New contact page and a note about commenting

Ever since I started this blog I’ve received a ton of correspondence from people asking me to help them out with whatever problem they might have. However since I did a post containing the support information for MajicJack, a lot people are leaving comments to that post containing their personal information for me to get in touch with them.

Please everyone, I beg of you, DO NOT leave any personal information in comments on my blog or any blog for that matter. There are a lot of nutcases and scammers out there and I don’t want anyone inadvertently putting themselves in a dangerous situation.

I think the main reason people did this was I didn’t have any way on this blog for you to send me a personal message. Well starting today I learned (I’m always learning) that you can have a contact form through WordPress. With that I created a Contact Me page that you can use to get in touch with me for whatever reason.

Get in Contact with me!

Friday!

Today’s quote comes directly from my brother:

Today I became a man… a manly man. Clogged the toilet using no toilet paper. Thats how big my shit was. Bow to me fucker.

Needless to say, he needs help.

The return of BASH Friday!!!!

Since my brother Charles keeps busting my balls and I’ve finally come to terms that I’m a lazy asshole – I present the return of everyone’s favorite Friday time waster…. BASH!!!!!!

http://bash.org/?894647
http://bash.org/?894351
http://bash.org/?894350
http://bash.org/?894335
http://bash.org/?894334
http://bash.org/?894043
http://bash.org/?893952
http://bash.org/?893353
http://bash.org/?892979
http://bash.org/?892785
http://bash.org/?892161
http://bash.org/?891290
http://bash.org/?889637
http://bash.org/?887536
http://bash.org/?887444
http://bash.org/?886198
http://bash.org/?885924
http://bash.org/?885012
http://bash.org/?884782

Karalootz

Your little spot on the net for me to tell you that I love and miss you deeply. Rest in peace now.

Read my brother’s dedication to his little shadow.

Using Dependency Walker

If there’s one tool I have completely fell in love with it’s Dependency Walker (DW). DW is a tool that let’s you see what a file, in many cases DLLs, depends on in order to get them to run or register.

Case in point, just yesterday I was trying to get Office 2003 SP 3 installed on our intern’s computer. No matter what I did, I was getting the dreaded 1904: Cannot Register MSRCLR40.dll error and it was driving me insane. Now according to Microsoft and other sourcesI found on the net, this is a problem with not having the latest MDAC installed for XP (2.81 sp1), however I checked (by following Microsoft’s instructions) and I did have the latest MDAC installed. In any case, I reinstalled the latest MDAC, rebooted, tried the installation again and got the same thing. Dammit!

At this point, I knew that I could be downloading and installing different things all day, so I opted to run a repair on Microsoft Office and see what that did. Wouldn’t you know, I got the 1904 error during the repair, go fig. Now I’m screwed. I ran out of options the net handed me, so that’s when I decided to download DW and give this magical life saver a run.

As I mentioned above, DW is a stand alone tool that let’s you select a file and shows you which other files (or modules) the file needs in order to run or, in our case, register. It’s extremely easy to use and understand.

The first thing you need to do is download and unzip the latest version of DW. As of this writing it’s 2.2.

After you have it unzipped, open up the folder and double click the depends.exe file. Once DW loads up, all you need to do is click File -> Open and select the file that you DW to inspect (for this example I selected MSRCLR40.dll that was in c:\windows\system32 on my machine).

Is that cool or what? As you can see from the screen shot above, DW will show you all of the files that MSRCLR40.dll needs in order to work. Now if there are any files that are missing from your machine, they will show up in RED at the very top of the list (I have everything this file needs, so I don’t have any errors). Once you have your list of files that you need, all you need to do is to either download the files from the internet or copy them from another machine and copy them to the appropriate place. Then just hit View -> Refresh (or F5) and see if everything is OK. Don’t worry about any delay-load dependency module errors you might get since these module aren’t loaded until you actually try to run or register the file.

In the case of my intern’s computer, DW told me that the machine didn’t have MSJET40.dll, MSJINT40.dll and MSJTER40.dll. I managed to copy these from my work machine, however you can download them from Microsoft. After that I went to a command prompt and ran:

regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\msrclr40.dll

The file registered successfully and I finally got Office 2003 SP 3 installed!

Using a tool like DW from the get go can save you hours of searching the internet and trying different solutions until you find the magical one that fixes your problem. I find that in the world of tech support this tool is invaluble and hopefully you will too.

Geek Week Update: Day 1

So how is it going so far? HORRIBLE!

Well first off, I updated my cygwin install with the latest version of git and subervion-perl a couple of weeks ago and when I went to rebase with the CFWheels repo, it would die. Only one commit at a time would be pulled down and then errors all over the place. After searching on google I found out that this is a known problem with the latest subversion-perl so I had to downgrade. That took me about an hour to figure out. I could have applied a patch to the version that I had already installed, but I wasn’t in the mood to be jerking around like that and I figured I’d leave that stuff to the experts.

After that I was finally able to sync with the svn repo and get everything up and running.

With my confidence in the toliet, I started writing tests and finding bugs that needed to be fixed. When I found my first bug, I decided to use trusty old tortoisesvn  to write the patch and get it into trunk since I had local checkout already. That went well, but it wasn’t the best way to do it. I should be using git and git-svn to do this stuff and by using tortise I had to litterally duplicate the patch that I already had in git. NOT SMART!

Anyhow, I continued coding and soon found another bug that needed some attention. “WHAT LUCK!” I thought because now I could submit the patch through git-svn like I should have been doing all along. BIG MISTAKE! Let’s just say that I fought with this for almost two hours, because I kept screwing up the workflow left and right and having to git reset –hard. Thank God that stackoverflow.com exists and after reading carefully, the solution that I found, and some playing around, I finally got the workflow down and was able to commit the patch.

All and all, I’m having a rough time. Maybe I’m just off my game today since I have a lot of other things in my head right now and my mental state isn’t in sync. No matter, tomorrow is another day and more coding.

Tomorrow I’m planning on completing the creation of a test database so that I can test out all the functions that depend on models and cleanning up the tests.

About the tests. Right now, the way I’m writing tests, I’ll have more then one assert in each test. From what I’ve seen and researched how other people write tests, this is the wrong way. You should have one assert for each test. After writing a bunch of them, this makes sense. Reason being is because if you have 5 asserts in one test and one of the asserts fails, the whole test fails. Now currently this isn’t a problem because I know it’s the last assert I wrote that failed. However, down the road I can see this becoming a problem when we’re trying to figure out where the test is failing. It’s not like I want the rest of the team to be commenting out asserts until they find the one thats failing. I come to the conclusion at this point that I’m going to have to rewrite all the tests I’ve created into this new format. Oh well it’s what learning is all about and the reason I love doing open source stuff.

I’ll update again tomorrow.

Grasshopper

May you leap from the blade of grass and settle on the stem of the dandelion.

My own CFWheels Geek Week is coming…

I’m not one for going away for vacation, it’s just not me, and with the wife starting up her own business it just seems that we won’t be going away any time soon. However I have to burn some of my vacation time at work or I’ll lost it when the year is over. With that I actually managed to convince the wife and my boss to let me take a week off from work, once my current project is done with, and just geek out for the 9 days on some open source. No distractions or nothing, just coding until I collapse with exhaustion over the keyboard. Hence the inception of my own CFWheels Geek Week. Hopefully I’ll be able to take this week sometime this month or the beginning of May.

What will I be working on over the week you nerds ask?

• Get the testing framework finally merged into the core (got to wait until 1.0 hits first)
• write a slew of tests against the existing core and for some of the features that keep causing bugs
• See what outstanding bugs and feature requests are in the issue list and what I can help to squash. Adding views and stored procedure support doesn’t seem all that complex and I have some ideas of what to do to implement it.
• Look at the routing engine that is currently implemented and see how it could be sped up and maybe implement namespaces and regular expression support.
• I want to look at a way to implement something similar to Engines that Rails has.

Those are my goals and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get through them all in the 9 days that I have. My top priority is the testing framework and the tests.

If you want to help out in any way it would be most welcomed. Even if it’s just an email with an idea of how to implement something, hell man, send it along. If you want help with some coding you can checkout the project using either svn or fork via github.

My new doormat

Any ColdFusion jobs in the South Florida area?

Some of my friends are hurting for some work down here in sunny (and freezing right now) South Florida. I’m asking if anyone in the community knows of some job opening to please pass them along this way. Anything in the following areas would do, either permanent or contract is fine:

ColdFusion
Flash
Photoshop
Illustrator
Site Layouts
Web Design

I’m not looking for any positions myself, just trying to help out my buddies as best I can. Please leave the information in the comments below so others can benefit as well.