May 2008 Web Log Entries
Bigger, Stronger, Faster - The Side Effects Of Being American
Posted: May 31, 2008 at 4:43 PM by Ben Nadel
Last night, I went to see Bigger, Stronger, Faster - The Side Effects of Being American. Written by Chris Bell and staring him and his two brothers, it is a no nonsense look at the world of performance enhancing drugs - what they are, what they do, who uses them, and most interestingly, how America is so incredibly hypocritical when it comes to de... read more »
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National Regular Expression Day And Reflections On My Own Journey
Posted: May 30, 2008 at 10:22 AM by Ben Nadel
With National Regular Expression Day coming up this Sunday, I was taking some time to reflect on my own journey into the land of regular expressions. I have really only come to love regular expressions in the last 3 or 4 years. Before that, I knew they existed, and I know people used them, but I really didn't know anything about them. It all see... read more »
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Ask Ben: Dynamically Executing ColdFusion Application.cfc Instances
Posted: May 30, 2008 at 8:57 AM by Ben Nadel
Here's a challenge. I'm trying to code a solution to replace a hefty, expensive CMS platform. ColdFusion does a lot of stuff and, I believe, can be used to replace that platform. Except for one thing; that CMS can surface CF apps and allow them to use the application.cfc within their directory. An example: /root/application.cfc /root/index.cfm /r... read more »
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POIUtility.cfc - "Too Many Fonts / Formats" Issue Fixed
Posted: May 29, 2008 at 10:06 AM by Ben Nadel
A number of people have brought this issue up to me (I would thank you, but I simply am not organized with my emails, sorry). Basically, because the POI Utility custom tags were creating new CellStyle objects for each cell in the Excel sheet, Microsoft Excel was going over the number of formats that it could use. Apparently there is some upper l... read more »
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HotFix For "The ColdFusion Mail Spool Encountered An Invalid Spool File In The Spool Directory"
Posted: May 29, 2008 at 7:45 AM by Ben Nadel
Dav just pointed out to me that there is a public Adobe HotFix for the ColdFusion 8.0.1 CFMail problem that was causing this error in my mail log file: The ColdFusion Mail Spool Encountered An Invalid Spool File In The Spool Directory. The invalid file MailXXXXXX.cfmail was moved to the undeliverable directory. I just downloaded the HotFix , ... read more »
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ColdFusion, jQuery, And "AJAX" File Upload Demo
Posted: May 28, 2008 at 4:05 PM by Ben Nadel
As part of the project I am currently working on, I had to learn how to post files to the server using AJAX. I had never even attempted this before, so I was extra excited to learn something new. Of course, what you might learn quickly is that you cannot actually do this via "AJAX". Luckily, Rob Gonda warned me about this at the New York ColdFu... read more »
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June 1st 2008 - National Regular Expression Day! (Post A Comment, Win A Prize)
Posted: May 28, 2008 at 10:01 AM by Ben Nadel
NOTE: To win prizes, you must post a comment below (and mention which prize you would be interested in). Not so long ago, I was walking down 14th street in New York City when out of no where, I started to think about Regular Expressions. They are just so awesome. I actually took a moment out of my walk home to stop and think about how much th... read more »
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CFHttpSession.cfc Fixed And Added To Projects
Posted: May 28, 2008 at 8:45 AM by Ben Nadel
A while back, I created CFHttpSession.cfc , a ColdFusion component that wraps around ColdFusion's CFHttp tag to maintain a session across multiple CFHttp requests. It does this by capturing returned cookie information from each response and sending it back with the subsequent CFHttp requests. As part of that blackbox, the CFHttpSession.cfc also h... read more »
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Malcolm Gladwell, Transactive Memory, And Pair Programming
Posted: May 27, 2008 at 2:12 PM by Ben Nadel
Thanks to a recommendation by Clark Valberg , I recently read The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. It was a good read and I like Gladwell's somewhat meandering story telling style. One thing that he mentioned really caught my attention - Transactive Memory. In the book he explains that when two peo... read more »
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Array Iteration Is Much Faster That Struct Iteration (Thanks Eric Stevens)
Posted: May 27, 2008 at 8:32 AM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I claimed that Struct iteration would be faster than array iteration in ColdFusion. This wasn't totally out of left field - what I have read about the two different objects and their underlying Java classes (FastHashTable and ArrayCollection) would have suggested that look ups on a Struct were faster than look ups on an array. After I m... read more »
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Updated: Converting A ColdFusion Query To CSV Using QueryToCSV()
Posted: May 27, 2008 at 7:59 AM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I posted a ColdFusion user defined function that took a ColdFusion query object and turned it into a comma separated value (CSV) string . I had made heavy use of the Java StringBuffer to build the string. This however, required many method calls and extra string concatenation that apparently was slowing things down. This is a good exam... read more »
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Ask Ben: Working With Inconsistent XML
Posted: May 23, 2008 at 10:49 AM by Ben Nadel
About your post: Testing For The Absence Of A Text Node Using XmlSearch() And XPath... I could not post any code so I am writing you here. Useful info. Here's another one for ya. Say your looping through some XML you got via cfhttp that has, at times, *inconsistent data*. See below. <girl> . . . <name>Hayden Panettiere</name> . ... read more »
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Bug With ARGUMENTS Scope And Implicit Array / Struct Creation
Posted: May 23, 2008 at 9:01 AM by Ben Nadel
When I was working on my XmlDeleteNodes() user defined function , I ran into a weird issue involving the ARGUMENTS scope and implict array notation. This feels very much like a bug to me, but I am not 100% sure. With my XmlDeleteNodes() method, you could pass in either a single node or an array of nodes to be deleted. However, internally, I wante... read more »
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Deleting XML Node Arrays From A ColdFusion XML Document
Posted: May 23, 2008 at 8:21 AM by Ben Nadel
Yesterday, I was working on an audit system that stored data at XML when I needed to delete a bunch of XML nodes from a particular document. I don't spend a lot of time manipulating ColdFusion XML documents; most of my work with them has been either creating them and searching them using XPath and XmlSearch(). As such, I wasn't sure what the best ... read more »
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Testing For The Absence Of A Text Node Using XmlSearch() And XPath
Posted: May 22, 2008 at 9:17 AM by Ben Nadel
In my previous post , I explored the issues associated with non-existent text nodes in ColdFusion XML documents. Because non-existent text nodes, like NULL values in SQL, cannot be compared to values for equality or inequality, it sometimes becomes necessary to check for the very existence of a text node. Generally, when we use XPath predicates i... read more »
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