Sumo Consulting^2.0

A few months ago, Sumo moved into office space in West Midtown Atlanta with design shop maybe.for.you. Considering our recent office upgrades I figured it was finally time to make a blog post about it.

The space is inside what was formerly a lumber yard in an industrial area of Atlanta that's rapidly becoming a popular place to live and work. It's proximity to Downtown and the rest of Midtown make it a great location and the industrial features in the area certainly make it interesting. Appropriately, the property is called "The Lumberyard".

A brand new Tornado foosball table is among the recent acquisitions for the office. While not directly related to work, it is a valuable "teaching tool" and I have already given several lessons in it's use. Unfortunately for the staff of maybe.for.you, they are the exclusive recipients of all of the lessons so far. Also note the ActionScript 3.0 and Flex class diagrams in the background - it's not all fun and games!

Another recent addition to the office took advantage of the 20 foot ceilings with a huge graffiti art piece on a couple of walls. The graffiti was done by local Atlanta artist Totem and covers an entire corner of the office, with other bits scattered on nearby walls.

Other interesting residents in the building include a recently opened restaurant called Bone Garden Cantina and rap artist T.I.

More pictures can be found in this Flickr photo set.

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It's over, and here's the tale of the tape...

• Days since OBC began: 25
• Total pounds lost: 12.8 (is 201.4, was 214.2)
• Body Fat improvement: 4.3% (is 18.5%, was 22.8%)
• Mile time improvement: 2+ minutes! (is 6:29, was ~8:30)
• Pushups: 1 more (is 43, was 42)
• Situps: 10 more (is 34, was 24)
• Dips: 8 more (is 42, was 50)

I'll spare you the photos, but I can definitely tell a difference. Now I just have to figure out how to keep this going without bootcamp...

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Well, I skipped my week three update, but I thought today would be as good as any to do another update. I'm at the middle of week four now (we get Friday off for the 4th). I only have two more session left, and I can definitely tell that bootcamp's made a difference.

So far the count is twelve pounds lost, and a significant visible impact on the love handles and spare tire. They aren't totally gone yet, but they are definitely on their way out. I've also gone from almost 23% (22.8%) body fat down to nearly 19% (19.2%) body fat during bootcamp. A significant improvement and pretty impressive considering it's really only been three weeks (+ one day) since I first took measurements.

Thursday morning we'll be doing PT testing again to see if we improved on our mile time, situps, pushups and dips. I'm anticipating a definite improvement in my mile time, but probably not as dramatic an improvement on the others. The bootcamp workouts really keep your blood pumping, they don't give you any breaks at all during the entire workout (which is a good thing) and involve alot of cardio. So much so that I'm often so tired from all the running around that I'm barely able to do the pushups and other strength building exercises when it's time to do them. As a result, I'm unsure how much I will really improve on the strength PT, but I will definitely improve my mile run, and here's how I know...

Each workout has a name, some of them are weird and hard to figure out. One's called "The Caterpillar", one's called "House of Pain", and yesterday's was called "Up Down". Well, today's had a pretty easy name: "The Long Run".

The long run started out innocently enough. We were told that the workout was "a surprise", and we started our warm-up by running just like always. Then we ran, and ran, and ran, and finally everyone figure out there was no warm-up - today was the long run. Well, I felt surprisingly good during the first two thirds of the run, keeping pace with the crowd, and even moving to the front a few times. They loop the group back on itself in circles now and then to allow the people in the back to catchup, which means that sometimes you may be at the front and find yourself at the back again suddenly after a loop. My goal for the first two thirds was to reach the front again by the next loop.

Since I'd run a very similar route two weeks ago for the 5K I did in Candler Park, I could tell immediately that I was doing better this time around. I ran well beyond the point where I'd had to stop and walk during the 5K.

...but then I suddenly found myself at the front of the pack, right behind Tim (I think it was Tim) the trainer who was the pace setter, running uphill. I knew he could tell I was behind him, and I felt him pick up the pace a little. I didn't want him to get away from me, so I kept pace and sped up too. By the time we reached the top of the hill it was time for a loopback again - down the hill and back up. That was the last you saw of Cameron pushing anything. I walked a little after that, but ran most of the last third of the run.

All in all, we did about 4.5 miles in about 45 minutes, for an average of about 10 minutes per mile - not too bad for someone who couldn't even run a whole 5K (3.1 miles) without walking just two weeks ago.

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There's anew CF podcast in town at cfconversations.com. The first episode features a roundtable discussion between Rick Mason, Adam Haskell, Aaron West, and Jeff Coughlin. You can subscribe to it via iTunes here.

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Well, I've survived a week of Operation Bootcamp and week two began this morning. I've done pretty well with following the workout and diet schedule. Thursday night I made it through an APWBWGTTD (Atlanta People With Blogs Who Get Together To Drink) meetup without drinking or eating junk, and Saturday night was out at Hand in Hand till nearly midnight frustrating our waitress by repeatedly asking for waters and diet cokes instead of my usual Paulaner Hefeweizen. I did still have a serious urge to visit the Majestic Diner at the end of the night and have some Food That Pleases (oh how it does please) but I managed to make it home without my Patty Melt and Hash Browns.

The workouts have been fairly consistent and on plan as well, including a bike ride on the Silver Comet Sunday and some meaningful time with the elliptical machine at my gym.

Best of all though, my weight and body fat percentage is definitely reflecting change. This morning, exactly 7 days after my initial weigh in, here are my new stats...

Now, I don't have any illusions that this rate of weight loss will continue during the program, but it's a great jump start and makes me very happy considering all the effort I've put into this so far.

The workouts continue to be tough, and I continue to be totally drenched and exhausted by the end. The instructors do a pretty good job of keeping everyone motivated and there are enough of them wandering around that it's really difficult to cheat during workouts without hearing someone call you out by name and get you back on track.

Next week includes a "Bring a Friend Day", and I've already asked a few people to come along. We'll see if anyone's brave enough to do it...

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Yup - today I started a fitness bootcamp in Atlanta called Operation Bootcamp. The specific bootcamp I'm inflicting on myself is held at 6:00AM at Candler Park, but they are also held in other locations around Atlanta. I'll be doing this every weekday morning for 4 weeks, with the first Wednesday and the last Friday off.

Anyone who knows me knows that the first challenge for me is the 6:00AM start time. I'm very much not a morning person, but I've decided that's gotta change. If I expect big fitness changes, I have to make other changes too, and waking up early is going to have to be one of them.

Another change I'll have to make during this program is to start following the Body for Life meal program again, which involves eating six smaller meals a day, and carefully monitoring protein and carb portions during the course of the day. I've actually done the Body for Life Program before, so this isn't totally new. However - considering my fridge is typically pathetically bachelor-status-empty, this will require more organized trips to the grocery than I'm use to.

So today being the first day of bootcamp, everyone does a fitness test (to be repeated at the end also) to help give some metrics on what kinda shape you're in and ultimately what improvements you make by the end of the bootcamp. I've decided to post my stats at the start and end in the same way fellow bloggers Dean Saxe and Brandon Purcell have done during their bootcamp and Body for Life challenges. Bootcamp measures reps per minute and mile running time, the Body For Life program measures weight, body fat, and before/after shirtless photo. I'm including both sets below (holding back the photo for now - you are welcome)...

• One Mile: 8:17 (or 8:47, wasn't paying enough attention)
• Push ups: 42 (one minute)
• Sit Ups: 24 (one minute)
• Dips: 42 (one minute)
• Weight: 214
• Body Fat%: 22.8 (as measured by questionably accurate scale)

Depending on how inspired I am, I may post progress per week, or maybe just at the end. Hey, whaddya want?!? This is the first blog post in like 7 weeks!

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Like many developers, I have a dual monitor setup. I also have certain monitors that over time have become the "Home Display" for certain programs. I almost always write code on the left-hand display (my OS primary). Firefox and applications I am developing are virtually always on the right-hand display.

So I've been developing a full screen AIR app lately and have been irritated that the AIR application always wants to open on my primary display, thus covering my IDE and also covering any debug controls in Flex Builder. For awhile I moved Flex Builder over to the right-hand screen, but that just felt wrong, so today I figured out how to programmatically move the AIR app to the secondary display.

Turns out it just took one line of code (line 10 below), setting the stage's x coordinates to the righthand boundary of my primary display (which is also the left-boundary of my right-hand display). Now this might be old hat for Flash developers, but not for me. I thought I'd post a little mini-app example of making this work.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="vertical" applicationComplete="applicationCompleteEvent();"> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ private function applicationCompleteEvent():void { stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN_INTERACTIVE; stage.nativeWindow.x = Screen.mainScreen.bounds.width; } ]]> </mx:Script> <mx:Label text="Hello World" /> <mx:LinkButton label="Close" click="stage.nativeWindow.close()" /> </mx:WindowedApplication>

Note that your milage with this example may vary if you:

1. Only have one display (it will move the AIR app out of your visible area)
2. Your displays are setup to be above each other rather than beside each other (same result as 1)
3. Your primary OS display is on the right (same again)

If you are looking to do something different with multiple displays, check out the Livedocs page for Enumerating the screens and the ASDoc for the Screen class.

UPDATE (10:20am)

Okay, so I thought better of my solution. This code does the same thing, but just moves the AIR app to the rightmost display. If there is only one display it will just stay there.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="vertical" applicationComplete="applicationCompleteEvent();"> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ private function applicationCompleteEvent():void { stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN_INTERACTIVE; for (var i:int=1; i < Screen.screens.length; i++) { if (Screen.screens[i].bounds.left > stage.nativeWindow.x) { stage.nativeWindow.x = Screen.screens[i].bounds.left; } } } ]]> </mx:Script> <mx:Label text="Hello World" /> <mx:LinkButton label="Close" click="stage.nativeWindow.close()" /> </mx:WindowedApplication>

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Posting this for consumption by Google, so that when this happens to me again I can search Google and find the answer on my own blog. Then I feel silly. Then I am happy I solved my problem.

NetDirect is a Java based VPN client that requires a the installation of a little ActiveX control and then runs in the systray.

The Problem

I have two computers running this virtually identical Vista configurations. One works, one doesn't.

I'm on Vista Ultimate, and had tried getting NetDirect to work in both Firefox. Essentially, I got to the point where a little popup window opens up, I can see the NetDirect icon in the systray, and the client appears to be starting up. Then I get a long pause in feedback and an error. The output I see in the popup is as follows:

Downloading zip file...
Extracting zip file...
Loading library...
NetDirect: Initializing...
[[[ long pause here ]]]
NetDirect: TapAdapter IP not Assigned
NetDirect: Stopping...
NetDirect: Stopped!

At this point the window closes and the systray icon goes away. I tried a number of things including starting the browser "as Administrator" and also had searched Google for answers without any luck.

The Solution

The problem may have been due tot he fact that I already had installed (months earlier) OpenVPN to use a different client's VPN. As I was hunting around the system for the "TapAdapter" mentioned in the error message, I found a start menu option under OpenVPN that said "Delete ALL TAP-Win32 virtual ethernet adapters". Woah - that looked promising!

So I ran the bat file, it deleted some stuff, then I tried starting up the NetDirect connection again. Wham! It worked! Problem solved!

Note: I also started Firefox "As Administrator" when first installing the NetDirect client (it downloads and installs a couple of things). This may or may not have mattered.

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By now you should know that it's best practice to keep debugging turned off on production servers. Even when debugging is restricted by IP, ColdFusion busily goes about collecting debugging information for every page request, even though it's not displayed on the screen. All this extra activity tends to slow down the server a bit, particularly if you have "Report Execution Times" selected. Under load, having debugging turned on can have a serious impact on performance. Even in development, turning on "Report Execution Times" can have a significant impact if alot of developers are sharing one dev box.

So you know you should have it turned off in production, but inevitably you're going to need to debug something in production sooner or later, and turn that evil debugging switch back on for a moment. Occasionally you're going to forget to turn it back off. Occasionally the wrong person gets access to the CFAdmin and turns it on just because they don't know any better. However it happens - chaos, anarchy, and mass confusion are likely not far behind.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to automatically detect that debugging it turned on and send yourself a notification or alert so you can shut it back off? Oh, but you can! Here are a couple of code snippets that you can drop into your Application.cfm or Application.cfc file to fire off an alert to yourself.

<!--- detect debugging on/off ---> <cfif isDebugMode()> DEBUG IS ON<br/> <!--- send cfmail or other alert here ---> <cfelse> DEBUG IS OFF<br/> </cfif>

Or, if you want to get a little more complicated and detect that template execution times are being calculated (maybe on a busy dev box), you can try this one:

<!--- detect template execution times on/off ---> <cfif isDebugMode()> <cftry> <cfobject action="CREATE" type="JAVA" class="coldfusion.server.ServiceFactory" name="factory"> <cfset debugTable = factory.getDebuggingService().getDebugger().getData()> <cfquery dbType="query" name="getTemplates" debug="false"> SELECT template FROM debugTable WHERE type = 'Template' </cfquery> <cfif getTemplates.recordcount> It's on!!!!!<br/> <!--- send cfmail or other alert here ---> <cfelse> Template execution time debugging is not turned on<br/> </cfif> <cfcatch type="Any"></cfcatch> </cftry> </cfif>

Both of these should work in CF6 and above, but I've only tested them on CF8.

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I've frequently heard complaints about people forgetting to log off when they end a Remote Desktop session. Instead they simply close the window, leaving their session running on the server. This orphaned session becomes a problem in many cases because Windows Servers are typically only licensed for two simultaneous logged in users. Even worse, if you can't remote into the box, you may not be able to easily identify the culprit(s) who left their sessions active. This leaves you no-one to throw things at and generally a very grumpy person.

Fortunately there is a solution to this problem...

You can configure Terminal Services to terminate abandoned sessions fairly easily on Windows 2000 and 2003 servers by doing the following:

1. On the server, go to "Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > teminal Services Configuration"
2. Select "Connections", then right click on RDP-Tcp and select Properties
3. Select the Sessions tab and Check the "Override user settings" checkbox.
4. Choose the criteria under which you'd like to start killing off sessions.

That does it!

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