I finally had a chance to look at Google+ tonight and in all honesty it is everything I expected it to be. It isn't much at the moment since being on a social network without many friends is like being at a rock concert by yourself. However, the user interface really appeals to me. In fact, all of the UI changes implemented by Google in recent days are exceptional. Yes, people will still find faults but I like the consistency across the services. The design itself makes really good use of soft lines and subtle highlights. I've also loaded the new design for Gmail, which is particularly stunning. The additional white space and sparing use of color as prominent call to actions is really exceptional. I suppose it will only be a matter of time before this is rolled out across the other properties. I know this would be a welcome change to the Google Docs section.

All in all I like the direction that Google is taking. Consistency in branding is always a big plus.

I really like the spreadsheet functions added to ColdFusion 9. It makes my life so much easier but I discovered an annoyance with the spreadsheetFormatColumn function today. It would seem that you have to set the column formats after you add data to a spreadsheet. If you attempt to set it before calling spreadsheetAddRows it will set the column format to default. Not cool.

I was a big fan of Delicious because keeping track of all the sites that interest me is a hard task. The problem with this service though is that it is difficult to easily access the information unless you install a plugin on every browser that you use. This is even more of a problem when you have several machines both at home and at work. Of course, you can visit the site but the workflow is not ideal. The advent of tabs in browsers can allow you to open Delicious in one tab while working on other tabs, however, do you really want to have to keep that service open all the time? It just doesn't feel important enough.

My current solution to the bookmarking problem is to use Gmail. I email myself links then use labels to organise them. Again, not ideal, but it has two advantages over Delicious.

1. I typically always have Gmail open in a tab during the day
2. Gmail is with me everywhere, including on my mobile devices

I believe that Delicious can be resurrected if it can overcome these two main hurdles. Can the YouTube founders do this? Maybe, but it would be very difficult. The incarnation of the service will have to be much more compelling than it is currently. A utopian solution would be to get the main browser creators to include a reference to a universal bookmarking service that uses Twitter or Facebook logins for access. Hey, I never said I wasn't a dreamer!

I've finally started playing with Railo and tried installing it on my Mac with Snow Leopard installed. I wasn't able to get it to run initially but had to make two quick changes to get it running:

1. Give the current user (the user under which you are currently logged in) Read + Write access to the entire* Railo folder, including all the sub folders.
2. Change the default port for Tomcat from port 80, to port 8080 since I already had Apache running on port 80. To change the port, edit /Railo/Tomcat/conf/server.xml and change the connector port.

I have largely ignored Railo in the past but I am really eager to play around with it and get some stuff deployed on this platform.

* Note that I am using Railo in a development environment so I gave full Read + Write access to the entire Railo folder, in a production set up this would definitely not be a wise thing to do. I don't think this would be a problem in most development environments since the user under which Tomcat would be running would usually have the correct permissions.

Picture this:

You are sitting on the bus,  your commute is 45 minutes long so you whip out your iPhone and start browsing Twitter. Your friend posts a link to this awesome article on social marketing, you follow the link and then sit for the next 15 minutes frustrated with:

1. waiting for the page and all it's ads to load
2. not being able to read the content because you keep having to pan back and forth on the screen.

This tends to happen to me a lot. There are VERY few sites out there that seem to understand that today there is a need for a mobile version of a website. Sure, you can get an app for your favourite site on your iPhone, Android, Symbian or Palm powered phones but these apps usually don't offer the website content or experience. The modern mobile OS and browser technology allows most websites to load and operate just as they would on a laptop or desktop but the experience is poor. With limited screen real estate, I want to execute my tasks quickly and effectively. I don't want to pinch or zoom on anything other than a map!

Two sites that have provided excellent mobile versions are:

1. Amazon - who understands user behaviour better than the users themselves, provides a slick, easy to use interface which makes shopping a breeze
2. Wikipedia Mobile - utilizing a minimalistic design, Wikipedia provides quick, relevant information on the go, no matter what your screen real estate!

These are just a couple examples but there are countless businesses and website owners out there who choose to ignore the tremendous mobile market to be tapped. Wake up people, it's 2010!

Some of the design choices in Office 2007 really baffle me. Some simple tasks just cannot be completed without jumping through so many hoops. I can't understand why this isn't on every website in the entire world! But, I hope this helps some of you out:

1. Go To: My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > File Types
2. Choose XLS (Repeat for XLSX)
3. Click Advanced
4. Uncheck "browse in same window" in advanced window.
5. Then highlight Open
6. Click Edit
7. Make sure in the Action box it says &Open
8. Make sure in the application used to perform action it says: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\EXCEL.EXE" "%1"
9. Check the box next to use DDE
10. Remove anything that is in DDE Message box
11. Remove anything that is in DDE Application Not Running box
12. Make sure the application box says: EXCEL
13. And in the Topic box it says: System

The original tip can be found:

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=8&threadID=195249&messageID=2254006&tag=content;leftCol

This allows you to have multiple independent Excel windows open. Very handy if you have multiple monitors.

This has been tested on Windows XP and Excel 2007.

We came across an error today with our drop down menu system that uses a PNG-24 semi transparent drop shadow image around the border where the transparency would appear black in IE 7 and IE 8. After searching and trying all possible fixes we found the solution to the problem and it was quite simple.

Our menu system uses jQuery (doesn't everything these days?), and had a nice fade in and fade out transition. jQuery handles the fade transitions by setting the opacity which IE does not like very much. So using the fadeTo() functions in jQuery is a no-no in IE. The solution, use hide() and show() instead. It's not as elegant but the transparency issue was fixed on all modern browsers.

Other solutions to the problem include:

1. Using a background colour instead of transparent on the style so you would do:

.my-transparent-stuff{background: #fff url('image.png') repeat-y scroll left top;}

instead of

.my-transparent-stuff{background: transparent url('image.png') repeat-y scroll left top;}

2. Using PNG-8/transparent gifs (hey, it's a solution)

3. Forcing IE8 into IE7 mode by adding the following meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

I still can't understand what Microsoft is doing!

For the past few weeks I've been incognito due to some memory leak issues we've been having with our new app. It is essentially a rewrite of our existing web application using Object Oriented techniques and embraces the Model-View-Controller paradigm. It really is a pretty little thing but unfortunately she crumbled under the weight of the world wide web. Anyone who has faced the memory leak problem will know that it is not an easy one to crack and it takes time to determine the exact issue. There are a lot of articles around that have excellent information which were all very helpful in my quest for a solution.

The system made a lot of use of the session and application scope for caching objects which was the first issue that we had to overcome. It seemed like a good idea, you've got loads of memory, you have a finite amount of objects that can be called for each session why not persist them. The problem is that ColdFusion 8 seems to have an issue with complex objects (i.e. CFCs) stored in the session and application scopes. The reason I say this is that we were seeing a very, very strange thing happening to the memory on our server. When load testing was run, the server was fine, the memory steadily increased until the initial sessions began expiring and then the average of memory usage plateaued, which is what you like to see. However, once the load test ended the memory steadily increased until it crashed the CF instance. Weird right? And so the search for a solution began. I came across a few helpful articles:

http://www.ghidinelli.com/2009/07/16/finding-memory-leaks-coldfusion-jvm

http://www.schierberl.com/cfblog/index.cfm/2006/10/12/ColdFusion_memoryLeak_profiler

http://www.alagad.com/blog/post.cfm/troubleshooting-coldfusion-performance-analysis-part-ii

These were tremendously helpful in assisting me in finding the solution. The last post from Alagad was the one that helped cure my issue in the end. You need to ensure that when making copies of persistent scoped variables that they are deep copied or used in a local scope within CFC functions. However, bear in mind that there are many causes for memory leaks and you should spend the time in figuring out the exact cause of your problem. I found the MAT tool supremely useful.

Here are some tips for curing memory issues:

1. Install cumulative hotfix 4 for ColdFusion 8.0.1 (Get it here)
2. Update the JVM to the latest provided by Sun, in my case it was JDK 1.6.0_18 (Get it here)
3. Add the -XX:+AggressiveHeap option to the JVM configuration (Read about it here)
4. Set your min and max heap to the same size to reduce the number of garbage collection calls
5. Run varscoper against your code and ensure all local variables are var scoped (Get it here)
6. Limit the use of variables scope within objects, use the THIS reference instead
7. Limit the number of complex objects (cfcs) being stored in SESSION and APPLICATION scopes
8. Clear the variables scope onRequestEnd (this doesn't really work when using Application.cfc though)
9. Run load tests! We used WCAT for Windows (Get it here)
10. Turn off CF monitoring use FusionReactor (or something similar) (Get FusionReactor here)

Hopefully these will help someone else going forward.

UPDATE 16/05/2010: Point #6 should be, ensure you scope your variables correctly. The THIS scope has its own set of limitations. Ensure that all variables (including loop indices) have the proper scope to avoid leakage.

So, there are more than just a few rumors about the possible Apple Tablet and why wouldn't there be a lot of buzz around the company that has a knack of delivering products that changes paradigms? I personally don't think there will be one. Now, to be clear, I would very much like there to be one but one question keeps coming up for me. Where will the Apple Tablet fit into the company's product line? A lot of buzz today seems to think that Amazon's changing of the Kindle royalty fees to publishers is some indication of the iminent arrival of the iSlate. I can't seem to connect the dots. How will Apple benefit from developing a tablet that would directly compete with the Kindle? Reading books on the iPhone or iPod touch are just as enjoyable. There is definitely a gap in the market for a tablet device, techies have been after it for years and let's face it, who would be better to develop one than Apple? However, what is the market segment that this fit into?

Schools - Apple's devices have never been cheap, hence I don't see it replacing paper notebooks in the short term.

Business - Executives could walk around with their slick tablets and look ace in the boardroom but other than that, who in the organisation would benefit from a tablet? Assistants? Would the market be big enough? I may be being very short sighted here but are there any others who would benefit?

General Consumers - Why would home users choose a tablet over a laptop or a desktop? I wouldn't, would you? Why? How will a tablet provide a better user experience?

The iPod and iPhone were part of the master plan for creating the AppStore and iTunes which are the real cash cows for Apple. Apple is happy on the desktop and laptop fronts because if they wanted to compete head to head with Microsoft or Dell they could be churning out low cost machines with the same awesome OS X. Although, they have cornered the design, music production, video production and now developer communities with their hardware. Where will the tablet fit and how will it benefit Apple?

Forget the hardware, what is Apple planning in the long run? This is the question that everyone should be asking. I guess on January 27th 2010 we'll all find out.

Communication is essential in life, so my tip for today when sending a message is to think of it as a text message (but using proper grammar!). You only have a limited amount of characters to use, so use them wisely and reduce the fluff. This can be applied to both verbal and written messages.

This is the end of this post.