I got tired of having an ugly blog and I am absolutely NOT a designer.  So I dug around looking for free blog skins and finally found the one I liked best.  Clean, simple and easy to implement with blogCFC.  It's called Nautica 2.2 Liquid [here].  The photo I used in the header is one my wife shot of the new I-35W bridge that spans the Mississippi river in Minneapolis, MN and replaces the one that collapsed (almost on me) back in 2007.  I'll have to have her get me high-res version of that photo so I can rid of the grain.  You can see the full size bridge photos here.

I still have design elements I want to try, but I'll have to do them another day.  It's 3:15am and my alarm goes off at 6am. Yuk.

Well, at least I won't have the ugliest blog on the net any more.  Now I can get back to ColdFusion coding and not be embarrassed by my ugly blog.

Cheers,

Update: Note to self, never write a blog post at 3 in the morning.  Spelling errors!

Update: 3 Days later I looked at my blog with IE.  I HATE IE!  Back to the CSS to compensate for the weakest link.

Update: I finally have it 'good enough' in IE. 

A long time ago I wrote a bash shell script to monitor ColdFusion 7 and issue a restart if the CF server hung itself or was about to run out of memory.  I posted info on this script at House of Fusion back then. Today I am still getting requests for this script so I am finally posting the script files to my blog (which I didn't have back then).  

Repost from HOF:

My bash script does two things.  It checks a specified URL for a certain string to see if CF is still responsive and it also calls a cf script which reports back an integer that is the amount of free JVM memory left.

If a hang situation is detected the script will pause for a specified amount of time and

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I'm very new to the world of running Virtual Servers.  It's a strange concept to me.  Even though I manage many of my own physical servers I'm finding it a little hard to grasp this whole concept.  Given that, I've manged to do two different installs today. Oh, I should mention I'm doing this on my Mac Book Pro with a 2.2Ghz Core Dual and 4Gb of ram.  So far I am finding Fusion, VMWare's only Mac offering, to be easy enough to use.  I did manage to install Ubuntu from the ISO, however the mouse behavior was real odd and I never did get the VMTools installed right.  I have more to learn.

I did find a neat website, elasticserver.com. Elastic Server lets you use a web interface to build your VM appliance stack.  I was able to pick the software I wanted on my 'server'.  I chose Open Blue Dragon, JBOSS,

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Someone at House of Fusion was asking how to see the sizes of sessions in CF7.  While CF8 has a built in Monitoring API but it can have dangerous overhead load on your application, CF7 does not even have that. 

I had run across the need to see all the applications running on our servers and then all the sessions of each application so I wrote a quick little script that uses the java objects "coldfusion.runtime.ApplicationScopeTracker" and "coldfusion.runtime.SessionTracker" to get all the data I was trying to see.

So here is that little  "Random Tool".  (Click on the Download Icon below.)