Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

This is a cool thing, because while you can choose from several pre-defined search sites (google, yahoo, amazon, ebay, and more), and you can click a "manage search engines" option to go to a Firefox site to find still more, you can only pick those that are listed on the Firefox site.

As with this gent, some search engines will just never be popular enough to be listed there. So how to add them?

Get the "Add to Search Bar" Add-on

You can also learn more about it in someone else's blog entry highlighting it.

How about accessing a site's search feature using a single keyword in the address bar

FWIW, I'll also note that rather than use the FF toolbar, one can also set things up so that a given page's search feature can be accessed from a single address bar keyword (if they don't have or don't want to alter that search bar in the top right). I blogged about that in my TipicalCharlie site, where I sometimes blog things that aren't of a CF nature but might appeal to just anyone. (Update: tipicalcharlie domain is no more, but page recovered using Archive.org.)

One more time about CSEs

Finally, just as a reminder, the CFSearch site I created is what's called a Google "custom search engine". I wrote previously about them and how other people had also come up with their own variants. You may want to check them out, too.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

First, you'll want to set the "toolbar" value

First, if you don't specify a "toolbar" attribute, you'll get a pretty ugly looking default toolbar with 3 rows of LOTS of icons. Now, if you read the docs, it will point out that you can get a simpler subset with setting the toolbar to a basic setting. But then, if you're not careful, it will complain:

toolbar set "basic" does not exist

A search of google (or the CF docs) won't turn up much.

Second, it's "Basic", not "basic"

So what's the solution? Well, it turns out that it's simply that the attribute is case-sensitive. Doh! So a working example is:

Note that, of course, you do need to do it within a CFFORM tag. I've added a CFDUMP to show the results when you do submit it.

That offers a nice single-row set of icons. (The alternative value, to get the default list, is "Default" (not "default"), but if you leave the toolbar attribute off, you'll get it anyway. The docs (see below) talk about how you can modify what icons you see by creating your own custom toolbar. It's just that the docs don't clarify well this issue about the basic value being case-sensitive. (I've added comments to the livedocs which have been accepted.)

Don't use Rows/Cols, use Width/Height

Here's another bummer that's not well documented: when using CFTEXTAREA, the traditional ROWS and COLS attributes (of a normal Textarea tag) have no affect at all, whether you're using an HTML or Flash-based CFTEXTAREA.

The solution: you must specify Height and Width (in pixels). (You won't get an error if you use rows and cols, they just won't have any effect.)

Some other issues

If you haven't noticed, when you submit such a rich text textarea, what you get in the form submission is the entered text with HTML tags representing whatever formatting the user applied using the toolbar, or keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl-B for bold. (I'm really not interested in debating here whether the HTML it creates meets everyone's preferences. Please take that up on the livedocs comments area.)

Finally, I'll point out that the docs (the Developers Guide page, at least) shows using the attribute as richtext=true. FWIW, this can also be specified as "true" (quoted) and "yes". I just mention this in case anyone may go doing google or adobe site searches to find more on the use of the feature. You might not find all there is if you're too specific about these "richtext" attribute values.

Where to find help for still other issues

If you need more help on or introduction to the rich text textarea, I'd point you to blog entries by other folks:

• ColdFusion 8: All about the rich text editor
• ColdFusion 8: Enable File, Image and Flash upload in the rich text editor in five steps

And of course see the docs:

• CFML Reference on CFTEXTAREA
• ColdFusion Developer's Guide discussion of CFTEXTAREA richtext option

Finally, I'd like to clarify that I really don't mean for this blog entry to become a place where all manner of problems related to using the rich textarea are discussed. I'd ask that please you keep any questions or observations related to just really fundamental aspects of using it, and take up other concerns at the Adobe CF Forums, especially the CFORM forum.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

According to various Microsoft resources I've found, such as this, the way it works is that delayed services start after those set to automatic have finished starting. Furthermore:

...it sets the priority of their initial thread to THREAD_PRIORITY_LOWEST. This priority level causes all the disk I/O the thread performs to be Very Low I/O priority. After a service finishes initializing, the Service Control Manager sets its priority to normal. The combination of the delayed start, low CPU and memory priority, and background disk priority greatly reduce interference with a user's logon. Many Windows services, including Background Intelligent Transfer, Windows Update Client, and Windows Media® Center, use the new start type to help improve the performance of logons after a boot.

As you can see, they set various Windows services to use this by default. So, should you use it? And in development or production?

Could be great for development

I can see it being very useful in development, especially. Imagine you want to have certain services running (like CF) but you don't care if they start immediately. Setting them to delayed means your machine can start up faster, and when you do eventually need what the service offers, it should be running.

(Yes, I realize you can start CF manually from the command line instead, and some may prefer that as their means of running CF in development. That's not the point here, though. And I also realize one can even start any window service via shortcuts as well, so as to start them manually. I use that to stop and then start them (rather than open services to restart them if I do it often, as I might with CF during development). I'm still not preferring to run CF from the command line by default, so let's let that debate go. )

I'm just saying that if you do want CF or other services started as services, but you don't really need them running immediately on restart, this seems a good option.

For now, I've enabled it for my two CF services (7 and 8), and their related search and ODBC services, and SQL Server and related services (I've already set MySQL and Oracle to start as "manual" as I use them less frequently), and IIS (world wide publishing service).

Any drawbacks? Time will tell

I say above that it "seems a good option" and "could be great" (and I mention it for development primarily) because I could see a possible problem where the lower disk, cpu, and memory priority could have some unintended consequences if in fact CF requests were to start coming in immediately upon start of CF. Again, perhaps in development this isn't an issue but it's something to keep in mind--and especially for production.

I could just see some admin deeming CF perhaps to be "not as important" as some other services on the machine and so they might set CF for this delayed start. If they don't realize this throttling that happens during service startup in this mode (and its not obvious), I could see it causing problems.

I'll say this bears paying attention to for any who perform troubleshooting on a CF server, if there are any problems during startup. It will now be one of the first things I look into when someone reports problems with CF on startup.

(I won't go so far as to suggest it's had anything to do with the problems some have had with initialization of CF due to JVM 1.6. Since it seems those were indeed solved by going back to 1.5, it doesn't appear it could have been due to this instead.)

There are some other interesting new features in Vista and 2k8 regarding services, especially "Preshutdown Notification". I may write more about those in a future entry.

And if anyone would want to snipe that their OS has long had features like the above, please, save it. :-) I'm here to help those who want or have to choose to use Windows. This isn't the place to try to evangelize them away or to carp about how they are or have been missing out. Thanks.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I recall now seeing it mentioned in the update (I always have Windows tell me what updates it has before installing them), but just had forgotten it. Anyway, the MakeUseof entry says that indexing should be a lot faster. That's good to hear. I had disabled the search for a while when I noticed it stealing a lot of resources (and yes, I know of Google Desktop and others, and they all can have that problem).

Anyway, just wanted to post this here in case others search for a solution to this problem. If you're getting this error, check if you already have it installed (either using "control panel>windows update>view update history" or "control panel>programs and features>view installed updates" and sort it by name to find if Windows Search 4.0 is listed and when it was installed (right-most column).

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Dear Friends

With the greatest sorrow a heart can withstand, I regret to inform you that my beloved wife, Glenda Vigoreaux has passed into the arms of our loving God. Her courageous battle with anxiety and insomnia ended the morning of Tuesday, July 15, 2008.

Glenda is survived by her adoring husband Paul Hacker, mother Lydia Echevarria, sister Vanessa Vigoreaux, brother Luis Echevarria and a host of family and friends who also loved her dearly. At last she has the peace for which we've prayed, as she sings with a choir of angels.

Glenda has been honored in a ceremony attended only by immediate family. The final resting place for her cremated remains is yet to be determined. Memorial donations may be sent to St. John's Lutheran Church, 7205 North 51st Avenue, Glendale, Arizona 85301. Please forward this message as appropriate. My apologies to those I may have forgotten.

Each of us who met her are blessed to have encountered a loving soul, unique in the world. Her concern and respect for each individual were genuine. Glenda trusted that in giving of her many talents, she brought out the best in good people and was thereby enriched herself. She was an inspirational angel among us.

Please join my prayers celebrating her life and honoring her example as an extraordinary human being. Remember her as I will, full of life and love.

Good night sweet Angel. Te amo.

Paul A. Hacker

If you'd like to comment, please provide them instead in the previous entry. Let's regard it as a memorial roll for her from our community and others (lots of nice comments there already).

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I'll have more on that in a moment, including more about her surprisingly storied past (entirely unrelated to training and speaking) that may be a surprise to some (it was for me).

But first I'd like to remember her as I knew her.

Glenda, the acclaimed trainer and speaker

Glenda was an Adobe Certified Master Instructor who had taught Adobe/Macromedia technologies starting in 1998, including ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, Captivate, Contribute, Acrobat Connect and Presenter. She was widely praised and received consistently high marks, working for Roundpeg in Arizona (since 2005) and who before that had been on her own as GVX Technology since 1996.

Glenda was an equally lauded and popular conference speaker, winning best speaker honors at Max 2004 and CFUnited 2005 (we tied that year). You can find a podcast of her 2006 talk on CF printing and Reporting as well as her CFUnited bio of that year. You can learn more of her professional history from her LinkedIn page. She was even a speaker on the ColdFusion Meetup in May 2005, when Steven Erat was hosting.

Suicide? Glenda?

The most tragic thing about the news is that her death has been ruled a suicide. I just can't fathom that. Besides the accolades above, anyone who knew her would say that she would seem one of the very last people in the world you could ever expect of being driven to that. In fact, if you look at the about page of her GVX site, you see that she had a clear passion for life, and for others.

Of course, I'd not talked to her in a couple of years, and naturally people's personal lives can often be masked by their public persona. Indeed there was much more to her background than many may have known (I didn't). I learned of her death today in an email from Steve Drucker (for which I'm so grateful). In it, he pointed to a news article (translated from Spanish).

The story reports that her husband found her with a gun at her side, with the "forensic and physical evidence...consistent with a self-inflicted shooting". I didn't know her husband, named there as Paul Hacker.

She came from a famed family, tragically notorious in Puerto Rico

But in that story (and with additional details found in sources mentioned later here), we learn that in fact Glenda came from a background of both notoriety and family tragedy. I never knew that hers was a celebrity family in Puerto Rico. Not only were her father and mother famous there as a TV producer and actress, respectively, but tragically, her father was brutally murdered and her mother convicted of it and jailed for 13 years. Apparently, all this was big news in Puerto Rico.

Indeed, the wikiepedia entry on her mother has even already been updated to reflect Glenda's death, and her death is listed as well in Wikipedia's 2008 deaths page with references to her notable family members, all this just 3 days later as I write. Again, clearly this was significant news to some people.

As further sad testament to the notoriety of all this, the news article above even says her house in Glendale and her family's in PR were both "full of paparazzi" (representing Puerto Rican press, I'd suppose).

I was almost tempted to doubt if we were talking about the same person, since these things all referred to her as Glendaly Vigoreaux Echevarría (the latter being her mother's famed last name). But then I found this memorial page which had that same "Glendaly" name but with happy pictures of her. Yep, that was the Glenda we knew.

A one-time TV star in Puerto Rico

The page goes on to offer still more about her family, their tragedy, and her life. It says that she herself had been a child TV star and later host, comedienne, and singer with her sister Vanesa on Puerto Rican TV shows.

That doesn't surprise me. She was certainly so full of life, which makes this all the more surprising.

R.I.P., Glenda

So today we remember the passing of a member of the CF community, a stellar trainer and speaker, mystified by the asserted cause of her death...while a segment of the celebrity gossip world instead regards it only as another tragedy for a notoriously troubled celebrity family. It just doesn't make sense.

She will be sorely missed.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

his blog entry with a photo.

That's representin'! :-)

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

• CFUnited Europe in mid March
• cf.Objective() in early May
• WebManiacs in late May
• Scotch on the Rocks in early June
• CFUnited in mid June

What a blast, and of course it's an honor to be invited. I've not written much about them because, well, I don't know what I could add that hasn't been said by many other bloggers who attended each! :-)

Unfortunately, the schedule precluded me giving any thought to attending (or proposing to speak at) WebDU (spoke there last year) or SpringBR. And sadly I had to miss the Adobe Community Summit.

As if those events (and the commensurate travel) weren't enough of a draw on time, in the weeks since the first event in mid-March I've also:

• squeezed in teaching 6 classes
• written 2 tips columns and a feature article for 2 editions of the FAQU
• organized nearly a dozen ColdFusion Meetups
• attended an invitation-only Microsoft Tech Summit (for a couple dozen folks they picked from competing communities to talk and listen to)
• spent a week in Germany with the fine folks at Intergral (makers of FusionDebug, FusionReactor, FusionAnalytics, and with whom I also do some consulting)
• and provided my consulting services to many folks in what little time remained!

Fortunately, the nature of my consulting is different than most: I focus on helping people solve problems (rather than build or architect apps), so they generally need me only sporadically and for short spurts of time. We've been able to fit them in nicely in the time in between, but I've got some who've been patiently awaiting the end of what some called "the conference silly season".

I had also started my series on the tools/resource list, but after part 10 got just too bogged down. I plan to pick that up again very soon.

Just wanted to offer a bit of explanation on the relative quiet the past couple of months.

I have some other really exciting things planned and in the works which I'll be sharing in coming weeks and months. Some are new resources, some new services, and some new tools. All dedicated to helping the community. It's exciting times!

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

While looking into the Mura web site, I came away so impressed that I wanted to write about it: not the tool, but the site! (Update: Again, I have updated all references and links below for the new site, but otherwise everything--my text and the resources I highlight--are the same as when I wrote this in May 2008.)

This is an example of an organization that really gets things right, not only about making their tool seem appealing but making it easy to evaluate it without having to first install it. So often, I look at various other products/projects that bury or hide key info to help me decide whether I want to bother considering it at all, let alone downloading or even installing it first. (So often, we're forced to download the product and either install it or at least read a readme. Some people just won't be bothered, so the site really can be key to winning customers.)

The Mura site does thing so well. I felt it was a real breath of fresh air, and I really hope others will consider adopting some of their approaches, which I'll talk about here.

First, I'll note that I have indeed added it to my list of CF-based CMS's. I think some would be surprised that this now makes 24 of them, at least per my listing (some free, some commercial).

What they get so right

Here are just some of the stellar features they employ on the site:

• an attractive site interface, with a real fresh look and feel (bright, colorful, easy on the eyes, lots of pictures of real, happy-looking people)
• a "quick tour" set of edited screenshots showing highlighted key features, in an easy to use slideshow interface
• a set of "" pages tied separately to marketing, IT, and design folks (see the left nav bar)
• high-level features page and separate list of all features
• Quick start tutorials
• their download page explains that they offer the tool in 2 forms. The "standard" flavor is simply the source code (like you'd expect for any project, though they note that it runs on either CF7+ or Railo 2.0+). The "express" flavor is a complete bundled edition that is easy to install onto a machine not running CF (or that is but you don't want to tinker with it). It runs on Railo Express which offers a totally self-contained environment to run a CFML app like Mura, with the Railo CFML Engine, Jetty Application Server and WebServer, and H2 Database. See the download page for links to those parts.
• Of course, they have all the other expected things: FAQs, forums (as well as paid support), and nice docs in the form of a user guide, developers guide, and component API.
• I mentioned the paid support page, and I'd say that and the services page are just another example of refreshing transparency: lots of other projects/companies kind of hide their services, as if they don't want to offend people that they're willing to take money to help users make the most of their tools. It seems a missed opportunity.
• They also offer a list of clients, to help you feel more comfortable knowing others have gone before you, and they have a blog, which is of course a great way to keep people updated on things.

Great first impression, and a model

It's clear that these folks have put a lot of effort into the site and wanting to make the tool appealing. (If it reflects the level of care they put into the tool itself, that certainly bodes well too, and I'm sure the site could lead some to feel that way, at least on the surface, so great way to make a good first impression.)

All this is just such a rarity in my experience, and I just find it so very refreshing. I wish them well, and hope these thoughts may help some others.

I'm not knocking any others in particular

Indeed, let me add that I don't say all this to embarass anyone in particular about their site. If you think I'm talking to you, that's just your conscience, not me. :-) I have no one in mind. And I'm not limiting my thoughts to only open source projects: there are just as many commercial product sites that drop this ball, too, which just blows my mind. I do realize that open source projects (especially if they have no paid support model) often feel constrained to "afford" the time to make such a nice site. Still, this is one open source project that just gets things so right.

Who else do you think "gets it right?"

I realize, too, that there are others that do things well. I mean no slight by not mentioning them, nor highlighting them earlier. In fact, feel free to list here in the comments any other sites you think get things right. I suspect one that some would think of immediately is ColdBox, and its site, both of which Luis Majano has clearly put a lot of effort into.

Note: This blog post is from 2007. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

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