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This is perplexing me.  My MBP is less than 1 year old (11 months) and it just started having really a short battery life this week.  This happened suddenly.  Last week I could go several hours.  This week the batteries life is sucked out of it in about an hour or less.

I have a 15.4" MBP that I bought new last February.  I use it every day for programming and internet.  The battery has 121 cycles on it which isn't that many according to Apple.  I do have the Apple Care Package and I may be talking to them before the 1 year mark.  

I normally run plugged it and only use the battery on rare occasions.  I may run on battery a few times a month.  This week, while in a meeting at work, I watched the battery die in about an hour.  This has never happened before.

I just started a life test battery drain down.  I'm timing in 5 minute intervals the battery life remaining while it sits idle running on battery.

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This entry was posted on January 30, 2009 at 9:10 PM and has received 9975 views. There are currently 15 comments. Print this entry.

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. 

This entry was posted on January 28, 2009 at 3:06 AM and has received 19345 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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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This entry was posted on January 18, 2009 at 10:54 PM and has received 2656 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry. Download attachment.

I've been reading more and more posts lately asking which version of the JVM should I use with ColdFusion x.xx?  This can be a big question, but it does get narrowed down a bit by the version of ColdFusion you are running and the known bugs in the JVM versions.

ColdFusion 7.xx

Lets start with ColdFusion 7.xx.  For years Macromedia and Adobe claimed that if you used anything other than the officially supported versions of the JVM you would not receive any support.  The problem is that the officially supported versions list never kept up with the updates from Sun.  This was a problem since Sun fixed many nasty bugs and performance issues, but Adobe still only  recognized the same old and buggy JVM versions.  So which version do I use?  When running version 7 of ColdFusion I won't use anything less than 1.4.2_13.  Anything before that, in my opinion and experience, is too buggy and unstable for high load applications.  The 'newest' version is 1.4.2_19 and unless there is a security update or something else very major, Sun won't be updating the 1.4 line any more. End of life was declared last October 30, 2008.  The last version I remember using was 1.4.2_17.

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This entry was posted on January 16, 2009 at 9:36 PM and has received 6550 views. There are currently 4 comments. Print this entry.

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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This entry was posted on January 15, 2009 at 11:36 PM and has received 2288 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.