20 of the Best of Shortcut and Hotkey Tips for Your Windows PC – How-To Geek.

For those of you who like to use the quickest methods of getting things done on your computer, we have shown you many Windows shortcuts and hotkeys for performing useful tasks in the past.

This article compiles 20 of the best Windows shortcuts and hotkeys How-To Geek has documented.

The Issue: I’m being passed some variables in the CGI scope from Shibboleth that happen to have hyphens in their names, like “Shib-Authentication-Method“, which Cold Fusion doesn’t like and throws an error if you try to use as a normal variable (because it is trying to do maths on it).

The Solution: Array-notation instead of dot-notation.

Now I am not trying to take credit for this trick – it’s an old one, but since I’d forgotten about it (albeit briefly), I thought I’d take a few minutes to blog on it in case others weren’t familiar or hadn’t dealt with it in a long time like me.

So you’re probably trying to refer to your variable like this by default: #CGI.Shib-Authentication-Method#, right? And CF is choking on it.

So try this instead: #CGI['Shib-Authentication-Method']# and voila!

Anyways, wouldn’t it be nice if MS SQL Server actually told you where you are missing indexes, and where performance can be improved.

Well, it can! Actually, it won’t tell you, unless you ask… so to ask, run this script, and it will even have a column with the CREATE INDEX script for you!

SELECT

migs.avg_total_user_cost * (migs.avg_user_impact / 100.0) * (migs.user_seeks + migs.user_scans) AS improvement_measure,

'CREATE INDEX [missing_index_' + CONVERT (varchar, mig.index_group_handle) + '_' + CONVERT (varchar, mid.index_handle)

+ '_' + LEFT (PARSENAME(mid.statement, 1), 32) + ']'

+ ' ON ' + mid.statement

+ ' (' + ISNULL (mid.equality_columns,'')

+ CASE WHEN mid.equality_columns IS NOT NULL AND mid.inequality_columns IS NOT NULL THEN ',' ELSE '' END

+ ISNULL (mid.inequality_columns, '')

+ ')'

+ ISNULL (' INCLUDE (' + mid.included_columns + ')', '') AS create_index_statement,

migs.*, mid.database_id, mid.[object_id]

FROM sys.dm_db_missing_index_groups mig

INNER JOIN sys.dm_db_missing_index_group_stats migs ON migs.group_handle = mig.index_group_handle

INNER JOIN sys.dm_db_missing_index_details mid ON mig.index_handle = mid.index_handle

WHERE migs.avg_total_user_cost * (migs.avg_user_impact / 100.0) * (migs.user_seeks + migs.user_scans) > 10

ORDER BY migs.avg_total_user_cost * migs.avg_user_impact * (migs.user_seeks + migs.user_scans) DESC

More details found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bartd/archive/2007/07/19/are-you-using-sql-s-missing-index-dmvs.aspx

via Have SQL Server Tell You About Missing Indexes « The Byte Stops Here.

Microsoft SQL server really cares what order you pass the params in to a stored procedure.

So your stored proc could contain something simple like:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[testProc]
    @param1 INT,
    @param2 INT,
    @param3 INT

AS
BEGIN
    SET NOCOUNT ON
        DELETE FROM dbo.tablename
        WHERE Id = @param1
        AND OtherID = @param2
        AND UserId = @param3

END

Ordinarily, if you are using an inline query like below, it’s not so much of an issue because you are designating the param name with the value:

<cfquery name="test" datasource="DSN"> exec testProc @param1=value1, @param3 = value3, @param2 = value2 </cfquery> 

But with cfstoredproc and cfprocparam, there is no way to designate this specifically (which, now that I think about it, seems like quite the oversight). There are little tricks you can use to help make your code readable, and the one my coworker was using was to add a “dbvarname” attribute to each cfprocparam. Despite the value you put into this attribute (which doesn’t really DO anything with regard to the database, it’s just there to make the code easier to read), SQL server will assume that you are passing in the params in order in which it is expecting them (in this case in order: param1, param2, param3). Therefore the code below would not work as expected:

 <cfstoredproc procedure="testProc" datasource="DSN" returncode="yes">   
<cfprocparam dbvarname="param1" value="#value1#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer">   
<cfprocparam dbvarname="param3" value="#value3#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer">
<cfprocparam dbvarname="param2" value="#value2#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer">   
</cfstoredproc>

If you assign values 1, 2 and 3 to params 1-3, respectively, the code above would cause the following SQL to be executed in essence:

DELETE FROM dbo.tablename WHERE Id = 1 AND OtherID = 3 AND UserId = 2

When what we REALLY wanted to have happen was THIS:

DELETE FROM dbo.tablename WHERE Id = 1 AND OtherID = 2 AND UserId = 3

Solution? Just tweak the order of your cfprocparams:

 <cfstoredproc procedure="testProc" datasource="DSN" returncode="yes">
<cfprocparam dbvarname="param1" value="#value1#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer">   
<cfprocparam dbvarname="param2" value="#value2#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer">
<cfprocparam dbvarname="param3" value="#value3#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer">   
</cfstoredproc>

*Disclaimer: the stored procedure and code actually involved in the real issue have been greatly simplified for the purposes of this post and the actual issue was trickier than it looks here.

Ran across this problem myself today with a function called checkXML and found this great post explaining the issue:

There’s some stuff on the web about this error in Coldfusion that I found helpful, but because it is such a useless error in the sense of telling you what the problem is I figured I would post my specific problem and solution.

In my case I was running a primary public function that called a few other private functions. The gist of my problem was that I had an argument in my primary public function with the name ‘generatepassword’. One of my private functions was also named ‘generatepassword’. When the private function was being called I suppose it wasn’t able to determine whether the argument or the method was to be called, and hence threw the error that really gives no explanation of this whatsoever.I suppose that the ‘incorrect type’ is the argument that it was trying to call as a function. Who knows. Whatever the error may say, that was the problem.

My search through google turned up similar cases. If you find yourself having this problem check your variable names and make sure that none of them conflict with your method names.

via Entity has incorrect type for being called as a function in Coldfusion 8 « pukkared.

yes, this is really our server room

Sometimes the smallest changes have a cascade effect – case in point, making a slight change to the AD domain controller time which was about three minutes slow. Lesson learned: be careful that the AM/PM stuff doesn’t reset itself without you noticing or you may be jettisoned into the future or the past without realizing it.

I’ve always wanted to travel in time, and I thought it was pretty entertaining when I started getting emails from the future (see pic at right for my initial joke diagnosis), but unfortunately our clients at CFWebtools weren’t so keep on a surprise trip into the future as a result of the above setting changing from AM to PM. As far as our servers knew, we instantly went from 1pm on April 5th to 1am on April 6th.

You don’t realize how many things are affected by the system time until you screw it up, believe me. Since all the servers got their time from the ADPDC they all thought it was tomorrow. Not only did client sites with features like calendars, etc. show the wrong date, but any process that looked at dates or used a date function like now() or getdate() were returning the wrong values. This caused not only display issues, but a whole slew of monitoring jobs to freak out because suddenly there was what appeared to be an unexpected 12-hour gap in the data. Scheduled jobs (SQL and CF) were also thrown off and either ran early or failed to run as expected. Even SVN had some fun with it, datestamping commits in the future.

Fortunately, the team got it sorted out in short order and everything was recoverable and re-runnable, but it definitely was an eye-opener to see what all was affected!

To troubleshoot, I first made sure I had the most current version of Skype installed. Check. Then I made sure I could consistently recreate the problem by annoying my coworkers with test calls and asking them to call me back, only to have Skype crash each time. Ok, problem definitely confirmed. Next step?

Teh Googler. I’ve been using Google groups for years to help me with software and hardware problems, and it’s a rare event that someone hasn’t already encountered and posted about it. This was no exception. After narrowing down my search results to the relevant versions/platforms (would you believe Skype can even crash on the Mac???), I confirmed that what appear to be the two basic “fix it” steps for Windows 7 app issues might be helpful here as well:

1. Run as Administrator. This is particularly helpful if you are encountering error messages that say something about “permissions”, but is also applicable in other instances or in my case, when you aren’t getting any error message at all other than “Skype is not responding”.
2. Compatibility Mode.  Sometimes older apps (and some newer ones too, apparently) just don’t play nice with regard to forward compatibility, so Windows 7 has a neat feature that lets you set a specific compatibility mode on a per-app basis.  Options go all the way back to Windows 95 which, most importantly, allows you to play DoomII on a Windows 7 box!

To access both of these settings, right-click on your app icon, Skype in this case, and select “properties”. Under the “Compatibility” tab, check “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and select your Windows version. In my case,, based on advice on Google groups, I selected “Windows Vista” (shudder). Further down, under “Privilege Level” check the box that says “Run this program as an administrator”.

You can also run an app as an administrator on a non-permanent basis by right-clicking on the program icon and selecting “run as administrator”. You may see a confirm dialog before the app starts, so be sure to confirm your action.

Back to my dilemma, after restarting Skype with the new settings, I annoyed my boss with a couple more test calls and no crashing this time. Problem solved! Thanks yet again, Google Groups. Hopefully others with similar issues may also find this post and find it helpful.