By barneyb on March 2, 2010
One of the problems with statistics is that they work really well when you have perfect data (and therefore don't really need to do statistics), but start falling apart when the real world rears it's ugly head and gives you data that isn't all smooth. Consider a very specific case: you have items that people [...]
Posted in development, potd
By barneyb on February 12, 2010
I've been playing with FW/1 a bit on a personal app, and it has proven incredibly frustrating due to multiple manifestations of a single problem: your Application.cfc HAS to extend the framework in order to use the framework. My complaint really has nothing to do with FW/1 in particular, the exact same argument could be [...]
Posted in cfml, development
By barneyb on June 2, 2009
I'm not sure when I started, but I've documented things in the first person for quite a while. Fusedocs promoted this format, and was probably a significant influence, though I recall doing it back in college as well. It's clearly not new or uncommon, but I just had a gentleman email me about it (based [...]
Posted in development, personal
By barneyb on May 26, 2009
About a week ago, Marc Funaro wrote an interesting blog post about CFML and OO. The prevailing opinion (via Twitter, blogs, etc) is that Marc is incorrect/inaccurate/inexperienced/whatever, and I disagree completely. He hit the nail on the head.
HTTP is a stateless, request-response environment. Nearly all web applications interface with a SQL database, which is also [...]
Posted in cfml, development, personal
By barneyb on May 26, 2009
I know I'm late to the "cf.objective() recap" party, but I've been both crazy busy and rather tired, so I haven't got to it until now.
First, I'd never been to Minneapolis before, and from the little I saw, it's a pretty nice place. Obviously I missed the "buried under snow" part, and that definitely puts [...]
Posted in cfml, development, personal
By barneyb on May 21, 2009
Image manipulation is a common tasks for web applications, usually centered around creating and managing thumbnails (of photos, PDFs, videos, whatever). Photo manipulation is a subset of image manipulation, and has a couple aspects that differentiate it other types.
First and foremost, photo quality is of high importance. Contrast this with creating a thumbnail of a [...]
Posted in development
By barneyb on April 10, 2009
Ever done functional programming? Chances are you'll say "no", but you'll probably be wrong. Javascript is a functional language, and while a lot of people use it in a procedural and/or object oriented way (\me raises hand), it's foundation is functional. Same deal with ActionScript. Used Groovy? Ruby? Python? None are functional (let [...]
Posted in development, groovy
By barneyb on April 6, 2009
If you read my blog regularly, chances are you write software and therefore can't, because your tools don't exist in the visual world. They're just magic strings of minuscule magnets on a rapidly spinning chunk of plastic…
I took my chef's knife to the sharpener a few days ago. Cost a whopping $4 to have him [...]
Posted in development, personal, tools
By barneyb on March 17, 2009
Ray Camden posted an interesting article over on InsideRIA about expanding short urls using jQuery and ColdFusion. After reading the article, I thought he was overcomplicating things somewhat by relying on the url shortening services' APIs to do the lookups. Yes, that's what APIs are for, but for this case, HTTP happens to be a [...]
Posted in cfml, development, javascript
By barneyb on March 17, 2009
In Spring 1.2 (and ColdSpring, which emulates it), you have the "singleton" attribute, which was a boolean flag for whether a bean is a singleton (the default) or a prototype (instantiated afresh for every getBean call). If you've used Spring 2.0+, you've probably come across the "scope" attribute, which supersedes the "singleton" attribute, and allows [...]
Posted in cfml, development, tools
