My glasses broke last last week leaving me a right predicament as I had no spare pair and I am blind without them. All I could find was an old pair of prescription sun glasses which are far too dark to wear inside and also had a big scuff on each lens (thanks to my kids) making them pretty horrid to wear, but as that is all I had, that is what I have been wearing.
As I am clearly going to be stuck with these until the new year till I can get a new pair I thought I would research if it was possible to remove scratches from lenses.
I found a lot of weird suggestions, one of which was to use a "non abrasive" toothpaste with a soft cotton cloth (do not use kitchen paper or anything rough), which was about the thing I had in the house from all the suggestions, so I thought I would give it a try,

To my great surprise, it worked, and and all the scratches and scuffs have now gone and apart from being too dark and an old prescription they are about 10 times better and actually wearable now.

I suspect this only works on lenses which have an anti reflective, anti scratch coating or an outer tint and where the scratches are very minor as the cleaning chemicals in the toothpaste must take off a very thing layer of the lens coating, thus taking the scratches off with it.
So if your specs fall into this category and are a bit worse for wear, give it a try, you may just give them a second life.

Another of the big annoyances with Railo is that it won't handle SEO friendly URL's out of the box, you need to get into the application servers servlet mappings to add url filters for each of your SEO URL formats.

e.g. each of these would require a separate servlet mappings url-filter.

mysite.com/index.cfm/something
mysite.com/sub1/index.cfm/something
mysite.com/muraCMS/index.cfm/something

If you are on a shared server then this can be a big problem as you do not have the ability to do this, plus making changes may also break other sites.

Thankfully there is a solution that allows you to apply these url filters on a per site basis, at least for Jetty anyway, I have not tested on any of the other servlet containers such as Tomcat, but the same solution is likely possible.

in your web root you will have a "web-inf" folder which is created automatically and contains your Railo context, inside this folder create a web.xml file and paste in the below contents. 
This will allow the most common SEO URL  "index.cfm/something" to work, I have also included the required filters for MangoBlog. Now you just need to modify this file within each of your sites and add any required url-filters.
The only caveat is that you need to restart your app server in order for the settings to take affect, if you are using the Helicon Zoo module that I blogged about previously then you simply need to recycle your application pool. This can be achieved by editing your web.config as any change to this file forces IIS to recycle the application pool.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>


 


<web-app


xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"


xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"


xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"


metadata-complete="true"


version="2.5"


>


<servlet-mapping>


<servlet-name>CFMLServlet</servlet-name>


<url-pattern>index.cfm/*</url-pattern>


<url-pattern>/post.cfm/*</url-pattern>


<url-pattern>/archives.cfm/*</url-pattern>


<url-pattern>/page.cfm/*</url-pattern>


<url-pattern>/author.cfm/*</url-pattern>


<url-pattern>/feeds.cfm/*</url-pattern>


</servlet-mapping>


</web-app>

Some weeks back I was talking with HeliconTech after they kindly donated a license for their Helicon APE product for use on cfmldeveloper.com my free CFML developer hosting community. And the topic of Railo came up as they noticed I also support Railo on cfmldeveloper, and they were telling me how they like to support niche technologies like this on Windows/IIS and were looking to add some new Java solutions, so we started discussing the requirements of a new Helicon ZOO module for Railo and what it lacked on the IIS platform. 
I explained to them how ColdFusion worked out of the box and the disadvantage of Railo requiring all the extra manual config of a Jakarta vDir, isapi Plugins, handler mappings and virtual hosts in the Servlet engine in order to make it work, and how a simpler ColdFusion like solution was needed, ideally using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. 
They also asked for a popular open source app that they could also build an installer for and bundle with Railo, so I suggested Mura CMS.

After only 1 month and a few more email exchanges, I am excited to announce that HeliconTech have already completed the new Installer module for both Railo and MuraCMS and added them to the Web Platform Installer, now that is fast work I must say, I was impressed..... cont...

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When ColdFusion mail fails to deliver it will sit in the undelivr folder forever unless someone copies it back to the spool folder for another try. And even then mail that is actually invalid will just keep ending up back in the undelivr folder forever unless someone deletes it. If either of these folders end up with hundreds of thousands of files in them( which will happen eventually on a busy server), it will stop cfmail working and will affect ColdFusion's performance.

I am quite surprised Adobe have still not addressed this, especially considering they added a new feature to CF9 allowing you to view and MANUALLY respool failed mail, which is ok if you only have a few emails, but as it only displays like like 10 emails at a time, it is useless on a server that processes hundreds of thousands of emails per day.

Up till now I used a little VB script and a windows scheduled task to handle this, but I decided it was time for a CF solution that I could easily just plugin into the cfadmin.

So here it is, a custom extension for your ColdFusion administrator which allows you to specify how often you want to respool your undelivered mail and how long you want to keep trying for, after the retry limit is reached the undelivered mail will just get deleted.

FYI Railo retries sending mails by default.

DOWNLOAD HERE

readme.txt file in the download contains installation and setup instructions.

you can also turn on verbose output when manually running the scheduler to see what it is doing.

I may also add the option to send a failure notice to the sender for failed mails that get deleted.

If you want the ability to manually view/edit failed mail and send back to the spool then try Ray Camdens Spoolmail.

Change log

1.0.1  - 01/01/2012

Added logging with CFLOG
Added ability to edit/save scheduled task url

1.0.2 - 21/06/2013

Fixed some issues withthe respool task not deleting mails
Set the default url for task to use localhost
Added optional verbose output
Updated the readme

I have just migrated this blog from Coldfusion to Railo today and thought I would share the process for anyone else who needs to get MangoBlog workign with railo.

Initially I thought it had all worked without a hitch, but then I found a couple of things broke. None of the links worked anymore as Railo (or rather Tomcat) does not support search engine friendly urls out of the box.
In order to get the SEO urls to work you need to make some changes to the c:\railo\tomcat\conf\web.xml and insert the following in the servlet mappings section.

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>GlobalCFMLServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/page.cfm/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>GlobalCFMLServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/post.cfm/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>GlobalCFMLServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/archives.cfm/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Then restart tomcat and all should be good. If you have any app that has something.cfm/other stuff then you will need to do the above with any other filenames as well.
I did try using the following

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>GlobalCFMLServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/*.cfm/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

but sadly it doesn't work.

This is one of things that sucks with Railo, there is a lot of tweaking and manual config to get it to do all the things that ColdFusion just does out of the box.

One other thing that I found during this migration is that the caller scope does not work properly in Railo, if you are trying to use caller scope to set variables in other scopes it simply does not work.

For example, say you have the following code in a custom tag called mytag.cfm

<cfset Caller[Attributes.returnVar] = foo>

and you called the tag as follows

<cf_mytag returnvar="request.foo">
or
<cf_mytag returnvar="local.foo">
or
<cf_mytag returnvar="someStruct.foo">

it simply doesn't create the variable, this however works fine with Coldfusion.

In or order to fix this I had to use a simple variable

<cf_mytag returnvar="foo">

This was the only format that worked,