If you just want to look at a file, there's a great free tool to do it: UniversalViewer.

It can open a 1GB file as fast as a 1kb file (because it only pulls in what it needs to show the screen full of text you're looking at.) And there are times when you may well need to look at some very large files, especially when troubleshooting CF servers, like I do.

And actually, as its name implies, UniversalViwer can view far more than just text files, including images and more.

I've just only ever used it for looking at log files, for which it excels (and yes, you can search within the file, set it to tail files, and more.)

I've been touting the tool for years in classes and presentations, and I was about to mention it in another blog entry, but then I realized I'd not blogged about it on its own. Rather than have the reference lost in another blog entry, here's its moment to shine!

And yes, I do realize there are several other tools that can do this. I list this one and several others in a category of my CF411 list: Generic File View/Log Analysis Tools. (Note that there are some nifty tools in that category there for looking specifically at CSV files, as well as other entire categories for specific kinds of logs, like CF logs, web server logs, windows event logs, etc.)

Before proceeding though, let me say that I realize there are many spam solutions, including ones based on your mail server instead (that you or your host might implement).

And yes, of course I do realize that folks using Gmail will want to say that they never have to worry about this at all!

Let me please just speak to those who do choose to (or have to) receive email from other mail servers, and perhaps can't control spam handling on the server, or still favor a client solution.

Background

I was trading emails with someone who, upon being delayed in responding to me, lamented about being "overwhelmed with spam in this mailbox". I was a little surprised to hear someone still having to suffer that, but then I realized that while there are many solutions out there, sometimes people just don't get around to implementing any, if even they know of them.

It's certainly devastating to potentially miss email, and since I make myself (and my email address) so public, it would be a severe problem for me if I had to wade through the few hundred spams I get per day.

Fortunately, I don't. I use a tool that takes care of it all for me. It really is amazing for my needs (though not free), and after sharing news of it with him, I decided to share it here.

Cloudmark, for Outlook or Thunderbird

It's a tool specifically for Outlook or Thunderbird, called Cloudmark. It's actually a hosted service that integrates with Outlook (and they have both Server and Desktop editions). The desktop edition is $40/year, but it's SO worth it for me, one of the few programs or hosted services I pay for, and have done so happily for several years. It's that good.

BTW, that price actually covers up to 2 PCs, and they do have volume discounts for implementing it on still more.

Using it is easy, and fast

There's no complicated setup, and unlike some solutions that require you to identify each spam message, Cloudmark instead immediately recognizes spam. You may never have to tell it a thing and yet it will catch and handle hundreds of spams in a day for you.

Recall that I said it integrates in the mail client (Outlook or Thunderbird) and checks with a server to determine if mail is spam. It looks for certain heuristics, and not just simplistic ones like from address, to address, or keywords. Instead it uses a combination of factors to rate the mail (as of course so do some other spam solutions).

As far as I have been able to tell when I've checked, I've had virtually no false positives (real mail being moved to the spam folder. More on that in a moment).

It also works fast. I've not notice it add any time to mail processing.

As an example, it's silently caught over 40,000 spam messages in the first 6 months of this year already.

And whatever slips by (and still ends up in your inbox) you can easily mark it as spam (with a simple keystroke or button press). What's more, that again gets sent to their servers and then others benefit from that observation (as you benefit from others, of course). It really is a community-driven network solution (and they seem very intelligent about applying heuristics so that no one can game or abuse the system.)

Dealing with false positives

As for false positives (messages marked as spam that are in fact not spam), that's of course a common concern with any solution that proposes to "catch" them.

This is one place where I prefer Cloudmark over mail server-based solutions (as have been offered by hosting providers). With Cloudmark, since it's running in the mail client, the spam messages do indeed still come down to my server, and they get shunted to a spam folder.

So if ever someone says they sent me something I didn't get, I can at least search that spam folder easily.

I do realize that by me receiving the spam (as compared to it being handled on the mail server) it's taking up both bandwidth (for me to receive it) and disk space (for me to save it). I just prefer that for the freedom it gives me to be able to search the spam if I ever need to. Hosted solutions often put a limit to how long they'll hold caught spam for you.

Not much to show, here or on the web site

You may notice I don't have much in the way of no screenshots to offer here. Indeed, there's not much on the web site, either. It simply works. There are lots of good referrals there. I just wanted to add mine here, as motivated by the conversation earlier today.

Free trial, try it yourself (referral link)

There is a 15-day trial. Try it for yourself.

I'll note they do offer current customers a referral code to give to friends who may sign up. We get a month free if a referring customer stays on for 2 months.

I'm not writing this for that reason! :-) But as long as they offer it, and if you'd like to do it:

Sign up with my referral code (which is naq4hl)

Cloudmark really has been wonderful for me for years, and I highly recommend it.

Hope that's helpful to someone.

It's just a rough cut. I haven't thought it through thoroughly (wow, how's that for an alliteration!). Still, while I know there are couple of concerns that will come to mind for some readers and I try to address those at the end, it does work for me and has helped improve my server's stability and reliability.

Background: do you need to care? Perhaps more than you realize

It can either be that there are many more than they expect, coming more often than they expect, or they may come extremely fast to your server (even many times a second). This throttle tool helps deal with the latter.

Why you can't "just use robots.txt and call it a day"

The first problem is that some of the things I allude to above aren't bots in the classic sense (such as RSS readers, ping tools). They don't "crawl" your site, so they don't regard that they need to be told how/where to look. They're just coming looking for a given page.

The second problem is that some bots simply ignore the robots.txt, or don't honor all of it. For instance, while Google honors the file in terms of what it should look at, my understanding is that it instead requires you to implement the webmaster toolkit for your site to control its crawl rate.

Then, too, if you may have multiple sites on your server, the spider or bot may not consider that in deciding to send a wave of requests to your server. It may say "I'll only send requests to domain x at a rate of 1 per second", but it may not realize that it's sending requests to domains x, y, z (and a, b, and c) all of which are one server/cluster, which could lead a single server to in fact be hit far more than once a second (in that scenario). It may seem that's an edge case, but honestly it's not that unusual from what I've observed.

Finally, another reason all this becomes a concern is that of course there can be many spiders, bots, and other automated requests all hitting your server at once sometimes. My tool can't help with that, but it can at least the other points above.

(As with so much in IT and this very space, things do change, so what's true today may change, or one may have old knowledge, so as always I welcome feedback.)

The code

So I hope I've made the case for why you should consider some throttling, such that too many requests from one IP address are rejected. I've done it in a two-fold approach, sending both plain text and an http header that is appropriate for this sort of "slow down" kind of rejection. You can certainly change it to your taste.

I've just implemented it as a UDF (user-defined function). Yes, I could have also written at in all CFscript (which would run in any release, as there nothing that couldn't be written in script in that code--well, except the CFLOG, which could be removed). But since CF6 added the ability to define UDFs with tags, and to keep things simplest for the most people, I've just done it as tags. Feel free to modify it to all script if you'd like. It's just a starting point.

I simply drop the UDF into my application.cfm (or application.cfc, as appropriate). Yes, one could include it, or implement it as a CFC method if they wished.

Then I call the UDF, using simply cfset limiter(), as shown below. That's it. No arguments need be passed to it, unless you want to override the defaults of limiting things to 3 requests from one IP address within 3 seconds.

Note that since the UDF relies on the application scope, you need to place the call to it AFTER a cfapplication tag if using application.cfm.

Caveats and more

There are definitely a few points to consider, and some concerns/observations that readers may have.

• First, BlueDragon fans will want to point out that they don't need to code a solution at all (or use this), because it's had a CFTHROTTLE tag for several years. Indeed it has. I do wish Adobe would implement it in CF (I'm not aware of it existing in Railo). Until then, perhaps this will help others has it has me.
• More important, some will be quick to point out a potential flaw in the approach of throttling by IP address is that you may have some visitors who are behind a proxy where they appear to your server to all be coming from one ip address. Fair enough. This is a dilemma that requires more handling. For instance, the BD CFThrottle tag implements this with a TOKEN attribute allowing you to key on yet another field in the request headers. I didn't choose to bother with that, as in my case (on my site), I just am not that worried about the problem. You may need to, so beware. Again, the log will help you determine how much it's doing any work at all.
• And some may recommend (and others may want to consider) instead doing this throttling at the servlet filter level, rather than CFML (something I've written about before .) Yep, since CF runs atop a servlet engine (JRun by default), you could indeed do that, which could apply then to all applications on your entire CF server (rather than implemented per application like above.) And there are indeed throttling servlet filters, such as this one. Again, I offer this for those who aren't interested in that.
• And of course, an inevitable question/concern some may have is, "but if you slow down a bots, might that that not affect what they think about your site? Might they stop crawling entirely?" I suppose that's a consideration that each will have to make for themselves. I implemented this several months ago and haven't noticed any change either in my page ranks, my own search results, etc. That's all just anecdotal, of course. And again, things can change. I'll say that of course you use this at your own risk. I just offer it for those who may want to consider it, and want to save a little time trying to code up a solution. Again, I welcome feedback if it could be improved.
• Now, one other gotcha to consider, if you implement this and try to test it: some browsers have a built-in throttling mechanism of their own and they won't send more than x requests to a given domain from the browser at a time. I've spoken on this before, and you can read more from yslow creator Steve Souders. So while you may think you can just hit refresh 4 times to force this, it may not quite work that way. What I have found is that if you wait for each request to finish and then do the refresh (and do that 4 times), you'll get the expected message. Again, use the logs for real verification of whether the throttling is really working for real users, and to what extent.
• There is of course another nasty effect of spiders, bots, and other automated requests, and that's the risk of an explosion of sessions which could eat away at your java heap space. People often accuse CF of a memory leak, which it's really just this issue. I've written on it before (see the related entries at the bottom here, above the comments). This suggestion about throttling requests may help a little with that, but it really is a bigger problem with other solutions, that I allude to in the other entries.
• Finally, yes, I realize I could and should post this to the wonderful CFlib repository, and I surely will. I wouldn't mind getting some feedback if anyone sees any issues with it. I'm sure there's some improvement that could be made. I just wanted to get it out, as is, given that it works for me and may help others.

It also gives me a chance to offer some props for the site of the company behind the tools, SolarWinds, which again many may find valuable in educating not only about the tools but the topics that the tools help with.

The free SAN and VM monitoring tools

• SolarWinds Free SAN Monitor - keep a close eye on the performance & capacity of your storage arrays and become a storage superhero!
  Note also:
  • Intro video
  • Or step up to their commercial Storage Profiler - Multi-Vendor Storage Performance Monitoring
• VM Monitor - continuously monitor a VMware® ESX Server and its virtual machines with at-a-glance virtualization health statistic
  Note also:
  • Intro video
• WMI Monitor - monitor your Windows® apps and servers in real time, using built-in, community-sourced, and customizable application templates!
  Note also:
  • Intro video

I haven't yet used them myself, so this isn't so much a recommendation of the tools but rather a recommendation that you consider them if you are interested in what they have to offer.

The company offers still more free tools, as well commercial ones of course.

A company that gets how to educate you about their products

You may have noticed above that I offered as well links to videos about each product. SolarWinds has really done a great job offering educational resources, especially videos, and organizing them into categories such as tech talks, webcasts, and more.

Indeed, if you may be new to network management (which can be a broad and/or deep subject, appealing variously to generalist IT geeks and hard-core network admins), they offer lots of compelling introductory resources, including their geek guides and even certification training . Of course they also have a helpful blog and twitter feed.

Just as I previously praised the Mura folks as a "company who got it right" in terms of setting up a compelling, informative web site for IT folks, I really have to say the same for the SolarWinds folks. Congrats, and thanks.

For years I've used a great freeware tool, FileLocator Lite (formerly known as Agent Ransack ), and I (as well nearly everyone I show it to) love it for several reasons. Beyond fast, effective, and easy searching, it also has a cool regular expression building wizard that may be reason enough to use the tool when you need to create a RegEx quickly. It's the freeware version of a commercial product, File Locator Pro, and can be found at www.mythicsoft.com/filelocatorlite/.

(Update in 2010: Originally, the free version was only packaged under the name AgentRansack, which was a little scary-sounding for some tastes. The makers finally offered a rebranding of the tool under the name File Locator Lite, though they still also offer it as AgentRansack, being the same product. The makers just seem to have a fondness for the "old" name so are going with both.)

BTW, I do realize that the Windows File Find feature can be enhanced by using its available Indexing Service. I've never been a fan of that for various reasons, and many won't enable such (for good reason) on production servers. Yet you may need to search for files on such a server. This tool can do it with little overhead. And I realize also that later versions of Windows do offer better text file searching, but it's still not as simple as it could be (if the first search doesn't find files, you're offered a chance to do a deeper search). This tool is incredibly simple to use.

Sadly, some people may not ever do searching for files by name or content (or suffer productivity) simply because the available tools are so poor. This one will change your mind!

Definitely favored over other search tools/editors

Since learning of it in about 2004, I no longer use the find feature within editors like Eclipse, DreamWeaver, CF Studio, or various notepad alternatives to search across multiple folders anymore. AgentRansack is so much faster than those in my experience.

It's also not only faster than Windows find, too, but unlike that (in some versions of Windows), it DOES search for content in ALL file types. Have you ever used Windows find to search text in CFM files, and found that it never finds files you know it should? The problem is that it has an internal list of file types it will search, and all others it will simply ignore. It also ignores files marked with the hidden and system attributes, which may not be expected. (By Windows Find I'm referring to the feature available from the Start menu or via WindowsKey-F).

And unlike using your editor to search, it doesn't lock up your editor while it's searching away. And even then, it's really FAST! I find it can search gigs of content in just a few moments--yet it DOES NOT rely on indexing the content in any way.

Another great benefit it has over the other more traditional search approaches is that while the left pane is showing the files it found in its search, a right pane shows (for any file you select on the left) the lines WITHIN the file that matched the search. Yes, in some other search tools the search results pane allows you to click a result to open the given file at the given location where the search result was found, but this approach in AR is just much simpler and more effective, I think.

Perhaps most powerful, it also integrates with the Windows Explorer interface, so it's easily reached by a right-click on any folder to search that folder and its children.

Bonus Regex Feature

As I hinted above, beyond searching, AR is also great for its really nifty regular expression feature, to help build regex's declaratively (with a wizard-like interface). I find myself opening it just to create a RegEx when needed. More than that, there is also a useful "test" menu option where you can enter a RegEx, and some text against which to search, and it will show what the regex would find in that text. Very handy.

Check it out

Everyone I've shown it to has been impressed. Check it out.

You can see screenshots of 3 main parts of the interface in use (including the regex wizard and results viewing aspect) at the site.

The only negative with the tool is its name. Some folks have cringed when I've proposed installing it while trying to help them solve one issue or another. But when they see it's a freeware version of a commercial tool, that generally tames their nerves. The very quick install and immediately obvious benefits quickly wins them over. Again, this problem has now been solved with the optional packaging as File Locator Lite.

I should also mention that this is one of dozens of such file/find tools that I list in a category for their type at my CF411 site, listing over a thousand told and resources of interest to CFers.

Enjoy.

For more information, see this blog entry: this blog entry from someone on the Chrome team. It includes links to more details on each change, as well as a brief intro video.

I've been really missing the auto-complete feature, whereby if you fill out text fields on forms that you've entered before, it remembers. (This is not the form-filler of the google toolbar which you can use to fill in an entire page.) You just don't realize how much you use that simple auto-complete until you miss it. (And if you didn't miss it, well, you don't know what you're missing!) Of course, it can be disabled, but it's on by default in the new release.

The update is really fast. Again, see the other blog entry for more.

And I would suggest that if you have any comments like, "yeah, but they forgot xxx", etc., I'd say it would be more worthwhile for you to post those on the google team member's blog than to offer them here. Just sayin'. :-)

Well, the fix is a pretty simple one, but one may miss it. In case any of my readers (or those googling for a solution) need the help, it's that you can right-click on the area where the menu should be (not on a tab, nor in the address bar above it) and you should see a pop-up set of context menu options to include "menu bar", "links", and "status" among other things.

You want to enable the "menu bar"

You'll notice that the "menu bar" option has no check mark next to it. Click on it, to set it, which will enable the menus. The "menu bar" is indeed what shows the File, Edit, View, and other menu commands. Hope that solves the problem for you, and if so, consider it my little Christmas gift to you.

If that option is already checked, then it may instead be that somehow hidden or moved. One tip is that there is also a "lock toolbars" option on the context menu mentioned above. If you de-select that, some of the various menu items will now show a small gray dotted vertical bar, which you can click on to move the particular toolbar. You may find somehow that the menu bar, if enabled but not visible, has somehow been moved or hidden.

Finally, once you have enabled the menu bar, you can use that "lock toolbars" to make it less likely that you or anyone else will cause it to disappear. Hope that helps.

Sure, there are many DB monitoring tools out there, but Ignite focuses on tracking, analyzing, reporting, and explaining wait events within the database--and you'd be amazed how often waits caused by your code, that of others, or from other operations in the DB are the explanation for poor performance. It can help target exactly what SQL statement or other operation is a cause of significant waits.

The tool presents the data aggregated over time, so you can view it per hour, day, week, etc. Great for both drilling down to find hot spots, and for viewing how coding/config improvements (resulting from your responding to the analyses) have led to performance improvements over time.

The tool runs with low overhead: it reads data that the DB provides, storing it in a database and providing a web-based interface to view that data. The process to read the data and create the repository (and present the web-based interface) can (and should) be done on a server separate from the server being monitored.

Here's a nice 2-minute demo. There's also a free trial, of course, and it's pretty quick and easy to install and benefit from.

As I noted in the title, it works with SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, or Sybase (sorry, not MySQL. Don't know why). And while it's a commercial product, it's not a ridiculously high price (as for some tools). I just learned of it in the past few weeks, and one customer of mine who tried it has been just thrilled with the results. I hope to write more about it later, but wanted to at least get this info out for folks to consider.

Turns out it's pretty simple: just turn off wrapping (Format>Word Wrap). Doh! I've missed it for years, so am passing it along.

I know some will want to jump in and say "why are you using NotePad anyway?" Please save the smart remarks (and let's see if someone skips reading this and comments anyway).

I'm well aware of the many alternative text editors, as well as alternative file viewers (two of over 100 categories in my CF411 list).

But there are times when one may find themselves working on a Windows server where perhaps they're not free to install an alternative editor, or perhaps they just need to view/edit one file quickly so don't want to bother.

For those folks, I hope the tip above may help.

And in fact, if I repeat the find a few times, sometimes it will go from showing no results, to showing what I expect. Woah! So keep that in mind, if you use.

Similar problem with Spell Check

I'll also note that I've found a similar problem with spell checking, at least the automated one that takes place when I send a message. I've got outlook set to check automatically (tools>options>spelling>always check spelling before sending), and sometimes I know I've typed an error and rather than stop to correct it have relied on the spell check to catch it later. But sometimes it's closed the message (on sending) without pointing out the error.

When I re-open it and do it again (not even a manual spell check, just sending it again), it then does catch the error. Yikes.

Not interested in hearing from nay-sayers

Now, I really don't want to hear from those who will complain about MS products, or Vista, or Outlook, or who would point me to alternative mail clients (like Thunderbird) or ask why I don't use gmail (I do, and I collect it in Outlook). Please, that's not the point of this thread, and some of us have legit reasons for the choices we've made.

Just trying to help others, maybe find a solution

I'm bringing this up here for those who do use Outlook, in case they may have also found they got no results on an Advanced Find search, or who rely on Spell Check. I'm just saying, try the search again a couple of times before giving up. And you may want to open and repeat a spell check if it's an important email.

It's certainly very dismaying that the problem exists. I don't even know where to begin to try to report it effectively.

This quirk about needing to search twice is unfortunate, and can certainly hamper one's trusting its results, but I've resorted to just repeating the search if I don't find something I know is there.

I'm pointing this out here in case others have the same problem, and especially if someone knows a fix. I do Windows Update pretty regularly, so there's not some obvious solution in that regard which I've missed.

Some tips about the features mentioned above

BTW, for anyone interested, Advanced Find can also be found (in 2007 at least) under the Tools>Instant Search menu. And to be clear, I don't use the instant search (or the search box at the top of the mailbox), nor the Search Desktop feature, both also in that menu. I also do not use the Windows Search feature built into the operating system, at all, for files or for email. When I want to search my mail boxes, folders, tasks, calendars, and such, I just use Advanced Find as I so prefer the greater control it affords.

And some of you may wonder, "how do you reopen the email once sent. It always goes immediately when I send". Well, I think that's the default. I always turn off the option, which is in tools>options>mail setup>send/receive>send immediately when connected (don't click the button lablelled send/receive. It's to the left of it.) With this option turned off, email doesn't get sent until you do a send/receive (f5 or tools>send/receive, or it happens automatically as scheduled, as in tools>send/receive>send/receive settings).

The delayed send is a great feature if you ever want to have a chance to reconsider a note actually before sending it, or you think of something just after trying to send it. Of course, sometimes you'll miss out and it will be gone, and of course there's always the drafts feature (just close the message, without sending) if you really aren't yet ready to send.

Anyway, it's a real boon with the problem above to being able to open a message after it's queued for sending to send it again, to trigger the spell check.

Another little trick I use, to catch when the spell check isn't working, is that I always end my messages with /Charlie (set as my signature), and I don't choose the "add to dictionary" option for that. So if a message fails to at least prompt me to correct that, then I know to re-open it and try again.