You may download this vim Coldfusion dictionary for free as is. I had put this file into a folder dict inside the vim Windows installation and then edited the vimrc. Here I added the following lines:

set dict+="C:\Program Files\Vim\vim70\dict\CF.dict"
silent sv C:\Program Files\vim\vim70\dict\CF.dict
q

Now I have a working way to autocomplete the CF tags, CF native functions and tag attributes with autocompletion without any problem. Probably I will improve this little file over the time and when I will consider this ready I will try to publish it to the Vim community site.

I forgot to mention that I tested this only with the Vim 7.0

We almost finished the server configuration and we plan for tomorrow or the day after the information migration for myFeedz. I hope the people that use this system to not experience any problems in this process.

For those of you that are not yet familiar with myFeedz project you should read more on the myFeedz official site. We encourage people in subscribing to the beta and give us feedback about it. For any questions you should write us an email.

When we first changed on our servers the MySQL version from 4.1.x to the MySQL 5.0.15 we discovered that even if we didn't touch the application that use this database everything became slower. They say they improved the indexing engine in the 5.0 release but actually all the subselects and union queries start working very, very slow with the same indexes that we had on the 4.1. We had to rewrite couple of these queries, even to break them into multiple small queries and join them manually from the PHP to be able to achieve the same speed as before. 

After this the hell began. Queries started to not work anymore, data was crashed...

1. A client reported that some pages where empty even if the information existed into the database. Therefore we started investigation and found that a very basic query in unknown situations returned empty results:

SELECT * FROM table_a INNER JOIN table_b ON table_b.fk = table_a.pk

even if information was there. After multiple tries we discovered that this query however works:

SELECT * FROM table_a INNER JOIN table_b ON table_a.pk = table_b.fk

This query using an INNER JOIN the condition order should not count at all. The equality is the same no matter were you start evaluating the expression. But incredible, it does and produce different outputs. We still search for a reason why this problem appeared on those tables.

2. Another query that do was crashing with empty results was:

SELECT * FROM orders_ord WHERE status_ord IN ('Confirmed', 'Closed', 'Initialized');

changing this to:

SELECT * FROM orders_ord HAVING status_ord IN ('Confirmed', 'Closed', 'Initialized');

worked as expected. We managed to reproduce this bug on a very small data subset and reported back to them. We seen they marked the bug as fixed.

3. The most crazy bug we experienced was that a simple query like this:

SELECT * FROM table_a WHERE date_field < '2006-01-01 00:00:00'

do not returned any records but

SELECT * FROM table_a WHERE date_field < '2006-01-01 00:00:00' AND primary_key>0

had 400 results. The cause was a bug fixed in the InnoDB engine:

"Inserting a new row into an InnoDB table could cause DATETIME values already stored in the table to change. (Bug#13900)"

therefore many of the records where crashed with dates like: '?789-56-34' or '2005-12-30 10:23:99'. Because of these invalid dates I suspect that indexes were crashed as well. After upgrading to a newer version we had to take all the dates from the table and manually change them to some values that were at least correct as dates but the original data was lost.

We were curious after this MySQL version upgrade what bugs they fixed. By looking to the change logs we found some amaizing ones:

"A left join on a column that having a NULL value could cause the server to crash. (Bug#15268)"

"RPM packages had an incorrect zlib dependency. (Bug#15223)"

"mysqld would not start on Windows 9X operating systems including Windows Me. (Bug#15209)"

"The server crashed if compiled without any transactional storage engines. (Bug#15047)"

"Invoking a stored procedure within another stored procedure caused the server to crash. (Bug#13549)"

"SELECT with GROUP BY on a view can cause a server crash. (Bug#16382)"

"For a MySQL 5.0 server, using MySQL 4.1 tables in queries with a GROUP BY clause could result in buffer overrun or a server crash. (Bug#16752)"

" The absence of a table in the left part of a left or right join was not checked prior to name resolution, which resulted in a server crash. (Bug#15538)"

"Use of stored functions with DISTINCT or GROUP BY can produce incorrect results when ORDER BY is also used. (Bug#13575)"

"SELECT COUNT(*) for a MyISAM table could return different results depending on whether an index was used. (Bug#14980)"

"A LEFT JOIN with a UNION that selects literal values could crash the server. (Bug#17366)"

"Creating a table in an InnoDB database with a column name that matched the name of an internal InnoDB column (including DB_ROW_ID, DB_TRX_ID, DB_ROLL_PTR and DB_MIX_ID) would cause a crash.(Bug#18934)"

and many others. I am disapointed about this version 5.0 which is the worst one we had. Never encoutered in the normal usage experience such problems on 3.23.x, 4.0.x or 4.1.x.

A change log will look like this: 

- A beta preview of the new CSS Menu that is almost ready was integrated
- The email messages of the forums changed to be able to track them down. I know that this probably destroyed the automatic email filters you had specially those subscribed on Beta and we apologize for that.
- Some small bugs corrected.

I know that after the release some problems appeared. If you encounter any issue don't hesitate to tell me eiter as a comment or by email directly (cristic AT interaktonline.com).

You will have only to find first a Linux Fedora Core mirror distribution version that you need to install. Next step is to run this command:

rpm -Uvh ftp://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/fedora.redhat.com/core /CORE_VERSION/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-x-x.noarch.rpm

which will install the fedora-release package for the new version.

The next step is even easiear: 

yum upgrade

After couple of hours you'll have the new version installed. 

I will have to warn you however that there are couple of things that you should know first:

• you can't do a big version jump like from Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 5. You'll have to make the upgrades to 3 then to the 4 and only after to the 5.
• after each upgrade check the grub to have the latest kernel image as default and then do a reboot
  
• the configuration files are not overwriten, instead they are saved with .rpmnew extension in the same folder. It is very probably that services do not restart after the reboot because changes have been made to these configuration. Do a diff between the old and new configuration to see what settings have been deprecated and what new settings have been added. ( I had problems with postfix, named and others).
• you should do the same thing with the init.d scripts
• the downloaded rpm files used for upgrade may be cleared using the yum clean all as is possible that the next version upgrade to not have the necessary space.
  
• read the yum manual in case you have problems.

Read this article if you still wonder why to upgrade to Fedora Core 5.

Good luck !

There many arguments why to use any of them but the more important are what do they miss. You would tell me that the Outlook is not a free product but the truth is that in corporate point of view if you need a tool which really helps you with your work you'll get it. The time is too important.

I will not compare the extra, not email related functionalities.  Outlook has many other features that really make it a pro. Thunderbird is extended by some third party extensions to support some of them but I don't want to enter that area now. I will strictly remain in the email client abilities.

The first thing that I really miss into the Thunderbird is the basic search ability. I can do a subject or a from search but this is most of the time far from being enough. When having ten of thousands email, most of them already filtered into subfolders by the persons that sent me and I want to the exact discussion about something I have no other choice then to start processing them manually one by one trying to remember the exact period of when the email it was received. And if the subject do not contained the exact subject summary then most probably I will waste lot of time to look for what  I am interested of.

Because we use an IMAP system I use the power of the procmail and of the sieve language to be able to filter quick and easy the emails directly into the folder where they belongs to on the server. I do this because when coming on Monday at the office and opening the Outlook it take ages to put the emails into their folders using its filtering system. As well the Outlook has a major problem because on IMAP accounts do not know to expunge the emails which results in extra work from me to have to expunge the emails after manually on server. In this situation the Thunderbird present me the list of IMAP folders that I want to see but on each of them I have then to right click and say to get me the new emails for that folder. This option is not even inherited. I would prefer to click first time on Inbox folder and subscribe and then to manually remove some of its subfolders if I really need to not see the emails inside. It is very frustrating to do this specially when having 100+ email folders. You could imagine that I can't miss the emails of my boss or from any of our key clients because of this.

The expunge problem that I described earlier on the Outlook exists on the Thunderbird as well. It is true that emails are not displayed anymore but they are there. You'll have to compress manually the folder to have those emails removed.

Because I am part of multiple email discussion groups and internal emails group sometimes I really need badly to see to whom an email was addressed and send emails from other emails accounts then myself. I simply can't do it in a simple way. When I want to write an email from the support account I'll have to create a new account in Thunderbird. Then it is also most probably possible that this account to not even exists and to be only an alias. Having 5-6 emails accounts duplicated on 3-4 domain names (depending on the business model) put me in the situation of creating up to 20+ thunderbird accounts instead of simply allowing me to write the email address from which this email to pretend to come.

I want in Thunderbird to be able to customize what are the fields displayed for each email in the list of emails. I want on forward even if the advanced headers view (I am a programmer) is selected to not include those headers which are sometimes taking a full page into the email. The simple resume is always enough, I never see when the full headers are usefully when writing emails. If I want those headers to forward I will manually cut and paste them.

Many daily newsletters that I receive are marked as scam messages. So I click the button telling him that this email is not a scam. No problem, the tomorrow email from the same address having the same layout, with a very close subject and with an article inside will be marked as scam as well.

I use to flag my emails to be able to follow them up as important. On IMAP the Outlook do not even allow me to summarize these specials emails in a single place which make me wonder why they still have the functionality. But on Thunderbird when I discovered that I may do a special folder to show me these emails separately I was very happy. This until the moment that I clicked on the folder and in 2 hours I didn't see more then 10 - 15 emails because every time I am doing this is searching through all folders over and over again. They are almost never cached and this functionality is even blocking the Thunderbird for a while. Do not use this functionality, is useless.

The list is even longer. I will not continue with it right now. I will be happy if these "small" things will be fixed first.

I love Thunderbird, it is ten times faster then the Outlook on big mailboxes but sometimes it makes me crash the computer with a big hammer. I simply can't use it in those situations. So I have to go in pine and do manually the things that he should be done for me. I hope the guys that are working on him to read this and really put them self in the position of users working daily with their software and make it to relay on it for simple but lifesaving tasks.

A couple of years ago we subscribed to a special Microsoft programs which by the end of a 1-2 years period would materialize in a Microsoft Certified Partners with at least one of the software tools we developed. Meanwhile we concluded that this Certification would not be worth it so the project was unplugged. 

During this period we had, for a fee, the right of use some Microsoft licenses like the Office Professional 2003, MSDN or Windows XP Professional to ease our development process. When the program ended we had to replace these installed licenses with some of our own therefore we wanted to buy 10 Office Standard 2003 and 3 Windows XP Professional.

Our first question was if for this amount of licenses we receive any kind of discount. The Microsoft said yes, you receive a discount of 3% (It makes me laugh even now !!!!!) if you buy the OLP licenses. At this time we didn't know exactly what this means so we started to take a look on the local market, in the Microsoft resellers offers, for the best deal. After receiving multiple offers we observed that for the same Office License on different dealers there are 100$ or more price difference for 1 unit. 

I decided to take the cheaper offer but in the last moment we discovered that these are OEM (original equipment manufacturer) licenses therefore we put this on hold to find out if we can use these types of licenses. I called Microsoft and they said they could not be used unless they came with a complete new computer. Even if in the past it was possible to buy these kind of licenses with any hardware inside equipment the Microsoft guys changed the license starting 1 October 2005. In this license they added new restrictions like the computer should be fully equipped, if the motherboard it will be changed the licenses should be re-bought (?!) (read this on different forums).

OK, this is definitely not the solution for us so we will have to find one suitable. Looking through the licensing system we seen that there 6 other licensing types: OLP, OVS, Retail, Educational, Select License and Enterprise Agreement.

The Educational is not for us so we skipped this one.

The OLP (Open License Program) version would give you a discount between the 3 and 3.5% depending on the amount of points you accumulate. To receive the 3% you'll have to buy 5 Offices or other 5 products for which you receive only an Open Business discount. To receive the 3.5% discount (Open Volume) you should accumulate through a period of 2 years at least 500 points ( ?!!!! each product has between 1 and 15 points. Windows XP Pro has 2, Office Pro 2003 has 2, Visual Studio .NET has 1). After all this you won't get in this price the box with the installation kit which you'll have to buy separately for each product and for each company location and for our case is even more expensive then the 3%. (probably this is a Microsoft joke that I don't get).

The OVS (Open Value Subscription) is a rent system where you may get, starting with at least 5 licenses, the usage rights for three years. This is the biggest joke ever. Why? Let me tell you:

- You'll have to rent a product license for every computer in the company if is not a server. Therefore if you need 10 licenses you'll actually have to get 30. Every new computer in the company will have to participate too.

- The price over the 3 years is even bigger then the full product price. After this period you're left with nothing.

- In the forth year you may continue for another 3 years or you should pay 1.75 times the rent for a year to have your license.

- Only the Office Pro and Office Small Business are part of the program ...

So after omitting the last 2 licenses types because they are for more then 250 computers we decided that the only option a company has is the full retail license and this will fit our need. Therefore after spending almost 2 days in searching all this information we ordered the Offices Standard and the Windows XP Pro we needed. The last surprise from the reseller:

"It is possible that the Retail version (n.a. FPP License) to be hard to obtain, it takes between 10-15 days and it is also possible to not find them at all as the Microsoft have discontinued these products because they are more then 2 years old, even if they don't have anything to replace them with. Only the Office Professionals could be found more easily as FPP License."

OK ... this is Microsoft.

P.S. Not even after 3 days of searching was I able to find the legal licenses in full text on the Microsoft site. This is one of the worst sites I ever seen.

This movie is made by a guy, jurnalist, which actually, initially, is frustrated by couple of conspiracy theories that were generated after the terribles events in US. This guy tries to demonstrate exactly the oposite to what these theories sustain so it start searching through the different footages and pictures tooked that day. Basically he  made this movie after realizing that even probably these conspiracy theories are not extracting the correct conclusions their arguments are 100% correct. Based on a large experience as a radio jurnalist, having a large experience after the 9/11 events in different talk shows regarding the subject he made this movie to present the irrefutable lies that have been presented by the authorities.

The declared scope of this movie is just to point these proofs about what we've been told and what actually is not true. There are no direct conclusions in this movie but indirectly by the questions that are asked during the movie and transparently through the different comments we are led to the US officials as the ones that are at least guilty of these events.

After seeing the movie, which has quite a good rating in the imdb, I started remember myself many things and questions that I wondered myself about the subject during the time:

In the planes crash day, George W. Bush, was said on CNN and other televisions, that was not in the air, into the Air Force 1, as the security procedure demanded in the next couple of hours. I wonder if this was a real negligence from its services or what was the real reason behind it and why no report was issued since.

The things that is expected from the US authorities after any kind of plane crash is a report with what happen with that plane. I never heard anywhere after this time, even if the conclusions are already know in this case, the conversations with the control towers during the hijack period and the crash to be made public. Actually what could be that secret when terorists take a plane and start negociate with the authorities. I think they seen that the plane actually was not in its normal course and they start making the different scenarious about tooking that plane on the ground and avoid large populated areas.

Actually there are no official reports what so ever about the events with conclusions in the different areas that were involved. There are tons of speculations, theories but the important information are not yet revealed (and I don't think I will see them in my life time). This is just like our Romanian revolution which still wait for answers about whom killed that many persons and why after 17 years.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of the Linux extremists as I know the Linux OS has many problems and many things to improve from the point of view of general use but I understand these extremists in this situation. You should't be one to see the wrong results. I love Linux but I am not able to do my daily work on the Linux machines.

We cannot accept sometimes just any report which claims to be impartial and actually contains lots of truncated truth. Here are some misses that probably they didn't think of:

1. The Windows design itself allowed the virus, trojans, worms and other malicious software of this kind to exist. All the supplemental costs that are caused by them are always put in separate reports but actually they all belong to the Windows machines. The Windows gave this opportunity to hackers and crackers so they didn't argued and just took it. I ask myself why Laura DiDio don't mention anything about these costs caused for example by the Sasser or other very popular threads to our work or about all the antivirus, network bandwith and other similar costs. Probably because it would confirm a truism where the Windows servers are not secure and reliable as she wants us to think. She would have to start this survey with this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/security/security_report_windows_vs_linux/ 

2. Microsoft appears to start having the security updates once per month more often then the Linux systems do now. This is a proof to my first point and not a Windows benefit. Why didn't they attach to this number  the report telling how many new high risks security reports exists in average per month for each systems and what is the average time between the security is reported and a solution exists? Where are the numbers about the new threads caused exactly by these 'fixes'? Probably because the costs of hacked machines were never counted. And probably they didn't add the real costs to apply these updates to all the machines within a company. We as many other software development companies like Macromedia still have problems caused by the SP2 on WindowsXP machines.

3. Another important miss is that they never counted how many of the Windows servers are in the wild directly exposed to the internet and how many of them are behind secure networks. We have some Windows servers too behind the Linux gateways which it is true they never had security problems. They just crashed by them self so we had to reinstall them once every six months. Based on my experience the Windows servers are struggled in DoS attacks twice as fast then the Linux machines.

I won't continue because the list would be long and will proof that this lady didn't do her analyst job as she should have. I will let her dreaming along with Alice into the Wonderland that Windows servers starting with the 2003 Servers will be from the point of view of servers equal or better then the Linux machines. The girl lives in a world were all the Internet bigger servers are Windows 2003 to protect our huge networks of interface designers, healthcare, academia, financial services working on Linux desktops, a world where the Sempron processors are used to build Airbus or Boeing plains and I will buy a Sparc machine for my 7 year boy to help him with his homeworks.