http://blog.crankybit.com Take a byte out of tech! Tue, 05 May 2009 06:04:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In my last post, I discussed some of the mistakes that can be made when using ColdSpring as our factory. It became evident that using ColdSpring to inject transient objects—that is, objects that have a state for a momentary use and then are discarded—into our service objects or other related ... http://blog.crankybit.com/factories-2/ As ColdFusion developers progress in the use of object oriented programming concepts with CFCs, our applications become more flexible and able to support additional interfaces such as Ajax or Flex through web services. We also potentially benefit just from overall code maintainability, extensibility, and reusability by using best practices and ... http://blog.crankybit.com/factories-1/ I have another blog that I use entirely for my own note-taking and reference, and I very frequently refer to my notes on my iPhone. Safari on the iPhone renders the pages wonderfully, but it is a bit of a pain to have to zoom in on the text of ... http://blog.crankybit.com/wptouch/ In some environments and scenarios, I used to use initialization (*.ini) files for storing simple configuration settings. Now I typically store this kind of information in a ColdSpring configuration file, or at least in an XML file of some sort. But at times I have to live (and work) with ... http://blog.crankybit.com/struct-in-simple-value-field/ I am "stuck" with a few web applications that provide web front-ends to Access databases. I am not the owner of these databases, and for various reasons, the database owner will not upgrade it to SQL Server. Alas, this sometimes causes headaches like the following. The Access databases are on ... http://blog.crankybit.com/reset-access-ds-not-cf/ I'm blogging this because it's a little tidbit I always waste about 30 minutes figuring out before I remember it. The <cfexecute> tag can return the output of the execution into a variable if you supply one with the variable="" attribute. However, I will try to do this, and (a) the ... http://blog.crankybit.com/cfexecute-output-in-var/ In my last blog post, I discussed how to efficiently handle multiple encrypted fields while using Transfer. The key was using onMissingMethod in the Transfer decorator. However, what about when we use the memento with Transfer's getMemento() method? This approach can be especially handy to quickly transfer an object's properties ... http://blog.crankybit.com/generating-a-decrypted-memento-for-a-transfer-decorator/ I had a recent project that had multiple fields in a particular table that needed to be encrypted for privacy and security considerations. I was using Transfer for the project. The typical way to handle the encryption is to create custom accessor methods in a decorator component. The Transfer wiki ... http://blog.crankybit.com/multiple-encrypted-fields-in-a-transfer-decorator/ Loose cables and electronics are bad. In electronics as sophisticated as computers, they can cause really odd behavior! My wife's Mac Mini was exhibiting odd behavior, namely, sporadic loss of sound. The internal speaker would suddenly become unavailable to the operating system. Furthermore, the speakers did have a slight hum when ... http://blog.crankybit.com/loose-cables-cause-sporadic-behavior-in-computers/ A few months ago, I posted an article about combining multiple Subversion repositories into one large repository. Some folks have expressed an interest in doing the opposite--separating one large repository into multiple smaller repositories. The process is not without its quirks, but it can be done. At first glance, you'd conclude ... http://blog.crankybit.com/separating-large-repo/ After banging my head against the wall for a couple hours over an odd application error, I've finally come up with the best, most definitive reason to use <cfqueryparam> absolutely 100% of the time: It helps you avoid odd--dare I say erroneous--SQL parsing performed by ColdFusion in the <cfquery> tag.  Huh? ... http://blog.crankybit.com/best-reason-to-use-cfqueryparam/ I have an app that uses <cfexchangecalendar> to look at appointments in an Exchange calendar and display them on a form on a web page. Everything was going smoothly until the department called and notified me that new appointments they were entering were an hour off on the web app. ... http://blog.crankybit.com/dst-in-cfexchangecalendar/ It's handy to establish an SSH key between machines so that SSH-related commands don't prompt you for a password. This is handy to quickly SSH into another machine, and it's even more handy when setting up SSH commands in automated scripts. For instance, you may want to execute some rsync ... http://blog.crankybit.com/avoiding-the-password-prompt-for-ssh/ Various reasons may cause SQL Server to get in a rut and not empty the transaction log of a database. In my case, our database backups were failing without our knowledge for several weeks, so the backups were never successful, and the transaction logs of a few databases grew so ... http://blog.crankybit.com/shrink-the-unshrinkable-sql-transaction-log/ I keep all my projects in separate Subversion repositories. I did this because it feels a lot cleaner this way, there is less risk in the event of repository corruption, and I use corresponding Trac projects that I also wanted to keep separate from one project to the next. That said, ... http://blog.crankybit.com/combining-repos/ This is a nice clean way to implement string trimming for the String object in JavaScript: [js]String.prototype.trim = function() {    return this.replace(/^\\s+|\\s+$/g,""); }[/js] With that implemented, you can then trim a string in the object-oriented way you would prefer and love: [js]var myStr="This is a test!   "; alert(myStr.trim());[/js] This is handy for client-side clean-up of form ... http://blog.crankybit.com/trimming-a-string-in-javascript/ My Linux box was hosting Subversion with no problem. I added a new repository to the several that were already present, and when I checked it out, it said, "301 Moved Permanently". Excuse me? As it turns out, there is a 301 error section in the Subversion FAQs. It says that ... http://blog.crankybit.com/how-to-fix-301-error-for-subversion-checkouts/ In light of the departure of the ColdFusion Weekly podcast (so long Matt and Peter, and thank you!), I have assembled a list of my favorite "shows" or "episodes". Really, all of the episodes were good and worth hearing. But these episodes were fantastic. Presented in chronological order: v1.5 - IDEs ... http://blog.crankybit.com/favorite-coldfusion-weekly-episodes/ I have a report that is generated by ColdFusion that assists our department with account maintenance on our AD network. It looks for a certain set of accounts, then looks up the account of the employee who "requested" or "authorized" the creation of each account to ultimately get verification from ... http://blog.crankybit.com/cfldap-dies/ I was improving the CSS of an old intranet web app (written in early 2001) to be closer to standards-compliance (getting it to just look good in Firefox and Safari would be good enough for me). While I was working on that, I noticed a whole bunch of my CSS ... http://blog.crankybit.com/why-isnt-import-working-in-css/