By barneyb on November 29, 2007
Charlie Arehart send me an email the other day about my Flex charting control and the way it's presented on the site (which is poorly). I ended up writing a fairly long response that was a bit tangential, but unreasonably so. The basic premise was that it's my site, and I don't like maintaining web [...]
Posted in meta, personal
By barneyb on November 29, 2007
I've updated the FlexChart demo to include display of the descriptor XML that is loaded into the chart, as well as providing a way to edit the XML inline and load your modified XML into the chart client-side. In addition to being far easier to experiment with, it also showcases the the client-side redrawing of [...]
Posted in coldfusion, flex, tools
By barneyb on November 28, 2007
Found some really interesting behaviour with CFTHREAD over the past couple days of testing. Put this code into three browser tabs and run them concurrently (so you get three simultaneous requests which you can view the output of). And ensure you have the CF Server Monitor open in a different window with monitoring enabled and [...]
Posted in coldfusion
By barneyb on November 26, 2007
I just updated FlexChart with a 'click' callback. You can now specify the name of a JavaScript function to be invoked when a data point on the chart is clicked. The function is passed the ID of the chart, the series label, and the x and y values for the point, in that order. Check [...]
Posted in coldfusion, flex, tools
By barneyb on November 26, 2007
I was working with CFTHREAD today, and found an interesting bug in ColdFusion. I'd wager that it's within the monitoring stuff new in CF8, but I can't say that for sure. Here's the problem:
Creating threads with CFTHREAD makes them appear in the server monitor, but they aren't removed from the server monitor when the terminate [...]
Posted in coldfusion
By barneyb on November 25, 2007
For most of the US, as is common knowledge, this weekend was Thanksgiving weekend. For most of the "white collar" workforce, that means a four day weekend. Which brings up an interesting question. What color is my collar? It certainly not a laborer, which seems to mean it's white by default, but that seems … [...]
Posted in personal
By barneyb on November 25, 2007
Google released a new version of the GMail UI a couple weeks ago. Not a whole lot different on the surface, but it's noticeably snappier overall, and has a few little improvements throughout (mute from the actions menu, contact detail popups).
I had two main gripes: it doesn't work with the [unsupported] BetterGMail Firefox plugin and [...]
Posted in personal, tools
By barneyb on November 25, 2007
I discovered a critical bug in my schema tool this evening. During the refactoring I did last week to allow multiple persistence mechanisms (so it doesn't require a DB) I reintroduced a bug that I had fixed in the DB-only version.
If the first minor version of a migration (major version) throws an error, it [...]
Posted in coldfusion, tools
By barneyb on November 25, 2007
I'm a big fan of MySQL, but I ran into an interesting performance issue this weekend regarding views. MySQL added view support in 5.0, and I've used it to great effect, but it's not all roses.
Edit (2009-04-22): I used the term "materialized view" below in a misleading way. True materialized views are stored in [...]
Posted in database, tools
By barneyb on November 22, 2007
This evening, I extended my Flex charting widget further. The demo is still available, and I've posted a new ZIP archive of the source.  Here's a quick rundown of what's changed:
The custom tag is now called xmlchart.cfm, instead of just chart.cfm. That's to make way for a different chart.cfm that provides an XML-less interface (like [...]
Posted in coldfusion, flex, tools