Category Archives: TECH

cfthread and request timeout in coldfusion

I have been playing around with CFthread in CF9 and assumed the threads would behave the same way as in Java, where the thread doesn’t die until all the operations are completed.

I was expecting a similar behavior with CFthread as well,since I was planning to spawn a asynchronous thread and let it complete a file upload to cloud using CFHTTP. In the process I found the following after some testing and playing around:

  1. The CFthread basically respects the CF admin panel timeout if it’s set and kills the thread after the timeout period.
  2. It doesn’t respect the request timeout set using the CFsetting tag in onRequestStart or any where in the code.
  3. There are still certain tags that don’t obey the CFthread request timeout,they are CFFTP,CFEXECUTE, CFX tags and CFStoredProc.

So if you like start a asynchronous thread that runs for a longer time than the request timeout set in the CFadmin,please use the following ways:

  1. Un-check the request timeout settings in the CFadmin and then set request timeout for all other requests using the cfsetting @ onrequestStart function.
  2. Use either of the above tags that don’t respect the CFthread timeout.
  3. Use the event gateways if needed.

Just thought some one could find it useful.

Carton of Milk – 2$, Nokia N85 – 300$, the joy when the phone works after dropping the N85 in milk – priceless

I really wish I didn’t do this mistake of trying to save 2$ milk carton from falling down and dropping my N85 in to my cup of milk when I was preparing my coffee while I was talking to my bro at the same time.

I did the usual stuff that I usually do when my equipments has water damage like completely dismantle it and let it dry for a day and try it back again. Most of the time it has worked for me and since the phone is from Nokia, the percentage of survival is little higher then other manufactures.

Multitasking has its share of failures like this, may be that’s why apple decided not to include Multitasking in ipad.

Until then I will try to resurrect my old HTC SDA phone which had suffered its own 30 feet drops, water damage and living in freezer for an hour :) and btw it worked all the time without issues. I decided to replace it only when its charger connection got loose which made it harder for me to charge the device.

I hope the N85 can also survive all the sufferings as good as HTC SDA has suffered in my hands. It has gone through a 20 feet drop and made out alive so lets see if it can survive the water damage.

Now I will have to wait for another 24 hrs to figure out if my phone can be revived or not.

Please email/im me if you need to contact me before that.

Yet another quake as I write this post. It shud be easily a 4 and we got after shocks.

-Updated April 4, 2010 @ 7.46PM

Well the phone is working perfectly as of this moment without issue. Thank you Nokia.

Carton of Milk – 2$, Nokia N85 – 300$, the joy when the phone works after dropping the N85 in milk – priceless :)



Hitler and Cloud Computing woes

One more reason why Hitler failed. Its just too funny especially when he wants to update his facebook page.

Enjoy it.

Here is the original video.

Amazon S3 isn’t for everyone

Its always been a pain to maintain a  backup of all photos and personal documents.When I heard about Amazon S3 cloud storage with its cheap pricing structure, I was in heaven finally a place I can store my data for eternity for cheap.

But when I started to move my data to Amazon S3 , the reality struck me hard was that

  1. my so called broadband connection which boasts a 512kbps upstream took me more than an hour to push a 200MB file and I have about 10gb of data.
  2. Most of all I can’t even switch to FIOS internet (Verizon) which has better up stream because they don’t have coverage in my locality.
  3. None of the freeware S3 sync applications like S3Fox, cloudberry and S3 Explorer support bandwidth limiting capability on up stream. So they basically occupy the pipeline until the upload is done annoying my room mate who was  trying to figure what the hell’s happening with the connection for like 2 days.

So until I get a better internet connection or smart app that can push data like torrents clients, I will not be able to use Amazon S3 as my primary back up storage.

Amazon S3 back up or file storage isn’t for people who are stuck in the cable world like me.

Where is bi.ng and Ap.pl?

Just read the news that the mighty Google has released its own URL shortener tool http://goo.gl which is available with Google Toolbar and  FeedBurner according to press release.I’m sure the tool will slowly be used by all Google products and may be ship with Android and Chrome OS which would be cool.

Pretty much every IT companies have started their own URL shortener web apps. The next question is when Microsoft(http://bi.ng/) and Apple(http://ap.pl) are going to release their URL shortener tools?

Windows 7 Vs Kubuntu 9.10 the fight continues..

I recently got a new laptop Lenovo ideapad Y550 which was supposed to come with Windows 7 but came with Vista instead but I already decided that I would use Ubuntu 9.10 to avoid all windows nightmare and started using Kubuntu 9.10 (KDE graphic environment of Ubuntu). I can do a whole podcast on the lenovo issue but I have made my peace.

Setting up an running Kubuntu was the easy part since the installation was seemeless and every thing ran out of the box except

  1. Nvidia GT240m graphics card for which I found the drivers from Nvidia site and spend like another 2 days figuring out how to install them during which I crashed the ubuntu when I removed some packages.
  2. My Audio isn’t audible as vista and my HDMI port doesn’t output audio in Kubuntu which works fine in Vista. Looks like a driver problem.

I have searched through out the net for the audio issue and no one seems to have the right answer that would resolve my issue so I’m actually considering moving to Windows 7 even though I haven’t gotten my hands dirty with it.

I pretty much use this laptop as my home entertainment system which would need the HDMI audio function. I still have 3 more weeks before Lenovo sends me Windows 7 disk to figure out the issue. If not then I guess I will be back to Windows world once again until then I will switch between Vista/Kubuntu.

Believe me Ubuntu is a monster once tamed it’s a pretty good dog and I like it a lot.

BTW Vista sucks pretty bad how the hell can I kill a process from task manager? I’m not even sure how people worked with vista.

I’m a novice in the linux world so if any one has better ideas to fix this issue it would be gr8.

Orkut No Donut for you..You can only add upto 250 favorites

Well who ever has used Orkut are aware the blog post title message which shows up when Orkut’s server are too busy to respond.

But this time no donuts for the whole Orkut team since they have set a hard limit of only 250 video links per profile which I hate personally hate and I’m not even a heavy user of Orkut. Here is the message I get when I add a video:

You can only add upto 250 favorites. Please remove some favorites in order to add new ones.

Looks like the Orkut network is going backwards instead of moving forward by implementing this kind of limit.  Considering India being one the major market for India this is a really bad move since Indian music industry is driven by the film industry with each having 5 songs minimum.  Don’t ask me why we need 5 songs in middle of a movie that’s a whole different story.

The reality is every orkut user bookmarks(embeds) all kind of youtube Indian film songs and this limit is going to make the users move to a different network. Wake up Orkut..

Here are some suggestions Orkut might do to improve the videos section which I personally used to like:

  1. Will it be too hard to create a playlist of all videos so we can listen to all of our favorite song.
  2. Has it even considering enabling search for the videos? It makes me wonder if this product is really from Google.
  3. If a youtube video has been disabled can it at least remove them by default instead of occupying my limited video library limit.

Considering all this downfalls of Orkut I do think may be I should join Facebook but I use these social networks to keep in touch with friends which Orkut does it ok for me.

May be I should depend more on my blog running on WordPress more where I control my app/data than letting them control me what I can and can’t do.

Universal Mobile chargers finally..

CNET news reported that the International Telecommunication Union a branch of UN has decided to go for universal mobile phone chargers.

In a world where each mobile phone from same manufacture have different chargers working this is a welcoming sign.

I also hope ITU gets in to and standardize the chargers for all portable devices as well. I’m tired of carrying individual chargers for my mobile, Blue Tooth headset and mp3 player. If we can standardize the laptop chargers that will be awesome too..

The only reason I’m worried is it wont happen soon enough. Since this is something driven by a branch of UN and we all know how long it would take for all countries to accept these protocols. Lets hope all the manufactures fall in line and accept it soon…

At least I’m happy that some where in distant future that there will less chargers lying around in my house.

Change of theme

Its been quite a while since I switched my wordpress theme to a different one. I changed some time in march and there were some issues with IE browser so reverted.

This time I have decided not to change the theme for IE issues alone. I’m done playing games for IE.

As far as the new theme its still boring as the old one but this blog is ain’t for some media blog so I will live with this one for some time.

Too much of rambling for a simple theme change.. so the 1 or 2 users who read this boring post :) please leave a comment if you have any UI issues other than IE seriously..

Railo 3.1 CFML server is awesome

Lately I have been playing around with Railo 3.1 in my Ubuntu 9 and believe me its super fast even in my single core centrino Thinkpad R50e laptop !!!!!

No offense to Adobe CF8 last time I tried to install and use Coldbox it just kept on giving me the blue screen of death.Not sure what caused the issue but my system is damn old so I can’t blame any one.

There are so many nice features in Railo which many of discussed here. Personally I like the cfdump eval and the debugging templates. Once it gets the complete BlazeDS integration done then it will be best of CFML engines out there.

I hope Railo helps CFML lead the way in web.

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