ColdFusion Muse

ColdFusion 8.01 64 bit on Windows 2k3 Web Edition - The Silent Killer

This post is a rundown of a recent troubleshooting adventure (If you don't know what a rundown is, ask Charles). I write these little post-mortems for a couple reasons. For one thing, I will need this solution (or some part of it) again at some point and my little pea brain is not going to retain all of this information. But what I usually do retain is the knowledge that somewhere on my blog I have a post about an issue with a Win2k3 64 bit CF install - or as Tevye would say, "Somewhere in the good book it must say something about a chicken!" The other reason is to benefit those of you in the ColdFusion universe who may be struggling with this issue. The Muse is all about community. If you are battling an install where the installer is failing silently after the splash screen, then this post will likely be a valuable read for you. If it doesn't solve your problem send me a note via Ask-A-Muse and I'll see if I can think of anything else you might try.

I was tasked with installing and optimizing ColdFusion 8 Enterprise 64 bit on a new server for a customer. I do this kind of task pretty often for companies who wish to have a clean and fully optimized install for migration. The new server was running Windows 2003 64 bit "Web Edition". Previously (in Windows 2000 I believe) the Web Edition would only support 2 Gigs of memory. But 2003 server supports up to 8 Gigs. I wanted to use 64 bit because the server was going to manage a large pool of modestly trafficked sites. It really didn't need the full fledged "multi-server" install. It just needed a nice big heap size. For that purpose the standalone Jrun install is perfect. In short order however, I found myself pitted against Win2k3 in a no holds barred install death match. Here's my story.

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Cfobjectcache Docs Wrong? Inconceivable!

In this post I'm going to claim that part of the official documentation is wrong. Whenever I do this sort of thing I always think of the movie "The Princess Bride" when Enigo says "You kep using that word... I do na think it means what you think it means". Be that as it may, I think the docs in this case are ambiguous at best and at worse downright misleading. There's an obscure little tag called cfobjectcache that's available in ColdFusion server. Although it was a part of ColdFusion 5, I first became aware of this tag in Cf 8. You can find Adobe's documentation for the tag here. If you read the documentation (always a good idea - the muse is great but he doesn't write about everything) you may get the wrong idea about this tag. At the top of the documentation it says (and I quote), "Description: Flushes query cache". Well that's straightforward enough isn't it? This tag is designed to flush the cache of queries on the server. It's easy to use:

...poof - your query cache is back to square one. Well not so fast my friend...

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Multi-Monitor Tip

For those of you using more than one monitor and using windows 7, I just accidentally discovered something that is pretty cool. Select a window on one of your screens. Hold down the windows key and the shift key and then use the right or left arrow keys to move it between your various monitors. That's something I do all day long - move various windows between my three monitors to make space for one thing or another. I suppose it's not new to some of you out there - but I thought it was nifty :)

Migrating XP Pro 32bit to Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit

This post is about the ins and outs of moving from XP Pro 32 bit to Windows 7 64 Bit. I just completed such a move and I have some tips for you that might save you hours of frustration. But before we begin let's get a couple things straight. First, this is not a post about the assets or shortcomings of Microsoft or it's products. Nor is this a forum for you Apple users to tell us all how superior you are because your box is shinier than ours. I actually love Apple products, but Apple users have been known to turn red and swell up like giant angry strawberries if you say anything positive about Microsoft. So if you are one of those folks who is going to have a stroke reading about someone actually choosing a Microsoft product, please stop reading now - or at least have emergency personnel standing by. On a side note, my next hardware project is building an Apple from an Intel box and off the shelf parts - same OS, less than half the cost. I'll write an article on that and hopefully sooth my Apple readers ruffled feathers (it probably won't be shiny though).

Meanwhile, let me first say that I was sad to see my XP pro box go. A computer is more than an OS to those of us in IT. We spend a lot of time and effort making it do things that "regular users" don't have to think about. My desktop XP Pro PC had more than 100 programs installed on it. Many of them I used regularly. I fully expected to have to reinstall numerous programs to insure full functionality. I also expected to have to abandon some items that would no longer work in my new environment. A year and a half ago I moved from one XP box to another using LapLink's PC Mover and it worked splendidly. This time, however, I was nervous about using PC Mover for 3 reasons:

• I was moving from XP Pro 32 bit up 2 versions to Windows 7 64 bit (skipping Vista altogether).
• My XP box had Office 2003 on it and I was putting Office 2007 in the new OS without an upgrade, yet I still wanted my outlook settings and email to migrate properly.
• I was moving my login profile from a local account to a domain account.

I naturally assumed that I would have a great deal of work to do just to get the machine back to the functional state from which it started. Even with my reservations the LapLink docs seemed to indicate it was possible and could be successful so I decided to use the product anyway. Here is my story.

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The Boolean-O-Matic: ColdFusion's Weird Relationship With Truth

Hello muse readers. I apologize for my long hiatus (which means a stretch of time where I was absent - it's not a size joke).  I have been swamped with closing out the old year and implementing plans for the new year. I'm afraid our little chats were put on the back burner temporarily. However, now that new year has begun I am committed to continuing our friendship. I'd like to start out with something simple. Indeed, some of you may find this to be ColdFusion 101.

This post is going to discuss Boolean values. A Boolean is one of those datatypes more defined by how it is evaluated than by what it contains. The muse definition is that if something can return a "true" or "false" in the context of a logic statement (cfif) it is a Boolean. It may be other things as well, but it has the properties of a boolean and returns one of 2 states - true or false. Interestingly, every language handles Booleans differently and many of them use the same wild west sort of approach that ColdFusion uses - where several things can be used as Booleans.

Even if you don't know it, you use Booleans every time you create a cfif statement. Still, it's surprising how many advanced developers do not fully grasp all the ways that ColdFusion has of evaluating something as True or False. And having said that I am fully aware that some smarty-pants developer will immediately inform me of some new way I haven't seen before of evaluating true or false (thank you sir, may I have another).

Anyway, I'd like to take a little journey into the world of Booleans to start off my 2010 blogging. Note: this post has a number of neat "tips and tricks" that you may have not seen before. Whether you choose to use them can depend greatly on your environment, the structure of your code and the standard you are using (especially in a team environment). I'm not advocating for or against, although I have my own preferences. I'm only putting it out there as another arrow in your quiver. So with that caveat taken care of, let's begin.

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