Blog

Coding is JUST like carpentry, except with keyboards and mice instead of hammers and saws. Ok, ok, that analogy breaks down pretty quickly, but the thought did occur to me today. Let me explain. During the summer months my church spends the summer doing service projects like picking up trash and painting houses. With our recent tenant finish snugly under our belt we ventured out into the construction field to flex our power drills and sawzalls and help a smaller church in need.

Some time ago while working in cfscript I had the need to cfparam a bunch of variables. I was building an XML document out of form fields and a number of the fields wouldn't always exist. At first I made a simple UDF to encapsulate a cfparam tag, but it this code was inside of a loop that beat it over and over again before it was finished and performance just wasn't cutting it. The culprit as it seemed was scope hunting.

Many of the low-level technicalities of our life go on right under our nose without us really understanding their inner workings. You drive your car everyday, but do you understand how an internal combustion engine works? You keep your milk cold in the fridge, but do you grasp the physics of why Freon absorbs energy when it becomes a gas? As a mere user, deep understanding of the things you use is generally not necessary, but if you build or maintain one of these systems you had better know what goes on under the hood.

The past couple of days I've been messing around with a couple functions, cleaning them up a bit to blog about them. One of them is for color-coding SQL and the other for highlighting differences in two strings. Both are pretty small, but very repetitive in what they do. Depending on the size of the text you are processing, performance varied. Sometimes the code inside was repeated hundreds of thousands of times given a large enough test.

Research shows that driving while extremely tired renders the same results as driving drunk. Following that same line of though, is coding while sleep deprived the same as writing your code in a drunken stupor?

I have a solution that I have gotten working locally to rid my ColdFusion logs of the annoying "Cannot create cookie" errors. For those of you just joining us, Teeps blogged it, Jochem explained it, I took a stab and it and failed, and now I'm back for round two. I apologize for blogging this so much lately, but once I get a good puzzle in my craw, I just can't let up until I've solved it.

They say that hindsight is 20/20 and I think they're right. Ray announced the winner of his Lemonade Stand contest today and I'm afraid I didn't do too well. In fact I lost $3.87 overall. Don't worry though, after downloading the code and fixing my function up a bit I can win almost every time now! If only I could remember where I put that danged time machine...

Zac Spitzer recently blogged about an article explaining how to hack ColdFusion. Overall the "exposé" was mostly meaningless drivel not having anything much to do specifically with ColdFusion itself. It was accompanied by an array of Code Samples that look like they were written by a third grader. One point the article made though caught my eye. It claimed MySQL would let you inject SQL into a cfquery not using cfqueryparam even if the variable was enclosed in single ticks. "Could it be?", I scoffed. Oh yes, yes it is true.

While, Ray is still reeling from the massive response to his IPhone post which has pushed back the Lemonade Stand Puzzler, I thought I would take a quick opportunity to put my code out there. In overview, Ray asked us to write a function that emulated a Lemonade Stand. It had to decide how many cups of lemonade to sell and for what price based on the weather, temperature, budget, and cost of supplies.

Teeps started off the fun last month with this blog post about countless errors in his logs about not being able to set cookies. I get the errors too, and they usually look like this: 07/11 15:58:19 error Cannot create cookie: domain = .notingdetails.com 07/11 16:19:01 error Cannot create cookie: domain = .notingdetails.com 07/11 16:39:12 error Cannot create cookie: domain = .notingdetails.com 07/11 16:45:05 error Cannot create cookie: domain = .notingdetails.com