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Rick O

Member since Feb 17, 2009

Recent Blog Comments By Rick O

  • My Approach To Building AngularJS Directives That Bind To JavaScript Events

    Posted on May 28, 2013 at 9:59 AM

    An excellent post with an excellent moral. I have been using AngularJS for a data mining and visualization portal, and deciding where to put logic has been a constant argument (with myself). Say you have to aggregate data on the client side, such as calculating means and variances over several dat... read more »

  • What The Heck Is Business Logic Anyway?

    Posted on Dec 14, 2012 at 7:03 PM

    In my head, the divide between Business and Application logic is this: Business logic manages data, Application logic manages users. If your system was never touched by users (such as an automated system, like an ETL process) there would be little or no Application logic. If your data had no struct... read more »

  • Experimenting With GitHub Gist-Based Code Samples For My Blog

    Posted on Jan 16, 2012 at 5:16 PM

    We use Gists in a teaching capacity at school, and one of the power points is that the students can fork an example Gist and run with it. I think the same could be used here on your blog if you could build it into the comments system. That is, someone forks and changes your code, links to the (new... read more »

  • Building Executable Scripts For The Mac OSX Command Line

    Posted on Jan 9, 2012 at 1:52 PM

    Permissions are easy: you have 3 numbers and each corresponds to a permission. The first number is the owner permission, what you are allowed to do. The second number is the group permission, as each file is marked not just with who owns it, but which group owns it. The third is what everyone els... read more »

  • Finding And Plotting Room Requirements For Concurrent Event Sessions

    Posted on Aug 30, 2011 at 11:15 AM

    Very nice. It's a surprisingly tricky problem, especially if you have a concern for space optimization. I made something similar back when I was playing World of Warcraft: http://rickosborne.org/wow/sp-gear/ (For a more interesting chart, use the Sources menu to Select All and then Apply Chang... read more »

  • What If ColdFusion Recognized More Truthy / Falsey Values

    Posted on Mar 25, 2011 at 11:59 PM

    PHP has an empty(value) function that does something similar. Where we might write structKeyExists(URL,'param') a whole lot of PHP code is written !empty($_GET['param']) instead of the true equivalent of array_key_exists('param',$_GET). I have an aversion to the empty()-style checks because it jus... read more »

  • Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: Erlang - Day 2

    Posted on Dec 22, 2010 at 4:28 PM

    I'm only passingly familiar with Erlang, but I have been teaching CouchDB in the classroom for a few months now. CouchDB is built in Erlang. Your examples here show a certain, for lack of a better word, "smell" to Erlang that seems to have carried into CouchDB. I don't mean this in a ba... read more »

  • Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: Ruby - Day 2

    Posted on Nov 23, 2010 at 5:27 PM

    Elliott- Sorry, I was unclear. I was referring to a web-based interactive console. So that people completely new to the language can try it out without having to install anything. Viz: http://try.mongodb.org/ http://tryruby.org/... read more »

  • Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: Ruby - Day 2

    Posted on Nov 22, 2010 at 9:10 PM

    Another Perlism: Heredocs. Nice. Another resource for you, if you find yourself really enjoying Ruby: http://railsforzombies.org/ (One of our graduates worked on that project. That's the second language I've seen with an interactive console where you can test out language features -- the firs... read more »

  • Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: Ruby - Day 1

    Posted on Nov 22, 2010 at 8:34 PM

    Interesting post, Ben, thanks! At first glance, it looks like Ruby got a number of things from Perl. The =~ search operator, for example, and the "single-line loop with postfix conditional" for another. That's one of my favorite things about Perl, actually, and I miss it in other ... read more »

  • XDOM.cfc - A ColdFusion Component For Easier XML Traversal, Manipulation, And Merging

    Posted on Nov 18, 2010 at 11:02 AM

    The definitive guide is "Pro Git" by Scott Chacon and is available in its entirety online at http://progit.org/book/ . Amazon also has them for ~$20. (And it's from Apress.) If you'd be interested in more interactive training, may I offer my services? Given your contributions to the ... read more »

  • XDOM.cfc - A ColdFusion Component For Easier XML Traversal, Manipulation, And Merging

    Posted on Nov 18, 2010 at 10:05 AM

    We gotta get you on GitHub. I'd love to submit an asQuery() patch for this.... read more »

  • Saturday Hackathon: Building A Photo Upload Site For Twitter

    Posted on Sep 21, 2010 at 10:48 AM

    If you have a chance, I'd be interested if you would break down your time spent on your hackathon. How much time in design? How much time cutting up assets (if any)? How much time writing templates, coding, testing, deploying? etc, etc, etc. I generally tell my students that actual coding is us... read more »

  • Extending The Application.cfc ColdFusion Framework Component With CFInclude

    Posted on Sep 20, 2010 at 11:34 AM

    This is twisted, and I'll admit that I can't readily think of anything intelligent to say about it ... I just wanted that poor, sad-looking, yellow-shirted Ben to feel a little happier. (Which is totally different than wanting to claim first post. I swear.)... read more »

  • Exploring Javascript's parseInt() And parseFloat() Functions

    Posted on Sep 16, 2010 at 11:04 AM

    Can you remember a world before console.log()? How did we all not go insane from alert() overload?... read more »

  • What ColdFusion Teaches Us About The Ultimate "Roll Your Own" Solution

    Posted on Sep 8, 2010 at 12:05 PM

    Good application developers know how to write code. Great application developers know how to find code that already works and then adapt it to do what they need. Who in their right mind would want to write every single line of code for an application by hand?... read more »

  • Saturday Hackathon: Client-Side MVC - The Wrong Way

    Posted on Aug 27, 2010 at 11:21 AM

    I look forward to hearing how this goes. I just spent several hours yesterday writing a new homework for my students in my Advanced Database Structures course. The homework works through the basics of CouchDB and Map/Reduce, and ends with them building a simple jQuery-based interface to the iTunes... read more »

  • Generic Invocation Wrapper For Core ColdFusion Functions

    Posted on Jun 17, 2010 at 12:16 AM

    That's truly twisted. I salute you.... read more »

  • ColdFusion CFThread Tag Body Executes As A Function Call

    Posted on Feb 23, 2010 at 1:19 PM

    Makes sense -- multithreading in most operating system-level programming languages (C, Perl, etc) is generally done with functions: Perl: new Thread \&subroutine; C++ with pthreads: pthread_create(info, attr, function, funargs); Some languages want you to create an entirely new class just for the ... read more »

  • Clearing The Session Scope Does Not End Your ColdFusion Session

    Posted on Feb 11, 2010 at 12:52 PM

    CFMAGIC is ColdFusion's way of reminding itself that it's set domain-level cookies.... read more »

I believe in love. I believe in compassion. I believe in human rights. I believe that we can afford to give more of these gifts to the world around us because it costs us nothing to be decent and kind and understanding. And, I want you to know that when you land on this site, you are accepted for who you are, no matter how you identify, what truths you live, or whatever kind of goofy shit makes you feel alive! Rock on with your bad self!
Ben Nadel