Signed Maddie up for training...
Well, I signed Maddie up for training classes last night. I looked around a little, but was feeling I needed to get her in to a class ASAP, so I went with Petsmart which is close by and had a class starting Monday night. I've watched them operate classes in the past and they seem to be alright. A buddy, Michael, who used to live in the Columbus area suggested a place they took their dogs to that use "positive reinforcement" techniques. If Petsmart doesn't work out, I'll check out that place.
Bengals: Akili Smith/David Klingler Anyone?
Bengals Open Negotiations With Leftwich -
5:01 PT: The Cincinnati Enquirer reports the Cincinnati Bengals have opened contract negotiations with Marshall QB Byron Leftwich.
While I think Leftwich has a lot of qualities to be an NFL caliber QB, his durability is in question. The Bengal have the uncanny knack to be able use their first round draft pick on injury prone players or players who turn out to be total busts. It appears they may be reaching in their bags of tricks again to waste another overall first pick.
I think the Bengals would be much better off trading down and drafting Leftwich—if he's the guy they really want he should be available later on. Heck, some moch drafts have him going as late as the nuber 27 pick (Steelers.)
Busy Day Yesterday
Well, yesterday was a busy day. I converted a client's old server over to a new box running CFMX in the morning and headed over to another client's location to help them try to recover some corrupted data. (They didn't have any recent backups that were good—their raid controller card had begun writing junk data to the drive, so things were in bad shape.) I was able to get them back up in running to a degree, but there's 2 weeks of data I wasn't able to recover. They're sending their box out to a data recovery firm and hopefully we'll be able to get that missing data back. I was a little disappointed I couldn't help them out better than I did, but that's why I've stressed to them in the past the importance of backing data up. This isn't the first time I've had to help the client get the box up and running after a hardware failure.
Anyway, the day was pretty hectic. When I was at the one clients location, a couple of oddities arose on the box I put live, so I had to come back to the office to fix those issues. Fortunately, nothing was major and the problems didn't affect the core audience. I still was hoping for zero down time and thought I had planned accordingly.
Something to keep in mind when transferring a server: check Google for links to your site and make sure that you haven't forgotten about any aliases or non-standard links. There was a function of the site left in there for legacy purposes (to map old links from a static version of the site built in the mid-90s) and a few of the variations weren't working. Since those aren't referenced internally, when running on my stress tests and bot scans, it never came across the problem. Anyway, a search on Google may have found some of the variations before the client's client did. :)
"Search Friendly URLs" with CFMX/IIS
In order to get "Search Friendly URLs" working in CFMX under IIS, make sure you've done the following:
-
In the cfusionmx\wwwroot\web-inf\web.xml file, make sure
that you have a mapping pattern that will make sure
to parse content after the .cfm extension. For example:
<servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>CfmServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>.cfm*</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping>
By default, CFMX Updater 3 out to have mappings like this in the web.xml file. If those mappings don't work, you can try a generic mapping to have the servlet parse everything:
<servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>CfmServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>*</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping>
- You may need to run the "Remove_ALL_connectors.bat" file located in the cfusionmx\bin\connectors. Try skipping this step first (especially if you have a lot of virtual servers already set up.) If things don't work the first time, try running this batch file. After running this batch file, you'll need to run the "IIS_connector.bat" in the same directory to reset all the associations to JRun and ColdFusion.
404 Weirdness After Rebooting with CFMX/IIS5
Ok, so I ran in to a really odd problem today. One of our servers decided that it wanted to start giving 404 errors on any request after the box was rebooted—it didn't matter if it was a static html page or a dynamic page. If I restarted all the services, things would start working again. This meant though, that if the box was restarted you manually had to run a batch file to recycle the services—which is unacceptable.
After doing some investigation on the box, I learned that the jrun log files in the CFusionMX\runtime\lib\wsconfig\1\ directory were generating lines like the following:
04:03:20 jrISAPI[init] JRun 4.0 (Build 55228) ISAPI Extension - Nov 21 2002 20:12:06 04:03:21 jrISAPI[init] initProxy failed to fetch server properties 04:03:21 jrISAPI[init] could not initialize Server_1:127.0.0.1:51010 04:03:21 jrISAPI[init] Couldn't initialize from remote server, deferring init till request time. 04:03:21 jrISAPI[init] JRun 4.0 (Build 55228) ISAPI Extension - Nov 21 2002 20:12:08 04:03:32 jrISAPI[filter] initProxy failed to fetch server properties 04:03:32 jrISAPI[filter] could not initialize Server_1:127.0.0.1:51010 04:03:32 jrISAPI[filter] Couldn't initialize from remote server, JRun server(s) probably down.Fleetwood Mac Concert
Man, I wouldn't mind seeing Fleetwood Mac, but I really am not going to pay $47.50 to sit in the nosebleed sections. I just can't jusitify paying $125 per ticket to see Fleetwood Mac. Maybe I'd do it if Christine McVie was with them, but if that's a big maybe. There's only a couple of people I'd pay that much to go see live.
Fleetwood Mac Concert
Journey, REO & Styx Coming To Schott
Not positive I'm going to this concert or not, I've already seen Journey and Styx a couple of times. I'd definitely go there's group interest in going though. I haven't seen REO in concert, but they're supposedly good live. The ticket prices aren't bad, but I don't think I want to pay $47.50 to stand on my feet the whole time—I'm getting old, what can I say?
Journey, REO & Styx Concert
Update: Dream Theater/Queensryche/Fates Warning Concert
So it appears to be official, the Fates Warning/Queensryche/Dream Theater concert appears to be heading to Columbus, OH. I'm looking forward to seeing Fates Warning and Dream Theater, but at this point in my life I could care less if Queensryche is there—and at one point they were my favorite band.
Dream Theater/Queensryche/Fates Warning Tour
Y-Boxx: Ultimate Entertainment System
I think I actually like Yoshi's previous version better than this one, but the addition of the projector is kind of cool. The box reminds me a bit of the old projection televisions from the early 80s.
Yoshi's Latest Boxx
It Tastes Just Like Ice Cream!
The complete third season of Mr. Show with Bob & David is supposed to be released in August 2003. If you've never seen a Mr. Show episode, I'd recommend renting Seasons 1 & 2 on DVD—it's by far the funniest show no one ever saw. I just wish HBO would have pushed this show more. Even though I had HBO at the time, they did a lousy job promoting the show so I never started watching it until I caught a re-run one night. I've been hooked ever since.
Mr. Show: The Complete Third Season
Reporters Fell For Commando Prank
The "Stay Lucky" soldier pictured wearing a helmet riddled with bullet holes was playing a PRANK, The Sun can reveal. Comical commando Eric Walderman and his comrades fooled Gulf War II newsmen by pretending he had escaped death by inches when he was shot at while fighting Iraqis. In fact his Kevlar helmet was just lying on top of his pack when it was peppered by fellow Marines trying to hit an unexploded anti-tank weapon.
I posted this picture awhile back on my blog. Just goes to show how you need to take everything you read with a with a grain of salt. That's not to say that everything you read is false, but reporters seem to be doing less and less fact checking in order to be the first one to "break" the big story. Granted, in this particular story the reporter could have checked with fellow soldiers and if they all played along at the time, there's no reason not to believe them. Anyway, always process the information you read and just don't blindly believe what you see.
With their first 2 picks in the draft, Dallas selects...
Don't believe the above image, check out Marshall's 2002 Football Roster.
My Busy Weekend
Turned out to be a big weekend. I had planned to cut the grass for the first time this year on Saturday, but ChemLawn showed up—which put a stop to those plans. That probably turned out for the best, since Jenn & I got a ton of things done Saturday. We went to lunch and then ran a couple hours of errands. We then stopped back at the house to pick Maddie up. After picking up some boxes and taking them to Jenn's appartment (for when she moves next month—to where where not quite sure yet) we took Maddie to Antrim park.
Antrim has a 1.2 mile track which surrounds a large pond—which the dogs are allowed to swim in. That was the first time Maddie swam and I think it freaked her out a bit. She was all gungho the first time until she realized that her feet didn't touch the ground. She then panicked a bit and was very tentative around the water the rest of the day. She did go back in a few times, but she didn't go very far and always kept her footing.
We also let her walk for awhile without her leash. She didn't stay far, but there was a jogger who was afraid of dogs and when Maddie went to great her, the jogger got really scared—so I put Maddie back on the leash. I only let Maddie off the leash after noticing that almost all the dogs at the park were not leashed. There were probably 50 dogs there. I really want to research training classes in town. I think it's time. Anyway, we had a good time at the park and Maddie feel straight asleep once we got in the car and starting driving home.
Russia Spying for Iraq?
Top secret documents obtained by The Telegraph in Baghdad show that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders.
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The name of Osama bin Laden appears in a number of Russian reports. Several give details of his support for the rebels in Chechnya. They say bin Laden had built two training camps in Afghanistan, near the Iranian border, to train mujahideen fighters for Russia's rebel republic. The camps could each hold 300 fighters, who were all funded by bin Laden.
More On The CNN "Coverage" In Baghdad
"I was stunned by that op-ed," Fox News Channel and ABC radio host Sean Hannity told The Times yesterday. "Doesn't CNN have a journalistic obligation to report these kind of details, or to make their reporters aware of them? You can bet if CNN made discoveries about, say, a conservative administration, they would share them."
This still ticks me off. I like what Rich Noyes has to say in this article.