I've just spent the last 2 days trying to figure out why Photoshop CS3 wasn't rendering my colours right... Now I don't know what made it bad in the first place (it might be Vista, it might be some warning messages that I, ahem, ignored after spending hours reinstalling programs on my new rig. Anyways, the problem was that most colours seemed warmer. For example, white was a pale yellow, and only within Photoshop. My desktop, web pages, everything was fine. However anything I would see in Photoshop was off a bit, which made it pretty hard to design anything for Project moreADS, take two.

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I know I've been absent for a while, and I'd lie if I said I had any good excuse for not posting anything during that time. To be honest, I hit some kind of a down, and it's been really hard getting back up. Work was at an all-time stressful high, and any extra-curricular time I had was spent trying to get some of the pressure off. However some projects that were being held back have since been launched, and work has begun on some new ones. I'm starting to get excited about my job again, which is a big thing considering the last couple of weeks.

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Ben Nadel has written up an excellent post and started a really interesting discussion on SQL best practices. Some techniques apply only to Coldfusion (which is just fine ), but most of them cover SQL in general. Follow the link to indulge.

[Nearly one month later...]

I've just finished writing up a small Javascript object for locking the user interface (say, if you want to lock the browser while you prompt the user with a nice little dhtml window, or something ), so I said to myself: "Why don't I share it with my faithful and forgiving public?".

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I'm relatively new to the "blogging" scene. However, I've been reading blogs and web comics for years now. I don't know why, but I always thought writing in a blog or coming up with a new comic was an easy thing to do. I'd see all these people frequently posting in their blogs, drawing comics 2-3 times a week, and when one of them would miss his update schedule I'd get angry. I mean, these people commit to an update schedule, right? Why can't they keep to it? Can't they respect their readers enough to keep up the pace?

And then my life changed. On December 4th of last year, I decided it was time I started my own blog. I mean, it looked so easy, why couldn't I do it myself? Today, however, I have to face the fact that it's been almost 3 weeks since my last real blog post. I now understand how the writers and comic artists must've felt when they happened to miss one of their deadlines. You want to post something new, but for some reason you can't. There are plenty of possible reasons, pick one. However, regardless of how good your excuse is you still feel bad for your readers.

Do you want to know what my reason is? Don't worry, it's not a sad story. I've been thinking about it lately, and I think I figured out why I can't seem to get myself to post. I've been putting myself too much pressure. For example, working on Project moreADS has been a chore, rather than a hobby. I was telling myself that if I worked on the project, I'd have to talk about it on the blog. That being said, if I want critical-web to keep moving forward, I need to make some changes. I won't be keeping an update schedule. Ironically, I'm positive this will actually mean more posts in the long run. I'll also stop thinking that working on Project moreADS means I have to keep a development log. I'll probably drop in from now and then with updates, but now every single step of the way.

Hopefully this is a change for the best. Only time will tell.

Welcome to the Animus

I know I've been rather quiet lately, but last week all my enthusiasm was funnelled into preparing for last weekend's LAN party. I'm back now and ready to get back to work, so stay tuned for some more critical goodness.

That's right, I went and changed the blog's theme. Again. However, I think this change was for the best. I like the clean feel I have with this new theme. Now, the reader can focus on the content rather than the container. I might play a little with the header, I'm not too sure I like that big image being up there, but it can stay for the time being (I hate doing graphics...).

Anyways, feel free to leave a comment whether you love or hate the new theme. Regardless of your reactions, I'll have a nice Project moreADS update for you tomorrow. Keep posted!

Stuffed crust.

Recently we started having several crashes and "unable to create new native thread" error messages on one of our servers at work. Oddly, this was one of our most stable machines and the problem started very suddenly.

Now I know what you're thinking, and no we didn't modify the codebase of any applications on that server (there are only 2). However, the volume of requests can vary from day to day, so we assumed it was being caused by memory problems. Every couple of hours, the jrun service would hang and we'd need to restart it. The server in question hosts two critical applications, and any downtime impacts our customers greatly. Scrambling for a solution, we focused our attention on Java's garbage collection and memory settings. We tried several scenarios, options and combinations, and although the amount of time between crashes would vary we'd eventually have to restart the services.

Out of ideas, we noticed we forgot to look for solutions to the "unable to create new native thread" error message. A quick "googling" found this page, indicating that when using the cfquery tag with the timeout attribute, monitor threads would accumulate and eventually lead to an "out of memory" message (and subsequent crash). Updater 2 for CFMX7 resolves this issue. The link to the Updater in that page doesn't work, but you can get all available downloads for CFMX7 here.

We applied the Updater one morning, and crossed our fingers. We're now on day 3, and still no crashes. I'm not saying this is the miracle cure for your server problems (if you have any), as several other factors might apply (amongst other things, Java's GC and memory settings greatly affect your server's performance).

D'oh!

In a previous article, we had configured FCKeditor to work with BlogCFC. After a couple of posts, however, we realized that FCKeditor was having problems with both "tags" we could use: <more/> and <code></code>. When switching from WYSIWYG to Source mode, FCKeditor would break all of our formatting, breaking the <more/> tag and destroying the <code> tag and it's content. After a little googling, here is what I was able to put together.

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Please forgive the lack of a real post today. I'm still under the effects of a 6 hour jet lag and a minor cold. Also, going back to work after two weeks vacation is always a little hard. There's also the fact that I have a couple of SG: Atlantis episodes to catch up to .

France was great. It was my second trip there, and going with my 20 month-old daughter was different. The first week was slightly disappointing: we had rain most of the time, and temperatures were low (0-2 celsius). Second week was great, though. Blue skies, higher temperatures (10-14 celsius). It's also where we had the best activities: Paris by Night, Bateau Mouche and the Chateau Versailles (notice this site is in Coldfusion!). We had a great time, very relaxing, but in the end we're glad to be back home. There's something comforting about routine .

If all goes well, we should still have two posts this week. I'll try and have a post with a workable solution for the code tag, as well as the scheduled post for Project moreADS. Wish me luck!

Dude, where's my pillow?