Sumo Consulting^2.0

It was interesting to see a recent post on Joel Spolsky's blog explaining that a recent service outage in their hosting environment was caused by accidentally setting their switch to auto-sense network speed. In the post, he acknowledges that they do normally set the network speeds manually and turn off autonegotiate but that one switch had slipped through the cracks.

Leaving autonegotiate turned on can cause all sorts of sticky problems on a network because during negotiation a switch can drop packets. In an office network this is less noticeable, but in a high load environment it can really toss a wrench into the works.

In fact, as reflected in this post on the short lived CF-Guru blog you can see that this same setting can cause CF to potentially hang and depending on load, eventually fail.

So consider this a friendly reminder. In production environments, peg all the switches and NICs to a set speed.

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So, I've recently started a new job in the San Diego Biotech community. After being here for some time and watching how the corporate folks operate, I've decided to actually print out a few simple principles and tape them to my wall so that I can point at them (literally) when someone inevitably comes to me and asks me to do something in a way that makes me cringe. I didn't invent these sayings, I just like them, and find that they apply almost daily here in the office.

I thought I'd share the 5 things I currently have on my wall and see if anyone had any great additions:

1. Work smarter, not harder.
2. Do it right the first time, not the next time.
3. Bring me your problem, not your solution.
4. Never believe the vendor.
5. There is always time for requirements.

Anyone else have anything posted on their wall? If so, what do you have up there?

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Being built in the spirit of Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion on Wheels is very promising.

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Finally, Slashdot is being converted from haphazard HTML to CSS! They've converted other sites in their family of sites as well, complete with shared base, print, and handheld stylesheets. It's worth taking a peek at the source to see how they have separated out the layout and structure from the design so that they can take advantage of common stylesheets for most sites and only change a smaller subset of styles to account for the different designs on their other various sites.

It's not as graceful as the Aura CSS template in use by many websites and blogs today, and it looks like they are still in beta mode for the stylesheets, but it's still fun to dig around in the code.

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I was participating in a thread today on the ACFUG email list and something occurred to me about many developer's mental quest to develop the "Perfect Application". The thread was about the use of "SELECT *" in SQL code and debated the real performance cost or gain from using or not using "SELECT *". Lots of people had opinions, and in the end a semi-consensus was reached that while it was important to consider the implications of using "SELECT *", there are plenty of scenarios where it doesn't really matter.

So many development questions are answered with "it depends". On the CFCDev list, I see so much "it depends" that I can predict the contents of some replies before even opening them. If I only had a nickel...

But "it depends" isn't satisfying!

A frequent lifecycle of a CF developer begins with a budding newbie roaming email lists and websites seeking "rules of thumb" and dutifully collecting them, jotting them down and attempting to "follow all the rules". They may learn that "SELECT * is evil", that "stored procedures are better for performance", or that slightly different syntax in an if statement results in some virtually unperceivable performance gain.

As your bag of tricks grows, you mentally start to build the Perfect Application in your head. You think that if only you could implement all the things you've learned in one application it would be Perfect! It would be speedy and sexy and would finally prove you've arrived as a seasoned developer!

As you continue to grow as a CF developer you realize that this list is not, in fact, the guide to the Perfect Application. You learn that while using Stored Procedures can speed up code, it can also increase development time and make the code less portable. That your tweaked if() statements are confusing to other developers on your team and slow development down.

One by one each Rule of Thumb from your collection is slowly disassembled as you learn that there are very few actual Rules of Thumb. Perhaps along the way you discover Design Patterns and add them to your list, only to find out that they too have exceptions.

In the end you realize that there is no such thing as the Perfect Application. Every rule has it's exceptions, and everything has a time and place. The makings of a great developer include not only knowledge of the tricks from your former Rule of Thumb list, but when NOT to use them.

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As Mozilla continues to rise in popularity and gain market share, some websites are being revealed as poorly coded or not up to date. Even well established and respected companies are missing the point. Take the San Diego Business Journal as a prime example. Works in IE, and even seems to be updated daily. In Mozilla however, the homepage will not even load.

Does this represent new opportunities for web developers to go "fix up" these naively IE only websites? Yup. Is there a good chance that the same decision makers will choose another web development firm which lacks the ability and/or foresight to build a cross platform website? Yup.

Note: All of my emails to the newspaper about this problem have gone into a black hole. I have to assume they know about this problems and either don't understand it or don't care about it.

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Today I came across a gotcha with the way Firefox saves username and password information for login forms. This may also be a problem with IE and other browsers/toolbar/add ons, but I've never used this feature in anything but Firefox.

Here's the situation: Firefox saves username/password combinations per domain, not per individual page. This means that it will attempt to use the same username and password on a member login (/members/login.cfm) and an admin console (/admin/login.cfm). That's not really a big deal because it doesn't really create a security concern, and if you have different logins for the two forms, you just end up re-typing things.

Here's the problem: Say you are editing a user's account in the admin section of your website/intranet/application. If the field names match the names in your login form (ie: username/password), then firefox will OVERWRITE the value specified in the value="" attribute of the INPUT tag and will insert your saved login information instead. That's right, it overwrites any values you've programatically populated the form with

If you aren't paying close attention when you edit a user, it's very easy to submit the form with the newly inserted login info in it. Granted, there should be some biz logic that prevents the form submission from being successful, but I'll bet there are plenty of systems out there today without this vital bit of logic. If you suddenly find that 10 accounts in your application share the same username and password, this could very well be the reason.

The solution: This is probably a good idea either way, but the solution I've used is to make sure that your login forms have distinct and different field names than your administration tool's user profile edit forms. A quick solution to a very odd problem.

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With the latest Preview Release of Firefox, I've noticed that it autodiscovers RSS feeds, flagging pages containing RSS alternatives in the lower right corner of the page as this example snapshot of Slashdot shows. As I've been browsing around the web, it's been interesting and surprising to see some of the sites that have RSS alternatives. It's also been interesting to see which sites (including alot of Blogs) have RSS enabled, but don't have the proper code in the head of the page to flag the content for browsers such as Firefox to detect.

Am I talking about you? Well here's all you have to add to your HTML head to make your RSS feed autodetectable:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.sumoc.com/blog/rss.cfm?mode=full" />

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I've recently been attempting to learn more about web standards and moving away from things like using tables for layout purposes and the dreaded font tag. In the process I've collected a couple of resources that are a great read on the subject. I thought I would share them for others currently heading down this same path.

CSS Zen Garden - Great example of applying different CSS style sheets to a single XHTML 1.0 Strict document to achieve ~100 *completely* different looks.

Position is Everything - Articles, tutorials, and links on CSS, the Box Model, browsers quirks, and more.

MACCAWS - Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards. MACCAWS core mission is "To provide Web authors with the resources necessary to promote Web standards as a commercially desirable choice for clients." (via David Foltz on WebSanDiego)

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