Is this a CFMAIL bug?

I just finished deploying a newsletter software showcasing some fancy CFFORM do da functions to the Library department. However, along the line, someone (up there) felt the user profile of the of the sender ID for the newsletter should be changed. We did the change on AD and since then, the mails have stopped coming in. Funnily, mails destined for subscribers outside my organization went fine, and if an internal email got copied, it got there. The mail only zaps into thin space when the TO address in internal. I troubleshot the servers, the firewalls, even messed the chat server up along the line (wanted people to share my grief, duh!).

I got fed up and left the stuff for a while (since Monday, I have been having nightmares of the honchos coming for my head). The CFMAIL is fed by a query to generate the content and the email addresses. Sometimes this evening, I removed the query and wrapped the CFMAIL within a CFLOOP (it does the same thing, just that CFMAIL with query directly is sexier) and it worked well…

I still don’t know if this is a known quirk or I’m getting something wrong.

Not the best time to take a jump

Dear Husband:

I’m writing you this letter to tell you that I’m leaving you for good. I’ve been a good woman to you for seven years and I have nothing to show for it. These last two weeks have been hell. Your boss called to tell me that you had quit your job today and that was the last straw.

Last week, you came home and didn’t notice that I had gotten my hair and nails done, cooked your favorite meal and even wore a brand new negligee. You came home and ate in two minutes, and went straight to sleep after watching the game. You don’t tell me you love me anymore, you don’t touch me or anything. Either you’re cheating or you don’t love me anymore. Whatever the case is, I’m gone.

P.S. If you’re trying to find me, don’t. Your BROTHER and I are moving away to West Virginia together! Have a great life!

Your EX-Wife

Dear Ex-Wife

Nothing has made my day more than receiving your letter. It’s true that you and I have been married for seven years, although a good woman is a far cry from what you’ve been. I watch sports so much to try to drown out your constant nagging. Too bad that doesn’t work.

I did notice when you cut off all of your hair last week, the first thing that came to mind was “You look just like a man!” My mother raised me not to say anything if you can’t say anything nice. When you cooked my favorite meal, you must have gotten me confused with MY BROTHER, because I stopped eating pork seven years ago.

I went to sleep on you when you had on that new negligee because the price tag was still on it. I prayed that it was a coincidence that my brother had just borrowed fifty dollars from me that morning and your negligee was $49.99. After all of this, I still loved you and felt that we could work it out. So, when I discovered that I had hit the lotto for ten million dollars, I quit my job and bought us two tickets to Jamaica. But when I got home you were gone. Everything happens for a reason I guess. I hope you have the fulfilling life you always wanted. My lawyer said with your letter that you wrote, you won’t get a dime from me.

So, take care.

P.S. I don’t know if I ever told you this but Carl, my brother was born Carla. I hope that’s not a problem.

Signed Rich As H*ll and Free!

Should non-dev organizations develop applications?

For those of us who work in the IT department of organizations, and who have some programming skills, we face a recurrent issue of build versus buy.

Sometimes, a dude in finance wants some fancy Excel macro, for a report NOW! Where I work, everything is needed NOW or worse still, yesterday. (Back to the Fancy dude/Excel macro) Should I search MS marketplace and buy a suitable macro or bump my head on macro writing to develop something for the annoying gnat. The above scenario is simple enough.

Sometimes, we are faced with under-performing legacy application. Legacy because that is what annoying program that is expensive to replace are called. Should we write helper application, modules, etc.? Is it right, em, to rewrite some part of the code to optimize it if the original vendors are too rich and complacent to do it?

From experience, I, with my colleagues, developed an application to do some function of the legacy app running our organization. Now, this app of ours is so large with a billion and ten modules performing all manners of functions: from generating statements to serving coffee with croissant. As you can expect from such attempts, the idea is good, but the app is far from perfect albeit better uptime and performance than our legacy app.

So every day, we get a zillion requests to develop this and that. When we send reminders that we ain’t programmers or developers, the honchos bark at us. But man, when we ask to go for trainings, developer conferences and buy books and materials, all of a sudden, the organization ceases to develop applications. What a life!

For me, I think organizations can develop little widgets here and there but should not dabble into app development unless it is ready to commit resources to it. Workers turned emergency developers usually write horrible codes with documentation and continuity equal to zero. The security implications of organization that rely on such home brewed apps is not too hard to imagine.

My CF8 wish list

The CF8 flour is in the mix and on its way to the oven. Now that we’ve been asked to dream big, so I will be stating my own wish list here.

  • Better charts. CF charts are clunky. Something sexy should make my blood boil, and my purse thicker from saving money on charts components
  • Man, we gotta reduce the flash form bloat
  • A custom preloader would be lovely. So also is attachable style sheets
  • Some days, CF and Flex should be husband and wife
  • More DB drivers
  • XML DB driver? It would be very cool if CF can natively manipulate XML like a DB
  • Dynamic DSN

And a lot more. If you have yours, you can state it here too.

Email and Success

A jobless man applied for the position of “office boy” at Microsoft. The HR manager interviewed him then watched him clean the floor as a test. “You are employed”, he said. “Give me your e-mail address and I’ll send you the application to fill in, as well as date when you may start”.

The man replied “But I don’t have a computer, neither an email.” “I’m sorry “, said the HR manager, “If you don’t have an email, that means you do not exist. And who doesn’t exist, cannot have the job.” The man left with no hope at all. He didn’t know what to do, with only $10 in his pocket. He then decided to go to the supermarket and buy a 10Kg tomato crate. He sold the tomatoes in a door-to-door round. In less than two hours, he succeeded to double his capital. He repeated the operation three times and returned home with $60. The man realized that he could survive this way, and started to go every day earlier, and return late. Thus, his money doubled or tripled every day. Shortly, he bought a cart, then a truck, then he had his own fleet of delivery vehicles.

5 years later, the man is one of the biggest food retailers in the US. He started to plan his family’s future and decided to have a life insurance. He called an insurance broker and chose a protection plan. When the conversation was concluded, the broker asked him his email. The man replied, “I don’t have an email “. The broker answered curiously, “You don’t have an email, and yet have succeeded to build an empire. Can you imagine what you could have been if you had an email ?!!!”

The man thought for a while and replied, “Yes , I’d be an office boy at Microsoft!”

Moral of the story….

Moral-1 – Internet /email is not the solution to your life.

Moral-2- If you don’t have internet / email, and work hard, you can be a millionaire.

Moral-3- If you received this message by email, you are probably already an office boy/girl and not any close to being a Billionaire.

So guys, am shutting down my blog and would be selling tomatoes!!!