Miki Saxon is quite a perceptive woman.  Virtually every month we feature a new article of her's in our newsletter, and for good reason.  They are interesting, well written, and have different takes on virtually every aspect of corporate life.

Her latest entry is about how encouraging people to think "outside the box" as people say, is futile.  Everyone has a box in which their imagination is contained.  Trying to think outside of it is against the purpose of these boxes.  Saxon feels that the way we come up with new ideas is to recognize the size of your box and try to expand upon it. 

Obviously, those who are very creative and have built their lives on their creativity have much bigger boxes.  The objective is to expand our boxes so that our creativity increases.  But everytime we "think outside the box" a new box is created around it, thus we always have a box.  But if we keep expanding, the sky is the limit.  You can read all of Miki's article HERE.

TeraTech welcomes our newest salesperson, Kathleen Herrington, to the team!

A Maryland native, Kathleen Herrington main area of expertise is in sales and marketing.  After studying Psychology and Business Administration at University of Maryland, Baltimore County she began her career at NationsBanc Mortgage and in that industry she stayed for over 15 years.  She is excited to learn more about web application development. She decided to come to TeraTech “because of the people and TeraTech’s philosophy towards its own people.  Michael [Smith] has an open-door attitude that everyone has something to contribute.” 

That she has lived in Montgomery County in Silver Spring and Rockville her whole life, it makes sense that she’s made a home for herself in Gaithersburg with her “husband and assorted children and pets,” she says.  Welcome Kathleen!

Today Sean Corfield passed the torch of Fusebox core development to Adam Haskell (see Fusebox site for more details on Adam's vision for Fusebox core development). I appreciate Sean for the Olympic improvements he has made to Fusebox over the years - getting the source into a public Trac repository (with Sim's help), rewriting the core into CFCs and adding many useful features over the years. And consider that when Sean first came across Fusebox he argued against it - but after trying it out he liked it so much that he helped out on the core files and help to steer Fusebox to where it is today! I will miss his lively input at Team Fusebox meetings too.

And I am looking forward to Adam taking Fusebox to the next level. When we discussed his ideas for the core at CFUnited he showed both the experience and passion to improve things a lot. And I think from his message that he is interesting in hearing from the Fusebox community too.

Leaps and bounds!  It seems everywhere TeraTech takes the MDCFUG lunch, we get more and more people to attend.  Last month we ate at the eatery at Union Station and people had a few comments.  One, they weren’t sure if it was upstairs near the Corner Bakery or downstairs where all the 30 or so small food shops are that we were meeting.  Two, it was brought to my attention that we are hosting the Maryland ColdFusion User Group Lunch, not the Washington DC ColdFusion User Group Lunch.

We will be having the MDCFUG Luch again at the Union Station Eatery and we will meet at 1:00 On September 1st, downstairs as close as I can possibly sit to the front of the eatery.  In other words, as close to the stairs and escalator as is humanly possible.   Again I will be in my green ColdFusion shirt, and if you plan on attending, you can email me and I will give you my cell phone number.  As for the second query regarding a Maryland lunch being held in Washington, D.C.; many people who work in Washington D.C. use ColdFusion, many more than those who live in Annapolis, and the people who have requested a lunch set up near them have done so mostly in the District.  If you are from Waldorf or Baltimore or anywhere else in Maryland and would like a lunch set up near you, don't hesitate to contact me (Matt@TeraTech.com) and we can work something out.. 

Like our monthly MDCFUG meetings at TeraTech’s Rockville headquarters, lunch is a great way to connect with other people working in ColdFusion and to discuss related issues in an informal setting.  Also like our monthly MDCFUG meetings, the MDCFUG lunch will be completely free, with exception to the price of your own food. 

If you are interested in having a lunch, but are not close to the location we chose, please let us know.  All questions, comments, concerns and suggestions should likewise be directed to me, Matt Weiss, Matt (at) teratech.com.  Also, please contact me if you plan on coming so I can provide a contact number for the day of the event.  I will send out an email the morning of the lunch to remind people. Hope to see you all there!

Four months and still going strong, the Maryland ColdFusion User Group Lunch is still the talk of the town.  These lunches are a success because people continue to come and network with other people working with ColdFusion. 

To accommodate all the different things people want to eat for lunch, we have chosen a new location for this month’s lunch.  It will be held at the food court connected to Union Station metro on Monday, July 28^th at 1pm.  There are various places to eat McDonalds, Au Bon Pain, and Corner Bakery just to name a few so everyone’s taste can be accommodated.  I, Matt Weiss, will be in the main eatery cul de sac with a CFUnited 2008 shirt on to be easily identifiable.  Bring some money for food, a great attitude and plenty of business cards for the contacts you will make. 

Like our monthly MDCFUG meetings at TeraTech’s Rockville headquarters, lunch is a great way to connect with other people working in ColdFusion and to discuss related issues in an informal setting.  Also like our monthly MDCFUG meetings, the MDCFUG lunch will be completely free, with exception to the price of your own food. 

If you are interested in having a lunch, but are not close to the location we chose, please let us know.  All questions, comments, concerns and suggestions should likewise be directed to me, Matt Weiss, Matt (at) teratech.com.  Also, please contact me if you plan on coming so I can provide a contact number for the day of the event.  I will send out an email the morning of the lunch to remind people. Hope to see you all there!

Because I am such an avid reader of Miki Saxon's Blog, I saw an article that most everyone can relate to, even billionaire company owners.  As unfortunate as it is, we are in a recession, especially with rising fuel costs and housing crisis that won't ever seem to bottom out.  WIth even the cost of groceries rising exponentially, people are spending less everywhere to save on the things they need.  This translates into companies having less money across the board.

During an economic downturn, it makes logical sense for executives to cut costs, and the easiest way to do this is simply to start letting people go.  If you fire people, obviously there's less people to pay, and a company will retain the money they're used to, with the exception of those people who were fired.  Right?  Not exactly.  Hopefully the people you have on your staff are there because you think they should be there.  Releasing them just because the economy isn't going well will only put these valuable people on someone else's payroll, so that when the economy comes back, you'll simply be out the right peole for the job, and people who've already been trained in their positions to boot!  To read Miki's entire article, just click here.

TeraTech offers training classes for ColdFusion and Fusebox for every skill level.  Here are the upcoming classes you can sign up for. 

CF201: Intermediate ColdFusion July 22^nd 10am-5

This class is taught by one of our resident ColdFusion Experts, Mr. Ajay Sathuluri and covers a range of topics: Security issues such as closing backdoors and forgotten passwords, Members Only issues like timeouts and cookies, Session Tracking including variable and structure dump, Locking issues like CFAdmin settings and CFLOCK tag, and Form Validation and why it is important.   

Ajay Sathuluri is a Senior Web/Database Engineer and Instructor for TeraTech, Inc. He has been using CF since 1999. He specializes in ColdFusion application architecture and database design.

All classes are held at TeraTech’s Rockville headquarters.  To sign up for these classes, or for a full class schedule list, go to http://www.teratech.com/go/training/class-schedule. 

This years ColdFusion United was great!  Those who came were a part of history, the 10^th annual CF United conference, and the first one ever held at the DC Convention Center.  People have said this was the best one ever with its range of topics and speakers as well as the events and antics being put on splendidly.

For all of those that could not make the conference, we are in the process of putting different presentations on the CFUnited websites so you can download them and watch them at your leisure.  This is also useful for those people who just LOVED some of the presentations and want to watch them over and over again.  To access these, go to www.cfunited.com/blog and scroll down to the entry dealing with “Presentations Recorded on Connect.” 

In addition to this, there were different interviews and roundtables recorded and also uploaded so that we all might have the pleasure of listening in on them.  Thanks to Brian Meloche for recording these, some of the people interviewed are John Farrar, Liz Frederick and TeraTech’s President Michael Smith.  To hear these interviews, go to www.cfconversations.com.

Thanks to everyone who helped in making this years’ CFUnited the best one ever!  We’ll see you all next year!

For those pacing in anticipation for the brand new TeraTech website, the wait is over.  We have launched our brand new site that is, dare we say, much more enticing. 

Along with it is our brand new campaign.  As we are ColdFusion experts, we specialize in keeping your servers and applications healthy with a similar approach to the healthcare industry.  It is best to get your servers and applications checked regularly, making sure that preventative measures are taken to keep them running up to speed.  The earlier a problem is found, the easier it is to correct it.  This holds true in virtually every instance in life, and sick or slow servers are no exception.  TeraTech suggests having your servers and applications checked regularly so that they might be resolved quickly and efficiently by our expert staff.  Sometimes the worst problems are those that sneak up on you slowly and become disabling from within.

But some times there are problems that need to be solved now.  Problems over crashing servers can’t wait for the weekend or even tomorrow morning.  For those problems needing immediate attention, we have the ability to quickly and efficiently fix problems with your servers, similar to going to an emergency room.  We can respond immediately to these types of “emergency” situations, ones that cannot wait until the next day.   Our ability to work at unconventional hours allows us to help our customers in any fashion they need. 

My presentation on HA-Clustering at CFUnited actually consisted of two parts.  Firstly there was the PowerPoint bit which I uploaded to the CFUnited server and then there was the practical part which I would like to overview here for those who could not make the event.

I had intended to use two VMware copies of Windows 2003 Enterprise (32Bit) with Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) running as the web server clustering mechanism,  ColdFusion Enterprise 8.01 and MySQL 5.0.  I attempted this on my Windows XP notebook with 3GB Ram and after several attempts I gave up because I just could not get enough responsiveness, I could never have gotten through the presentation effectively.  However, I do intend to attempt this again, in future.

Instead I reverted to running the tests on my notebook and the details are as follows:

• System - Dell Inspiron E1705 with 3GB Ram running Windows XP. 
• CF Version - ColdFusion Enterprise 8.01, installed in the multi instance manner with two instances clustered with RoundRobin algorithm.
• Servlet Container - JRun 4 Updater 6.
• JVM - Sun 1.6 (aka 6).
• Web Server Apache 2.0.59
• Test Application - cfwhisperer blog lab copy based on Mango blog.
• Load Test Tool - Paessler Web Stress Tool.
• Server Utility - SeeFusion version 4.0.7

I created a load test script by simply browsing the lab copy of the cfwhisperer blog in the URL recorder inside the Paessler Web Server Stress Tool and saving the URLs; this took me about 5 minutes total  and I had a very usable test script, that is one of the reasons I really like the Paessler tool.  I recorded 18 clicks in total as I have found around 20 to be optimal, for most test scenarios. As my presentation was only 60 minutes total I only showed one 10 minute test.   I kicked off the test which was running against the Apache web server which I connected to the two instance CF cluster with the wsconfig GUI utility.  So this was a 10 minute load test with 20 concurrent vUsers with 8 second think time between clicks.  As the test was running I first stopped one instance and we immediately observed the response times climb from an average of 300 milliseconds to a peak of over 20 seconds and then fall back to 300 milliseconds, this took around 30 seconds and although response times went up we still responded to requests.  I left this for a couple of minutes then restarted the stopped instance there was no similar slowdown as the instance came back, but we did see a slight rise to 600 milliseconds.  I then repeated the exercise by stopping the other instance and we observed similar results. 

My intention is to at least repeat this at cfdevcon in Brighton, England in September, 2008 and hopefully extend it a bit if I can.