devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

My tax refund was electronically deposited on Friday, so I decided to spend some of it on a new server to host my website and despammify & deviriify my e-mail. Currently I’m running a couple of VERY OLD, noisy boxes to power my website and e-mail. Currently this site is being served to you on a Celeron 466 w/ 192 MB of RAM (which I first built in 1999), and my e-mail is ran on a K6-450 w/ 128 MB (cheap intarweb special circa 2000). I think my cell phone is more powerful than these two doorstops, and certainly much quieter. And of course both of these boxes are running my favorite server OS, FreeBSD. Actually the mail server has been running the same install of FreeBSD for over 4 years now without any hiccups:


[booms@shadow booms]$ uname -a
FreeBSD shadow.booms.net 4.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE #0: Sat Jan 13 12:48:44 MST 2001 booms@shadow.booms.net:/usr/src/sys/compile/LEETBOOMSDOTNET i386


I think that’s pretty amazing.

Here are the basic specs on the new hotness:

• Intel Pentium4 processor, 520, 2.8GHz, 1MB Cache, 800MHz FSB
• Memory: 1G DDR2, 533MHz, 2X512 Single Ranked DIMMs
• 80GB, Serial ATA, 1 inch, 7.2K RPM, Hard Drive

That should be more than plenty to handle the amount of traffic I get, and I really didn’t spend much at all on it. I’m pretty sure I’ll end-up going with FreeBSD as usual, but I can be swayed (read as: convince me to use Linux, Linux geeks). I’ll have to research server software and all of that again, but at this time I’ll install Apache w/ PHP & Tomcat as usual, and switch to using Postfix for SMTP. I need to see if Spam Assassin is still the way to go to get rid of spam, and if so I’ll integrate that into Postfix.

I’d like to think about installing Postgres, but I’m sure it will be easier to do the standard install of MySQL in the long run. I won’t have much time to mess around with setting it up once it gets here unfortunately being that I’ll be starting a Java class at the time.

It’s going to be so nice to trim the number of active machines at the house down to two quiet ones. I suppose I’ll have to eBay most of the old boxes I have sitting around (yeah, so lets not get into how many computers I have now…)

My current favorite browser Mozilla Firefox has been updated to version 1.0.1. You can read the release notes here.

After attending a high-level presentation about CFMX 7.0, a couple of co-workers got the impression that you could use the Sourceless Deployment option to essentially deploy a CFMX application to a J2EE server without needing a license for it. I interjected after remembering a thread about this topic on CFTalk recently, but couldn’t cite any specifics. I ended-up going back to the thread for clarification and found the information that I needed. Thanks to Sean Corfield and Dave Carabetta for elaborating in the thread.

The high level view for licensing regarding the ColdFusion 7.0 deployment options are:

- Sourceless Byte Code Deployment: ONLY runs on an existing ColdFusion 7 Server. This option is intended to protect ColdFusion source code if you want to sell a ColdFusion based product to other people who have their own CF 7 server without giving up intellectual property within that code. The deployed code refers to the ColdFusion runtime directly but does not actually include the ColdFusion runtime itself.

- J2EE EAR/WAR Deployment: Can be deployed to supported J2EE servers (and then some.. I’ve deployed it to Apache Tomcat and have read about people deploying it on JBoss as well). ColdFusion runtime is embedded within archive file. Requires standard per server Enterprise licensing. I think the previous semantic was taken the wrong way– you will need a Enterprise license to deploy the EAR/WAR into a production environment once the Enterprise trial expires. Can be deployed without the ColdFusion Administrator and the ColdFusion source files.

In summary, you can’t use the Sourceless Deployment feature to deploy a ColdFusion application to a J2EE server in order to avoiding paying for licenses.

Update: Sean has posted a more elaborate version of how the two deployment options work.

I was just looking for some info on Google Groups and I think I may have found what appears to be the first mention of ColdFusion on the internet by it’s founder J.J. Allaire.

I suppose that means it’s 10th birthday is coming up pretty soon, eh? It’s cool to think I’ve been using a language for the majority of it’s life, though not quite as long as the early adopters in the community who’ve been using it since CF 1.5!

I think I know what the problem is, but I can’t fix it until later this evening. Thanks for letting me know (they worked for me because I was logged in).

Turns out when I imported my entries from MovableType, it created a blank user to do so. For whatever reason this blank user was messing with the comments.. deleted it and it seems to work now. Thanks to those of you who told me about the problem.

I own a couple of handfuls of domains for future business ideas which may or may not ever come into fruition, but I keep them around anyway just in case. I started off with Network Solutions in the 90’s, then moved them to Dotster in 2000 or so. Lately as my domains have been getting close to expiring I’ve been transferring them over to GoDaddy. I’m currently in the process of transferring a domain over again and I received an e-mail from a salesperson at Dotster:

Dear Dotster customer,

Our records indicate you are transferring your domains from Dotster to Go Daddy Software, Inc. I would like to take this opportunity to permanently reduce your Dotster account pricing and offer you free services for your loyalty to Dotster. I can beat GoDaddy’s registration and renewal pricing at $8.95 and set you up with permanent $6.00 transfer pricing. As you may know transfers also include a one year renewal. This permanent change in your account pricing will also include free URL forwarding, free DNS management, and free e-mail forwarding.

I have included a chart of TLD’s this new pricing will affect and a chart of services you will be receiving if you decide to keep your account with Dotster. I would be happy to answer any questions you may have regarding this e-mail or any outstanding issues with your Dotster account. If this offer interests you please let me know as soon as possible, and I will get your account set up right away. If you reply within 4 days of receiving this message I will be able to cancel your transfer request and you will be able to renew your domains through your Dotster account at your new rate. This is NOT a coupon. This will be your new pricing structure for as long as you are a Dotster customer. If you choose not to reply to this message your transfer will not be affected and the transfer will proceed.

Well, had Dotster just given me a competitive price upfront rather than gradually raising the rates to almost double what I paid when I transfered them over originally, I wouldn’t be leaving. It would be less hassle to just stay with them, but I still plan on giving my business to GoDaddy out of principal. I also get a 2 year renewal for the price of one by moving them, so it’s too little too late as far as I’m concerned.

In the past week or so Firefox has been very slow and generally unpredictable on my machine. I’ve done a bit of everything to try and correct it– reinstalled Firefox, upgraded to Windows XP SP2, upgraded my various security software (firewall, AV, anti-spyware), disabled various bits of software, etc. I tried a bit of everything and nothing seemed to work.

Eventually I started tracing the patterns of when Firefox would lock-up, and it was each time a new browser window was spawned. I started uninstalling all of the features which seemed like they might calling out to the intarweb or somehow interfering with network calls each time a new window was spawned, including Live HTTPHeaders, BugMeNot, GMail Notifier, and ForecastFox.. none of these seemed to help the problem.

Finally I did the thing I should of done from the beginning when I had these problems– tried to see what Firefox wanted to connect to when it spawned a new window. I noticed an outgoing connection to nettripper.com each time a new window was spawned. I went to Google that domain, and as it turns out, that’s the site for the SwitchProxy extention. I assume it’s maybe just checking for an update or something, but I haven’t actually looked at what it sends/recieves there, so I can’t comment on it at the moment. Anyhow, I uninstalled the SwitchProxy extention, and suddenly Firefox doesn’t suck again. What a pain!

As you can probably see, this site has been completely changed. Mostly I just wanted to move from turtle slow MovableType to WordPress which I’ve been using on another site for about a year and even sent them a donation last Summer. I’ve been waiting for WP 1.5 to come out for some time.

This site is still fairly beta– the sub-categories are still strewn about, and there might be a couple of broken links here and there. I have a few more hours of airbrushing to do on the header graphic as well, but it’s getting there. I’ll try and get all of this ironed out over time, but we’ll see. I also need to recompile PHP to build in GD and XML support as well.. argh.

So I’ve had a pair of Grado SR80 headphones that I use at work for about a year, and while they sound quite amazing, I’m getting to the point where the comfort factor just isn’t working for me anymore. I remember reading quite some time ago that you could replace the ear pads with some from Sennheiser. In the process of trying to find information about that I came across this page which has all kinds of crazy Grado mods.

A former co-worker of mine sent me a link to Things to Say When You’re Losing a Technical Argument. I think my personal favorite is “Yes, but can this be embedded in a toaster, for example?“, but there are plenty of arguments which I’ve encountered in there which were being passed as valid for sure.

A good example of a frequent argument I think that everyone experiences– “But doing X adds Y milliseconds to each request.” Typically this is an argument floated by people who are against using frameworks or think a given technology sucks because it makes things too easy– aka, being productive and getting stuff done rather than focusing on being l33t and re-inventing the wheel.

An example of a tool that people scoff at that I use sometimes because it works well is WDDX. If I need to store a complicated data structure to be used again later that isn’t horribly large, doesn’t need to be searchable, etc., it’s a very quick and easy way to accomplish it. It does seem a bit antiquated and generally not used that much beyond the ColdFusion world, but it’s helped me in several situations in which it would of been very unproductive to develop my own XML schema.

There is certainly a balance in developing good software using best practices and developing something which will handle anything you can throw at it, but in general my opinion is your initial goal should be to get it working to meet business requirements. Once it’s working, refactor for performance and scalability. If it still seems unreasonably slow after refactoring and you’re reaching a point of diminishing returns, you can always implement it in another tool/language/platform much easier and quicker because you have a working prototype which in theory was written in a way which made it easy to port since you’ve had a chance to refactor it. It also gives you the chance to improve upon the original version in the process.