Obligious

2011-12-20T12:57:00.000-08:00

The December

Oxford St. London

If you are anywhere in the western world right now, you cannot remain untouched by the glorious and ever so magical charm of the Christmas season. It’s impossible to walk even an inch on the street without being offered a “mad bargain” or “the best deal”. Oh it’s everywhere. The houses, the offices, the clubs, the pubs, the malls, the walls and the lighting, the decoration, the shopping the celebration, even the TV channels, it’s all over the place, you simply cannot miss it.

The funniest thing is, it’s also impossible to spend this holly-jolly month without meeting at least one member of the Christmas-has-become-an-industry club. Such is the charm of this magical wonderful season that even those who loath all this merriment, namely the members of Christmas-has-become-an-industry club, cannot help belonging to this industry as the most important player, the market.

Anyway, this narration is not really about Christmas. It’s about being in the midst of this Christmas saga when you have no role to play. Please keep reading, I will make myself clearer.

I live in London, but as you may have guessed by now, I am an “outsider”. My relatives, friends, acquaintances the entire social group to which I fundamentally belong, lives far away in another country, so in a way here I am, all alone! But I am sure, I am not alone (intentional pun :) !) there are millions of people, all over the world in the same situation as me, who go through this very mild torture (I am a bit sorry to call it torture, it really isn’t that bad!) of going through a huge built-up of a lovely day to come in our lives - a day which will come as a wonderful welcome break from our hectic routines, a day when all our loved ones will come together to share and care, a day with the promise of an ultimate human experience- a built-up which eventually for us, ends in nothing like what was promised.

I know there are so many things you want to tell me right now. Like, it's my own fault that I am so miserable, because I didn’t plan to be with my own social group during the holiday season!

Well, the answer to this question is quite complex and maybe it’s best if I leave that discussion for some other time. But on the subject of how desperately people want to be with their family on Christmas, I would like to tell you about one of my colleague. This guy recently went through a “Spontaneous pneumothorax”, or in simple English, a collapsed lung, long story short, he is seriously ill and the doctor has advised him to strictly avoid travel by air but in the spirit (read madness) of Christmas he has decided to cross the English channel on a bus ! (and off-course I need not tell you that the bus will be on a ship :) , “Crossing the English channel on a bus” is yet another interesting story which I will tell later. So anyway). I asked him why he was being so irrational and taking such a risk and he said “I can’t miss Christmas with my family!”

Well-done to the Christmas industry and to the hype that is built around the Christmas season that people (even with a broken lung) will cross seven seas just to be with their family on a date!

<more to come later>

BugLogHQ for runtime bug reporting.

2011-12-20T07:10:00.000-08:00

We have around 10-12 websites running at any given time, and our problem was that we were spending a lot of time in debugging/reproducing the errors reported by our client. We wanted a system which could log all the errors reported by different websites in just one place.
I stumbled upon this online bugreporting tool called as BugLogHQ and I was quite impressed by there solution.

It is very simple to implement and you can download the whole project from Riaforge.
The code is very well written in a nice ColdBox like framework, hence you can modify it if you want to.
You may have to do a bit of tweaking in database design. Specially in there Entry table, where the columns are set to be very small, while your Exception data could be very long (which is usually the case).

But at the end of the day it does what it promises and saves a lot of time.

IIS returns blank page.

2011-12-20T06:23:00.000-08:00

Ever since we moved our old sites to new server, we were getting random issues of IIS giving us blank page.
It was really frustrating because there was no error message Wat-so-ever. After a little bit of googling I found that It could be a permission issue. It was dying becuse the Virtual directories I was trying to access were not assessable by the user logged in. After I connected as "Administrator" it started to work just fine.

Go to Start --> IIS manager.

Go to the Basic Settings on the right hand side

Click on Connect as -

Click on Set -

Enter your Admin username and Passoword -

Click OK and do the same for all your Virtual Directories.

This fixed my IIS from returning blank pages.

SVN Information through Coldfusion

2011-12-19T05:24:00.000-08:00

You can access SVN information from your coldfusion code. I have written these two methods and they do the trick for me. It is useful for my managers/colleagues who are not very technical and still wants to know about the code versions, changes etc.

<cftry>

</cfexecute>

</cfcatch>

</cftry>

</cffunction>

OR you can use the following method to get the SVN information between two dates

<cftry>

</cfexecute>

</cfcatch>

</cftry>

</cffunction>

And then I access them through the url like this -

<b>

SVN LOG from

<cfoutput>: #url.startDate#</cfoutput>

<cfoutput>: #url.endDate#</cfoutput>

<br>

</b>

<cfoutput>#XmlTransform(logResult, xmltrans)#</cfoutput>

</cfif>

To show them in a pretty style I wrote this XSL -

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="/">

<html>

<body>

<th>Revision</th>

<th>Author</th>

<th>Message</th>

</tr>

<xsl:for-each select="log/logentry">

<xsl:sort select="position()" data-type="number" order="descending"/>

<tr>

<td>

<xsl:value-of select="@revision" />

</td>

<td>

<xsl:value-of select="author" />

</td>

<td>

<xsl:value-of select="date" />

</td>

<ul>

<xsl:for-each select="paths/path">

<li>

<xsl:value-of select="." />

<b>

<xsl:if test="@action='M'">

Modified

</xsl:if>

<xsl:if test="@action='A'">

Added

</xsl:if>

<xsl:if test="@action='D'">

Deleted

</xsl:if>

</b>

</li>

</xsl:for-each>

</ul>

</td>

<td>

<xsl:value-of select="msg" />

</td>

</tr>

</xsl:for-each>

</table>

</body>

</html>

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

I know that there is a lot that can be done, but for now this is fulfilling our requirement.