When buying "Audiophile" components is a step too far...

I've just found an "Audiophile" grade 13A mains fuse that costs just under £25. A standard 13A fuse for the domestic UK mains wiring costs about £0.25. Yes, the "Audiophile" fuse is around 100 times more expensive than the cost of a standard 13A fuse. This bothers me. It bothers me a lot...

You see the problem with certain "Audiophile" cables and accessories is that the "science" and "facts" that are used to support the claims of the manufacturers are subjective and quite often cannot be scientifically proved. If you don't agree with the claims or can't tell the difference between their product and a "standard" product then quite often it's then said that your ears are not "Golden".

Getting a Nokia N900 to do MMS

So Vodafone supply the Nokia N900 without the ability to perform MMS messaging... Check out the Vodafone docs on the subject here. That's right, one of the most advanced phones on the market today and it doesn't support MMS capabilities; or does it...

I've put together a step by step guide to getting up and running with MMS on the N900 as there doesn't seem to be a one stop shop for all this information on the Internet. It's all out there but takes an hour or two to collate and make sense of so I've distilled it down to a single set of instructions...

How to get things up and running

The first thing that you need to do on the Vodafone install of the N900 is add in the repository settings for the maemo.org extras repository to get all the extra goodies that you'll need to install MMS functionality on your phone. You do this by navigating through to the Application Manager and selecting Application Catalogues.

In the Application Catalogues manager you can enable the maemo.org catalogue for starters and then click on the "New" button to add another catalogue into the phone, the settings for which are:

Catalogue name: maemo.org extras

Web Address: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/

Distribution: <leave blank>

Components: free non-free

Installing the apps for MMS

Once you have the Catalogues configured and enabled let Application Manager refresh itself and then hit the "Download" icon.

Choose the "Search" option and "fAPN". Download and install it.

Choose the "Search" option again and this time search for "fMMS". Download and install it.

Configuring the N900 for MMS

Now we have the fAPN and fMMS application installed, we need to configure the settings for Vodafone.

Firstly, open the "fAPN" application and create the following APN profiles by clicking on the "Add new APN" button.

Create "Vodafone MMS" and "Vodafone Internet" and then using the fAPN "Internet Connections" button, modify the two newly created APN profiles to suit.

Vodafone MMS APN settings

Enter the following settings for the Vodafone MMS APN profile you've created:

Access point name: wap.vodafone.co.uk

Username: wap

Password: wap

Prompt password at every login: off

Hit "Next" and then "Advanced".

Check the "Use Proxy" tick box and then enter the following details into the HTTP proxy:

HTTP Proxy: 212.183.137.12

Port: 8799

Hit "Save" and "Finish"

Vodafone Internet APN settings

Enter the following settings for the "Vodafone Internet" APN profile:

Access point name: internet

User name: web

Password: web

Prompt password at every login: off

Hit "Next" and "Finish".

Configuring fMMS

Launch fMMS and choose the "Configuration" option.

Choose "Vodafone MMS" for the APN.

Set the rest of the settings as follows:

MMSC: http://mms.vodafone.co.uk/servlets/mms

Resize image width: 300

Your phone number: <your phone number>

Hit "Save".

Sending an MMS

Click on the widget where your battery life is displayed and choose "Internet Connection". Select "Vodafone MMS". It's important that you do this when you use fMMS to both send and receive MMS messages otherwise, it won't work.

Hit "New MMS" and compose your message, then hit the send icon.

If all the settings are present and correct and the mobile gods are smiling upon you, you should see "Message Sent" shortly thereafter. If not, review your settings and try again. I had a problem where I mis-typed a URL and kept receiving the 403 Access Denied page when testing. Fixing the typo sorted it.

Anyway I hope this helps other new N900 users out there. Happy picture messaging!

Verity K2 Error codes for ColdFusion

I recently had a need to dig into the internals of the Verity K2 search engine for ColdFusion and I needed to interpret some of the more esoteric error codes that Verity can produce. I searched the web for hours looking for a document that I knew existed (I'd read it before) but I just couldn't find on my system. Needless to say, now Verity is a defunct search engine technology, searching the Internet proved to be a fruitless process. In the end, I ended up running a network wide search across all our internal servers for PDF files that contained references to Verity K2.

It seems that a long time ago, I had the foresight to save a copy of the document I needed to what is now a 10 year old server that is about to be retired :-) Thankfully it hasn't been retired yet!

Anyway, as the rest of the Internet doesn't seem to think this document is any use when in fact it is an excellent resource for all the error codes that Verity K2 can produce, here it is!!!

Download Verity K2 Client Programming Guide

Justifying non-justified text for the Internet

Recently a client asked that we alter the text layout on a site we built for them so that the text was fully justified by default. This is something we actively don't do as a matter of accessibility as we know that the full justification of text can make the readability of said text plummet.

We declined to justify the text for said reasons of accessibility and pointed out a few useful links to sites that argue against full justification of text and the reasons why it is so bad.

So this post is here to gather together those resources in one place so we can highlight these excellent posts and provide a single resource that points to them.

• RNIB - Is Justified text, err... justified?
• RNIB - See it right standard general guidance (MS Word document)
• Wikipedia - River (typography)
• PWS Ltd - Text justification issues and techniques
• e-bility - Enabling the Internet for people with dyslexia
• Skills for access - Maximise text readability
• Made for all - Designing for users with dyslexia
• Usability - An Accessibility Frontier: Cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties
• Web Dev Blog - Can justified text be justified for the web

So there you have it. A list (in no particular order) of some excellent resources that spell out just why building an accessible site with justified text simply cannot be justified.

I hope they help other accessibility minded web designers dissuade their clients from using justified text just as they dissuade ours.

Which came first, the job or the job seeker?

I've just been looking at the NORAs/alljobsuk.com article from the 5th of February about the volume of vacancies in the UK recruitment market

http://www.norauk.com/2010/02/vacancy-volumes-indicate-steady-recovery/

The top graph in the article shows the volume of jobs being published by the top 10 job boards in the UK. Obviously there's the holiday periods to factor in and you can clearly see Easter, the school summer holidays and Christmas dips for both 2008 and 2009. 

Clearly the credit crunch has taken its toll on the volume of jobs being advertised but the underlying trends between 2008 and 2009 are identical. A rise in vacancies in Jan/Feb tailing off in March followed by a major dip over Easter, recovering until mid July and dipping until September where the volume increases until the end of November tailing off and then dipping dramatically for Christmas there after the recovery begins again in January.

But beyond the trends that are shown for holiday periods, there is a deeper question here.

Integrating ColdFusion with Taleo TBE WebAPI

Integrating with a web service should be easy right? But what happens when the WSDL files generated by the web service are invalid? How do you integrate then? Well, this is the story of my integration attempts with Taleo TBE.

Firstly, Taleo have resource on their website that carries all the documentation and it even has a Java Toolkit containing some pre-prepared jar files that should make life easier if you are integrating using the Java platform. But hey, we wont need the Java Toolkit because we have ColdFusion and <cfinvoke> so we should be able to refer to the documentation and knock up an API wrapper in an hour or so. Or can we?

When is an expert not an expert? When they're a Clifford expert!

I have just had the most annoying customer service experience for a very, very long time. I'm currently doing some research into replacing my current car alarm as it's old, can be unresponsive and the company that manufactured it appears to be no more.

Naturally, I searched the Internet and ended up on the Clifford website. They have what I usually find to be a great feature allowing you to interact with an expert in real time and ask questions about their products etc. Unfortunately, this time, the expert wasn't.

A project to replace CFX_POP3

So I've finally started a CFX_POP3 replacement project and I'm open sourcing the thing too :-)

The project can be downloaded at RIAForge.

At the moment it has functions that can extend the POP functionality in CFPOP to match that of CFX_POP3 and I've added some extra functions too.

There are features that are missing from POPCFC that are in CFX_POP3 such as the SPAM filtering Bayesian analysis functions but the main POP processing functions that are missing from CFPOP are in there such as...

• hasMail() returns a Boolean if the mailbox has mail.
• getMessageCount() returns the number of mails in the mailbox.
• getUIDList() returns an array of UID values for the messages in the mailbox.
• getMessagesAfterUID() returns all messages (up to maxrows) that have been received since the message specified by the UID passed in.

Performance wise, these functions are as fast or faster than CFX_POP3.

You can use the CFC as follows:

<!--- normal usage --->
<cfset popAccount = createObject("component", "pop).init(myserver, myusername, mypassword)>
<cfif popAccount.hasMail()>
    <cfset messages = popAccount.getMessages()>

    <cfdump var="#messages#">
</cfif>

- OR -

<!--- SSL usage --->
<cfset popAccount = createObject("component", "pop).init(myserver, myusername, mypassword)>
<cfset popAccount.setProperty("UseSSL", true)>
<cfif popAccount.hasMail()>
    <cfset messages = popAccount.getMessages()>

    <cfdump var="#messages#">
</cfif>

Hope you like it! If anyone finds any problems with it, be sure to let me know :-)

Extending CFPOP to (eventually) replace CFX_POP3

So CFX_POP3 seems to have  a limited life left in it as it is a 32-bit CFX tag written in Delphi and masquerading as a C++ tag for the purposes of talking to ColdFusion. It seems that a 64-bit compiler for Delphi is quite a way off even now but ColdFusion developers are already moving onto a 64-bit CF platform rendering CFX_POP3 useless.

To that end, I figured I'd start looking at extending CF using built in functions and the available Java classes to see if I could extend the functionality available in CFPOP so we no longer need CFX_POP3.

I guess this little project will end up being a CFC but for now I thought I'd try to re-create one of the more useful features of CFX_POP3; retrieving just a list of UID values. By retrieving just a UID list from the server we can speed up several processes and it is one of the reasons why CFX_POP3 has been so popular in the past.

So this morning I set about looking at the available POP3 functions in the java class files that ship with CF8 and it seems that the javax mail classes are chock full of excellent toys.

The function to retrieve a list of UID's from the POP3 server needs to be quick otherwise we may as well use CFPOPs "getHeadersOnly" and the javax mail classes provide a way of pre-fetching UIDs using a FetchProfile class and adding in a FetchProfileItem to specify that you want to retrieve specific items from the POP3 server.

The FetchProfileItem class is an "Inner Class" of the UIDFolder interface and creating that object is a little bit different from creating an object from what would be classed as the "Outer Class".

<cfset var fpItem = createObject("java", "javax.mail.UIDFolder$FetchProfileItem")>

Note the reference to FetchProfileItem is predicated with the outer class javax.mail.UIDFolder and the use of the $ symbol indicates that the class is an Inner class to be instantiated.

Once I'd figured out that little bit of code, it was a simple process of accessing mailbox and using the folder.fetch function to retrieve the UID values of the messages on the server.

On my tests with the function, using CFPOP to retrieve the headers of the mails in a mailbox with 2031 messages in it, it took on average 80 seconds to retrieve the details including the UID values.

Using my new pure CF/Java function to retrieve just the UID values for all the mails in the same mailbox took an average of 0.42 seconds. Yes you read that right, it took on average under half a second to retrieve the same number of UID values from the server.

So, without further ado, here is the code that retrieves UID values from a POP3 mailbox in CF.

<cffunction name="getPOPUIDList" access="public" returntype="array" output="false"
        hint="Retrieves an array of UID values for the e-mails in an account">
    <cfargument name="server" type="string" required="true">
    <cfargument name="username" type="string" required="true">
    <cfargument name="password" type="string" required="true">
    <cfargument name="port" type="numeric" required="false" default="110" hint="POP3 port to use">
    <cfargument name="timeout" type="numeric" required="false" default="30000" hint="Timeout in ms">

    <cfset var javaSystem = createObject("java", "java.lang.System")>
    <cfset var javaProps = javaSystem.getProperties()>
    <cfset var javaSession = createObject("java", "javax.mail.Session")>
    <cfset var fp = createObject("java", "javax.mail.FetchProfile")>
    <cfset var fpItem = createObject("java", "javax.mail.UIDFolder$FetchProfileItem")>
    <cfset var folder = "">
    <cfset var UIDs = ArrayNew(1)>
    <cfset var mailMsg = 1>
    <cfset var pop3Session = "">
    <cfset var store = "">
    <cfset var messages = "">

    <cfset javaProps.setProperty("mail.pop3.port", arguments.port)>
    <cfset javaProps.setProperty("mail.pop3.connectiontimeout", arguments.timeout)>

    <cfset pop3Session = javaSession.getDefaultInstance(javaProps)>
    <cfset store = pop3Session.getStore("pop3")>

    <cftry>
            <cfset store.connect(arguments.server, arguments.username, arguments.password)>
        <cfcatch>
            <!--- if we're here throw a useful error --->
            <cfthrow message="Unable to connect to #arguments.server#."
                    detail="The most common reason for this is a mis-spelling of one of the arguments.">
        </cfcatch>
    </cftry>
    <cfif store.isConnected()>
        <cftry>
                <!--- for the POP3 protocol the folder is always "INBOX" --->
                <cfset folder = store.getFolder("INBOX")>
                <!--- open the folder --->
                <cfset folder.open(1)>
                <!--- create the message objects --->
                <cfset messages = folder.getMessages()>
                <!--- set up the filter with the FetchProfile, adding the FetchProfileItem of the UID --->
                <cfset fp.add(fpItem.UID)>
                <cfset folder.fetch(messages, fp)>
                <!--- loop through the retrieved message objects and retrieve the UID from the object appending it to the result array --->
                <cfloop from="1" to="#ArrayLen(messages)#" index="mailMsg">
                    <cfset ArrayAppend(UIDs, folder.getUID(messages[mailMsg]))>
                </cfloop>
                <!--- close the connection to the server --->
                <cfset store.close()>
            <cfcatch>
                <!--- if we're here, close the connection to the server if necessary --->
                <cfif store.isConnected()>
                    <cfset store.close()>
                </cfif>
            </cfcatch>
        </cftry>
    <cfelse>
        <cfthrow message="Unable to connect to #arguments.server#."
                detail="The most common reason for this is a mis-spelling of one of the arguments.">
    </cfif>

    <cfreturn UIDs>
</cffunction>


Then we call the function as easy as this...

<cfset myUIDList = getPOPUIDList(myServer, myUsername, myPassword)>

If we need to set the port and timeout for the connection, we can do as follows

<cfset myUIDList = getPOPUIDList(myServer, myUsername, myPassword, 110, 30000)>

You can download the code here.

Tracking down Out of Memory errors in ColdFusion standard

About three weeks ago, we had a problem with one of our production servers. The problem was code related but only caused a problem when the load on the server reached a certain level.

Because we track all code changes and we knew that the server was not running any new code and the issue appeard just days after we had installed the latest ColdFusion hot fixes, we initially ruled out a coding issue in favour of a JVM/CF based memory leak.

As this particular server was running ColdFusion Standard edition, the built in server monitor tools were not available so we hooked up JConsole to look at the memory allocation on the server using the following JVM settings:

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=9500 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false

As you can see from the screenshot, the Heap Memory Usage was ramping up to the full 1.2Gb available to the JVM in around 10 minutes of a JVM restart and the server was staying up for around 30 minutes before it was restarting again. CPU, Thread and Class instance levels were all remaining relatively constant throughout this period so it seemed like the memory was leaking from within ColdFusion.