so perhaps progress only comes with reflection.

Voice for Radio

2010-01-28T23:30:00.002-06:00

A while back I suggested to James Spencer from Basic brewing a show topic about creating a club web site. What options are out there, things to watch out for etc. I was interviewed Monday for the show. I felt like I was in speech class in high school, nervous. I thought I was rambling, didn't make sense etc... But today I listened to the episode and hey it was not bad at all. That guy kinda knows what he is talking about. Well I hope it helps some club make a decision on a web site.

Avatar Awesome

2009-12-29T06:19:00.001-06:00

I saw Avatar in 3D over the weekend and wow. It was a visual feast from the landscape to the native creatures. The story line was very interesting with some parallels from Earths past. You do have to pay attention in the few scenes with both humans and the natives understand the size difference. This movie had mechs, wild creatures, a love scene, nice looking aliens, an uprising, man vs nature, space travel, and a spiritual side. Overall not a bad movie at all.

Cons: I did have issues with the floating mountains. Sure maybe for some reason the rocks floated but could a floating rock have a waterfall from it? Also the mineral they were searching for was Unobtainium. Humorous but kind of a snap out of it moment for me in the movie.

Spreading the merrymint. Mint Lip Balm

2009-12-07T09:37:00.007-06:00

Merrymint mint lip balm recipe (kind of like burt's bees)

makes about 12 -15 of the .15 oz tubes

Equipment:

A sauce pan you don't care about to melt things in.
Digital scale is really nice to have
Having a tube filling tray really helps.
Spatula
A place to fill the tubes that you can get lip balm all over. I used a cake pan.

Ingredients:
1 oz beeswax (our wax was from a bee keepe r)
0.5 oz virgin coconut oil (more like butter)
0.5 oz regular coconut oil (more like butter)
0.3 oz lanolin oil (helps to warm it)
0.8 oz sunflower oil
5 drops rosemary oil (high quality)
30 - 40 drops peppermint oil (medium quality)

optional: vitamin E oil.

Process:
Heat all on very low/melt heat.
When melted add the rosemary and peppermint drops.
Pour into tubes.

About the recipe: we started with a recipe off the internet and I used all virgin coconut oil first and found it was to strong of a coconut flavor. The regular coconut oil did not have as much aromatics and was also softer. We also went 50/50 on wax to coconut oils to get a softer stick. You can use 1.5 oz wax to get a harder stick if you like. We also found that our rosemary oil was very high quality and cut it in half.

Enjoy

Scratch that, switching to .Net

2009-11-19T16:46:00.004-06:00

We were told yesterday by our IT leadership that we are switching to .Net. Talk about a change that rocks you to the core.

ColdFusion programmers wanted

2009-10-14T09:16:00.003-05:00

We will be hiring anywhere from 3 to 6 ColdFusion developers for 2010 projects. I do not know how soon the job postings will go up but I will updated this post when they do. If you are a ColdFusion Developer please comment or contact me. Our team is on ColdFusion 8 and moving to CF9 early 2010. We use ColdSpring, Model-Glue and Farcry frameworks, MS SQL DB server...

Chocolate Mead (braggot)

2009-10-12T12:53:00.002-05:00

I brewed a Chocolate Mead this weekend. I've wanted to do this for a while. Here are the details.

1 gallon batch
------------
1 oz pale chocolate malt - for that roasty chocolate flavor
2 oz crystal 80 - for some sweetness the yeast can't ferment out.
steep above for 10 to 15
3 lbs wild flower honey
boil for 10 minutes to increase the mouth feel increase melanoidin formation
3.5 oz unsweetened bakers cocoa at flame out

yeast: 4g BM45 rehydrated for 15 min - gives a slight berry flavor
pitched at 61F last night.
fermenting at 58F (in same fridge as my Kolsch)

No bubbles this am, but still early. I might have be either up the temp or move the mead since I need to keep the Kolsch cool.

Belgianish Experiment Results

2009-10-09T12:25:00.003-05:00

Well its been a bit since I did the Belgianish Ale Experiment and here are the results.

First off I bottled a little to soon and there was lots of yeast sediment in the bottom of the bottles. I hit my FG (1018) so it was done but not clear. This prevented me from presenting it to friends until just last weekend. I poured some for a friend and he was very impressed. It was smooth with that Belgian flavor.

Roggenbier fermenting

2009-09-21T12:54:00.003-05:00

Well I brewed a partial mash clone of Schell's Roggenbier this weekend. This was about 4 lbs of grain, the most grain I have ever partial mashed. I decided to break out a cooler and use my two grain bags. Previously I had just mashed in the pot. Well I missed my mash temp a bit, 148 instead of 152 range. I could not add more water since I still only have a 4 gallon brew kettle. Schell's does a step mash with these steps:

95F 5 minutes
113F 20 Minutes
144F 10 minutes
162F 30 Minutes
172F mash out

After that it was pretty good. As always I forgot to take an OG before pitching and darned if I was going to try after that. I'm fermenting it at 62 for the first several days then will ramp it to 68 over several days.

Cell phone phone home

2009-09-11T13:34:00.003-05:00

If anyone finds my cell phone please call the Home listed in contacts. Thank you. Last seen Tuesday 9/8 and goes by the name of "cell phone". It might need a charge by now but if it has power it will have a picture of my daughter on the background.

UPDATE: A humming downstairs couch revealed my cell phone.

Free as in Beer Kits

2009-08-24T15:39:00.003-05:00

I won a beer ingredient kit from the Brew Bubbas podcast. They had a contest for contest ideas and I submitted several. My idea of a beer with local ingredient won! I just heard they are sending me a California Common Kit from their brew log Craig and Jerry are great guys and their podcast is great for every level of brewer. They are real down to earth guys with lots of respect for the craft and life in general.

BeerXML SDK Project

2009-08-20T12:52:00.003-05:00

BeerXML is a standard for storing beer recipes. Some applications and sites can read and export recipes in this format however the compliance to the standard varies WIDELY. A while back I wrote a BeerXML parser for our club web site so we can post recipes. Doing so I said wow there should be some tools to help developers out. So I asked around and posted some messages on blogs asking if anyone wants to form an open source project. After getting two replies I decided to create this Google group. BeerXML SDK to aid in the groups communication and planning.

Current languages represented:
ColdFusion
C#
Java
Ruby

Anyone is welcome to join. The main goal is to make some SDK's to help import BeerXML into native objects and data types. Other goals are exporting and other tools to work with the objects.
However this is all up for discussion.

Model-Glue 3 is here!

2009-08-11T08:49:00.002-05:00

The long awaited release of Model-Glue 3 (Gesture) is here. http://model-glue.com/coldfusion.cfm
Some of the features I like are helpers, formats and event types. We've been using concepts similar to some of these features and had Joe on sight a few times and he was the inspiration for a few. What a great MVC framework. We use MG across several of out applications both as the entire site or several MG apps nested within another framework. Model-Glue helps use split up the view and model tasks very nicely.

Thank You Boston Beer Company

2009-08-07T12:28:00.005-05:00

I entered a raspberry wheat beer in to the Samuel Adams LongShot 2009 competition a while back. Its a free competition to enter and you get BJCP score sheets back. I placed 4th out of 10 in the fruit beer category for my region. Not to bad. An average of 32 for score. I have to say this was not my best version of the raspberry wheat in the first place. I was brew at someone elses house at the same time we where and mistakes were made. But not a bad placement.

So I received my score sheets and one thing I totally did not expect. A free hat, almost as good as free beer. This is a very nice hat with embroidery on the back that says LongShot and on the side that says 2009 homebrewer. There were 1500+ entries nation wide so the Boston Beer Company put some real dollars behind.

The Belgianish Ale Project - Update

2009-08-04T11:42:00.006-05:00

Fermentation is going strong at day 11 since the first feeding. I ramped up to 72F over several days and its been there for the last several days.

Feedings #?
Well as always time got away from me and I was not able to brew a 3rd batch of wort to feed it and since its so far along I'd rather not expose it to any O2.

Just for review I went from a week old starter to the first wort feeding of a 1051 OG wort. After 3 days I added a 1095 OG wort and ramped the fermentation temp up from 68 to 72. Might bump to 73 here since its still going.

The Belgianish Ale Project - Feeding a fermentation

2009-07-22T08:52:00.007-05:00

Well after listening to an interview with Sean Paxton the homebrew chef talking about how Rochefort brews their beers I decided to try an experiment. Rochefort brews 4 days and pitches the entire yeast on day 1 and adds the wort, then adds more wort the following days. They are doing this on a 1078OG beer. So I wanted to try something like this and partial because I have a 1500ml Wyeast Belgian Ale 1214 starter that was ready but did not have the time to brew with yet. So I brewed up a 1 gallon belgian style 1050 OG wort to feed to the starter. In a day or two I'm going to feed it (add to it) another wort in the 1095 OG+ range. I'd like to feed it one more time to build it up to a little over 3 gallons of around a 1080 beer. I might also feed it belgian candi syrup (dark) after that but prob only if I have time and only if its active fermentation.

Feeding 1 recipe (brewed 7/21)

Feeding 2 recipe (brewed 7/24)

Feeding 3 - life got in the way and did not do this.

Feeding 4 - ???

3 gallon batches of beer

2009-07-13T23:10:00.005-05:00

Most homebrew batches are 5 gallons of beer. However for a long time now I have been doing smaller batches like one, two and three gallon batches. I've really come to like the three gallon batches. They fit in a 5 gallon carboy with no blow off of overflow. They are about 30 bottles so just right for having some to share/trade but enough to have some of your own. As you might guess, I still bottle. So bottling 30 bottles saves some time. Also I just did two 3 gallon batches at once. I find that I can brew more often yet get a good amount of beer still. It also saves a bit.

To accomplish this I use hopville.com for formulating and scaling recipes. I keep the percentages and OG, IBU and stats as close as I can. Sometimes its hard to keep SRM the same as some quantities do not split nicely. Hopeville.com does not do grams either so sometimes the spec'd recipe is a bit off from brewday. Overall I have had great success in small batches. You do have to watch the pitching rate but 3 gallons for a smack pack or vial is a good amount.

I'm also looking a making a 2 liter bottle keg.

ColdFusion 9 & Bolt Public Beta. Special CF Meetup today.

2009-07-13T08:46:00.000-05:00

ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder (formerly Bolt) are now on Adobe Labs.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion9/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusionbuilder/

Also there is a CF meetup special session today with Terry Ryan presenting on Centaur and Bold. This is basically an online CFUG meeting done via Adobe Connect. Just bring your browser. http://www.meetup.com/coldfusionmeetup/calendar/10841349/?a=nr1p_grp

CF 8.01 - vulnerability

2009-07-06T09:02:00.007-05:00

UPDATE: Adobe hotfix for below issue. http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-09.html

Please read.
http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2009/07/
http://www.codfusion.com/blog/post.cfm/cf8-and-fckeditor-security-threat

FCKEditor vulnerability http://www.ocert.org/advisories/ocert-2009-007.html
FCKEditor patch 2.6.4.1 http://www.fckeditor.net/whatsnew

Mayo Clinic Hiring ColdFusion Developers

2009-06-23T13:18:00.001-05:00

My team is hiring senior level ColdFusion developers. Below is the posting.

Senior Analyst Programmer

Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, is seeking qualified candidates for the position of Senior Analyst Programmer. Our Global Product Service is in immediate need of a highly motivated individual to be part of the Population Health technical team who is capable of designing and implementing interactive web-based applications and services. Duties will include supporting the monitoring and maintenance of multiple web sites and working closely with other members of the Population Health technical team to help architect applications for the EmbodyHealth portal. You will also assist in the integration of EmbodyHealth with other business units at Mayo and other vendor partners. To qualify, you must have a Bachelor's degree and three years of professional software development experience; or an Associate's degree and five years professional software development experience; or nine years of professional software development experience. Three to five years' experience in web application development and a background working with ColdFusion are required. Experience in data modeling and design on enterprise level DB such as Microsoft SQL Server is also essential

Mayo Clinic, one of Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For," offers an excellent salary and benefits package. To apply or learn more about this or other opportunities, please visit http://www.mayo-clinic-jobs.com/job/ROCHESTER,-MN-Senior-Analyst-Programmer-23956-Job/497314/

Stephanie Bowron, Human Resources Phone: 800-562-7984

Mayo Clinic is an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. Post-offer/pre-employment screening is required.

Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injection in CGI scope

2009-06-12T16:13:00.005-05:00

This is not another post telling you what 100 other have. We all know you need to check....
However often times there are a few variables forgotten when checking for CSS and SQL injection.
In ColdFusion there is a scope called CGI. It contains things like CGI.QUERY_STRING and CGI.SCRIPT_NAME. If you use either of these in your code these are susceptible to attack also. I have seen a malformed URL create attacks in both of these.

Here is one SQL injection tool that may help you. http://portcullis.riaforge.org/

Code - more like a bar top than I thought

2009-06-11T12:48:00.002-05:00

You ever look at some code and see "blonde, brunette, redhead ", okay Matrix quotes aside. You ever look code and see different coding styles from multiple programmers touching it? Its like a well worn bar counter or that worn door handle. Fingerprint here, smudge there and worn down here. It just seemed interesting to me.

Performance Tuning ColdFusion

2009-06-09T15:42:00.003-05:00

This is a great place to start "Performance tuning for ColdFusion applications". Don't be scared off by the Jvm memory tuning stuff. If you can tune your JVM this article has other good nuggets of info.

My tuning tips:

Turn on the debugging info and the "Report Execution Times " setting. Or just this setting as enabling everything can suck up a lot of memory. Look for not only long running code but code that you did not expect to run more than once or N times. If something only takes 30ms but runs 100 times maybe you could still tune it to run less. Especially something that may only take 30ms in development could make a huge impact if it starts taking 100ms say.
Indexing your db tables properly can help a lot. Sometimes we create tables, write a bunch of code and forget to go back and look at what fields we actually used in the where clause or joins. Sometimes things change and that primary key may not be "the field" you used.

Enjoy

Pomegranate Saison?

2009-06-03T11:17:00.004-05:00

A couple weeks ago when I bottled the Saison Du Mont from the big brew I added pomegranate juice to a bit of it. Last night I opened one. For starters I had targeted 3 volumes with the priming sugar before adding the juice, needless to say it was a little over carbonated. After the foaming out of the bottle was done I tasted it. Below are my notes.

Appearance: It is more cloudy than the normal batch. Pectin?

Aroma: a flowery aroma and then that Belgian funk with some citrus.

Taste: Its a bit more tart than the normal batch and you can't really taste any fruit.

Mouthfeel: Its very smooth and a bit creamy on the tongue. The extra carbonation maybe or perhaps more body.

Wife test: My wife liked this version compared to the normal batch.

Overall I think we need to do a side by side next time. If I did this again I'd back off on the priming sugar for the juiced batch.

Brew on

Free Beer Label

2009-05-30T07:02:00.003-05:00

I made a label for the Saison Du Mont beer the club made for Big Brew. Anyone interested can download it for free. Visit the RAZE site for the free beer label. This was made from a Saison label I found online and I modified the lettering, created new letter and other things. It prints out very nicely.

ColdFusion Client Variables

2009-05-28T13:10:00.003-05:00

I just watched a great presentation "Sessions and Clients and Crashes, Oh My!", with Charlie Arehart on the ColdFusion Meetup site. Its a very good presentation if you have client management enabled or run on a server where it is enabled. Anyone managing a CF server needs to watch this preso. We don't use client variables because we store things in session and save to the db only when needed. We also use sticky sessions and can re-create anything in session from the db. A long time a go we watched client variables do like 3 or 4 queries to the db on every page and said we can do better than that. How ever client variales are a nice feature to have if you need to use it.

Saison Du Mont - AHA Big Brew Beer

2009-05-21T12:56:00.003-05:00

For the AHA's Big Brew on May 2nd a fellow club member and I split a 10 gallon batch of the Saison Du Mont and pitched different yeast. He pitched the While Labs Saison yeast and I pitched a Wyeast French Saison (special edition) yeast. We both fermented around 64 ish the first couple days then ramped the temp up the best we could to 78-80. The French Saison yeast hit 1.008 and I think the White Labs was at 1.014 yet but I have not talked to him in a week or so. Its been about a week since I bottled mine and I put one in the fridge the other day. Quality control is very important.

Appearance: It was already carbonated and had a nice head that formed lace. I think it has a little more carbonating to go.

Aroma: The aroma was like a Wit, orange and spicy but seemed a little more funky.

Mouth feel: It was very smooth and finished dry. Maybe a little more carbonation yet.

Taste: It tasted very much like a Wit but not as strong orange and corriander. It was more bitter (25 IBU) than my usual Wit's (16 - 18 IBU) and my wife mentioned the bitterness. Its also pretty green yet. There was a that Belgian funk taste in the after taste. A good thing if you like the Belgians.

Overall a very good beer for one week after bottling. It should turn out to be a nice summber beer.

PS At right is the label I made for it.

Brew stong!

ColdFusion performance and stability

2009-05-20T12:01:00.005-05:00

Once in a while I hear a comment or a question about ColdFusion and its performance and stability. Usually this is coming from an experience where the CF environment was not architected well, not best practice. We follow best practices and our stability is 99.5% to 100% and usually its some maintenance or non web server outage that lessens that number.

Let me tell you that my team has been running several very success medical information sites for over 8 years on CF. One site now gets about 70 to 80 million page views a month. It uses FarCry for a CMS and does a lot of caching. Its no static site by any means of the imagination. Especially considering FarCry is not a page based CMS but rather the objects have views and the data can be displayed in a multitude of ways. Makes caching more fun that way. lol.

We have a host of other sites we run that are more db bound. One of them maintains about 1000+ logins an hour durring peak load. That is just logins, not counting users who are on the site already. It also rocks for stability and performance.

We run multiple instances of CF on our servers. Some servers have 5 instances running 5 different sites. Sure we do run in to times when we need to tune the code to utilize memory better but that's not a bad thing. By the way CF8 and a newer JVM gave us a nice performance boost. Some apps saw a 20% improvement.

My tips (from the top of my head):

Use multiple instances to isolate applications.
Use trusted cache and save class file settings if you can.
Cluster - using a hardware load balancer.
Use CFC's, ColdSpring and other frameworks where you can. Like Model-Glue.
Use stored procedures or at least cfqueryparam
Use a var scope checker.
Use session scope to lessen db writes, this will require sticky sessions in a cluster.
Look at you debug output and see where you can tweak performance.
Look at your db performance, can you cache data, indexing...
Benchmark and load test.
Have a dedicated administrator who can actually spend the time needed on the servers.

If you follow best practices ColdFusion is very fast and stable.

Centaur aka ColdFusion 9

2009-05-20T11:54:00.006-05:00

Well, as I'm a CFUG leader we were shown a CF9 preview. Let me tell you about [Censored] and [Censored]! By the way there is an NDA in place. I'm very pumped for this version. Lots of integration and programmer features. If you thought CF8 was great, CF9 with shine!

Hop Rhizomes

2009-05-20T11:49:00.004-05:00

Well 7 of my 8 rhizomes I planted are doing great. Many of them are twisting up the twine trellis. I had ordered 4 and 4 were from a brew club member. Both sets were stored in the fridge over a week before planting. I soaked the rhizome in water about 30 min before planting. Planted them in April, still cold in MN. I put them just 2" down. A couple weeks later sprouts. Now they are about 18" or more tall. It seems like they grew faster once they were around the swine. Unless that's just because they are more established. Well I should have Hallertau, Fuggles and Centennial this fall.

Bottled Meads

2009-05-19T13:29:00.001-05:00

I bottled two meads last night. A sparkling Blueberry mead that tasted pretty good at bottling. The other was a vanilla mead that had a rubberband flavor. I had added the bean in at primary fermentation and not sure that was a good idea. Or the off flavor could have been the yeast. I used a german wheat beer yeast. The wine yeast BM45, I used in the blueberry makes great melomel.

About time...time to brew...time to code

2009-05-19T12:24:00.001-05:00

Okay after over a decade of being in the web industry I finally created a blog. Woot! Welcome! This blog will be about web development and brewing topics.