A word of advice for anyone using Yahoo mail:

Use Googlemail

Last night, I had to test the formatting of an email generated by our Email Marketing tool within Yahoo mail.

• The first email I sent arrived immediately
• The second email I sent did not arrive within an hour and a half
• The third email I sent (20 minutes later) also did not arrive within that time frame
• The fourth email I sent (over an hour later) arrived imediately

When I checked yahoo mail this morning, there were four unread emails - including one which had been sent at 16:30 the previous day - this mail took at least 8 hours to arrive!

This in itself should be more than enough to stop anyone using yahoo mail (This is definitely not an isolated instance, we have had several reports of this behaviour from our clients).

In addition, the following would also stop me using yahoo:

• Extremely intrusive advertising, often taking over ~ 50% of the screen space.
• The annoying this message was sent using yahoo mail - aren't we fantastic! message which yahoo seem to put into every outgoing email by default
• When you set up a new account, Yahoo seem to "opt you in" to receive messages within various categories - without warning you that they are going to

Now I appreciate that some people don't get on with the googlemail interface - but if my 60+ year old mum can can cope with moving from yahoo to google (and actually prefers the googlemail interface) - then it can't be that hard!

Add on the fact that you can host email for your own domains there for free - and you get a whole lot of other functionality for free as well (Blackberry / mobile device / POP3 / IMAP access, integration with other Google services etc.) - and the advertising is non intrusive (and often relevant) - then I really can't understand why anyone would use a service which is as dysfunctional and annoying as yahoo's...

Rant over... for now...

I'm currently in the process of setting up a new development machine with all the software I need (Oh what fun!)

I was working may way through my list of essentials (about 90 items and counting!) - installing from disk for stuff on disk, and downloading the most recent versions of apps available on line.

Shortly after installing MS-Office (and running MS Update and rebooting), I tried to download iTunes... I.E. crashed as soon as I had clicked the save to disk button.  I tried again... I.E. crashed again.  So I thought - lets download FireFox and use that instead... I.E. crashed again.

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Dell have finally deigned to deliver my replacement laptop (Original went in for repair in early December!).

As mentioned previously, I'm in the habit of backing up my machine to an external disk on a regular basis (o.k. maybe not that regular - but at least before it gets taken away for repair!!!) using Acronis True Image.

This offers a handy utility whereby you can mount a disk image as a drive - so I can have full access to the contents of the old hard disk when I need it, from the new machine.

Now I don't know about you, but I find it takes me weeks to get a new development machine up just how I like - and there always seems to be stuff I have forgotten off my old machine...

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Just to pass the word around...

I recieved excellent customer service from Acronis recently.

We purchased Acronis TrueImage about 18 months ago, primarily for taking images of development systems post configuration for rapid rebuild when required.

We seem to have mislaid the installation disk when we moved offices a few months back - which became an issue when I had to send my laptop back to Dell for repair - and ended up with needing a new system.

I had taken a full image of the system prior to Dell taking it away - so I wasn't to concerned when they told me the system could not be repaired - until I realised we had lost the disk.

I contacted Acronis to see if there was anything they could do, and, after I had faxed them a proof of purpose, they sent me a secure download link for the Product, and a new serial number...

I know it may only be a small thing - but compared with the level of service we seem to receive from other I.T. companies I thought I should mention it.

I can highly recommend Acronis as a good company to do business with (as well as producing excellent software).

I have come across the following issue when attempting to persist a CFC to the Coldfusion Application scope, when the the CFC method had been invoked remotely.

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Just a quick post to try and find out what RSS readers people use - and how they rate them.

I currently use google reader for all my web based feeds (It's about the only thing I've found that seems usable for the number of feeds I (try!) to follow!

I need something else though particularly for internal RSS feeds. Internally we have a number of apps which provide an RSS feed - in particular Trac.

I need an app which which notifies me as soon as there are any new posts, and which will continue to highlight to me that I have unread items until I have read them.

I need an app that can run in the background all the time - preferably as a taskbar icon - basically like an IM client for RSS feeds.

It needs to be able to run on Windows XP (although I'm sure the 7% of you who are visiting using OSX will no doubt want to tell me how there is a much better solution on the Mac!)

Any recomendations?

I've always been a fan of Views within SQL Server - I've found them especially useful when creating applications which need to be able to access data from external sources, without necessarily being aware of where that data came from - or even of its precise format.

One feature which I have found especially useful, is the ability to select and join to data from within a different database, from within a view.

This can be done as follows:

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MS Exchange stores the email addresses for all users and other entities within the Active Directory.

It is very easy to add an email address to a User (Email Addresses tab on the properties page for an Exchange Enabled user) or to a public folder (Exchange System Manager > #Organisation# > Administrative Groups > #Administrative Group# > Folders > Public Folders : Select folder, right click > All Tasks > Mail Enable : Select Folder > Properties > Email Addresses) (O.K. easy when you know where to go).

Multiple email addresses can be added for a user or folder - but its very hard to see which email addresses have been assigned to which entity - especially as there are 2 different management consoles dependant on the type of entity, and secondary email addresses are not easily visible without opening the enity that contains them.

If you attempt to assign an email address which is already assigned to another entity, you get the following error message:

This email address aready exists in this organization.

ID no: XXXXXXX Exchange System Manager

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We use Exchange 2003 internally, together with Outlook 2003 as an email client.

Outlook does not handle multipart emails correctly - any attempt to preview the plain text version of the email results in showing a conversion of the HTML version into plain text, rather than the text/plain alternative.

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Be careful when setting up a root ColdFusion mapping, where the ColdFusion root and the web server root are not the same location.

On our standard Development machines, we are running IIS on Windows XP, and have been developing against 3 versions of ColdFusion.

We set up 3 IIS virtual directories (/cf5, /cf6, /cf7) each pointing to a subdirectory of our sites folder (c:\sites\cf5, c:\sites\cf6, c:\sites\cf7 etc.) - with the corresponding version of CF handling each virtual folder.

Within each version of CF, we set up a root mapping - e.g. for CF7: / = c:\sites\cf7, in order to allow the CF Mapping path to be consistent between development machines and production servers.

This works fine for most occasions - the IIS virtual directory normally has nothing to do with the CF Mapping - however there are a couple of exceptions:

• Using the Application.cfc OnRequest Method: (CF will set arguments.targetpage to equal the IIS path)
• When attempting to invoke a CFC as a webservice (error: Could not resolve CFC datatype)

Both of these issues can be resolved by setting up a CF mapping to match the web server virtual directory mapping (e.g. /CF7 = c:\sites\cf7)

If you are using Distributed Transaction Co-ordinator to manage MS SQL server cross-server transactions across machines which are not in the same domain, be careful when installing Windows 2003 SP2.

To enable cross domain SQL transactions using DTC, it is necessary to drop the required security from "Mutual Authentication Required" to "No Authentication Required".

Quite helpfully, installing Windows 2003 SP2 will cause the security settings for DTC to be reset to the default - "Mutual Authentication Required" - preventing Distributed transactions from occuring.

SQL server will give a really helpul message along the lines of "Unable to enlist in transaction" (which is the same message you get if there are any network issues between the 2 servers).

Only took me 5.5 hours to spot what the issue was - Thanks Microsoft :P