Josh Nathanson

Recent Blog Comments By Josh Nathanson

• A New Wrist Pain

  Posted on Aug 18, 2008 at 5:31 PM

  @Jason -- whoa, acupuncture is junk science? Acupuncture has been practiced in the East for thousands of years to great success. It's really our own narrow-mindedness in the West that keeps us from taking advantage of alternative solutions. I had a personal experience with acupuncture that really... read more »

• OOPhoto - If Object.Validate(), Why Not Object.Save()?

  Posted on Aug 18, 2008 at 5:11 PM

  The object doesn't have to know anything about saving itself - it just has to know exactly where to find that information, or, where to pass itself to complete the requested operation. I've found a good way to handle this is to pass in, via the object service, a pointer to your DAO to every instanc... read more »

• Chase Bank - Worst And Seemingly Most Insecure Telephone Interface Ever!

  Posted on Jul 21, 2008 at 1:59 PM

  I wouldn't be surprised if they found out that asking people to say their numbers out loud, reduced the number of mistakes. It might be easier to make a mistake typing in a long number like an account number, than it is if you're reading it off a bill or something. These decisions are usually bott... read more »

• Turning On Multiple Statements In ColdFusion 8 MySQL 4/5 Datasource

  Posted on Jun 11, 2008 at 2:34 PM

  Thanks for the tidbit Ben. I have always worked around this limitation in the past, but I absolutely need multiple statements for something I'm working on. I did a google search for "mysql 5 allow multiple statements" and your post came up.... read more »

• Writing AJAX Return Value Logic On The Server

  Posted on Apr 17, 2008 at 5:21 PM

  @Adam, what do you think about an ajax call building html on the server and then sending it back to the DOM? The classic example is generating options for a select menu, or rows for a table. I just find this to be cleaner than sending back a bunch of JSON and then building the DOM elements in the ... read more »

• JSON: Minor But VERY Important Detail Creating Syntax Error: Invalid Label

  Posted on Mar 5, 2008 at 3:45 PM

  Almost two years later and this post is still paying dividends. Luckily I didn't bang my head for too long before googling "invalid label". Thanks Ben!... read more »

• DreamWeaver CS3 Slows Me Down

  Posted on Feb 18, 2008 at 5:16 PM

  I still use DW MX 2004. I finally got it working really fast with no delays or anything, so I don't feel the need to move to CS3. Some tweaking was necessary in the Preferences area to get it working fast, most notable turning off "Show contents of included file" in "Invisible Elements" preference... read more »

• jQuery Reference Guide By PACKT Publishing

  Posted on Oct 22, 2007 at 2:18 PM

  Hey Ben and other jQuery'ers, Another fantastic book, while not specifically related to jQuery, is jQuery creator John Resig's book: Pro Javascript Techniques. Reading this book shored up many of the gaps in my understanding of JS, and John's enthusiasm for the subject is exemplified throughout, w... read more »

• Using CASE Statements In A SQL UPDATE Query

  Posted on Aug 30, 2007 at 3:11 PM

  When I say simple values I mean you can't do something like this: CASE WHEN 1 THEN 'Where colval = 1' ELSE 'Where colval = 2' END In other words you can't change the structure of the query the way you can using dynamic CF.... read more »

• Using CASE Statements In A SQL UPDATE Query

  Posted on Aug 30, 2007 at 3:08 PM

  It's amazing what SQL can do once you start digging into it. A little gotcha about CASE statements is that you can only return simple values in your THEN clauses. It's a little less flexible than using dynamic CF in your queries, but as long as you are only looking to return simple values the CASE... read more »

• Ask Ben: Printing Shipping Labels With ColdFusion

  Posted on Aug 24, 2007 at 7:24 PM

  Oh I see, you are using an MS Word label template, never mind.... read more »

• Ask Ben: Printing Shipping Labels With ColdFusion

  Posted on Aug 24, 2007 at 7:23 PM

  If you are just outputting formatted html, how about using cfdocument to generate a PDF? This is available on >= CF7 and a lot easier.... read more »

• Tiny Change In ColdFusion Coding Methodology

  Posted on Aug 24, 2007 at 7:17 PM

  I pretty much lowercase everything as well. Even multi-word variable names and functions, unless the words next to each other have the same end/start letters, then I'll camel case the whole thing: i.e. "listtoarray" becomes "listToArray" Except for some reason, I still like to use a capital "A" on... read more »

• ColdFusion Calendar Event Scripting (Inspired By Peter Bell)

  Posted on Jul 30, 2007 at 5:51 PM

  I happen to have a public-facing calendaring application, so I have had the pleasure of running up against all of these issues and more. The toughest one is a recurrence type of what I call "Monthly, same days of the week." That's not the greatest description, but it takes into account things like... read more »

• Ignorance Rears Its Ugly Head Again

  Posted on Jul 13, 2007 at 4:52 PM

  It all comes back to CF's lack of marketing. I suppose CF has always provided a decent ROI for its owners (Allaire, Macromedia, now Adobe) without the slightest bit of marketing. Why spend money on advertising if you're making money without it? Because of this, CF is not "in your face" like a Mic... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 8: CFThread Part III - Set It And Forget It

  Posted on Jun 4, 2007 at 1:01 PM

  Thanks for the posts Ben. I'd never fully grokked threading concepts before and this goes a long way toward clearing things up for me.... read more »