So, this week, I was approached about doing a project in a language that I have never written in before.  I do not have the project yet but I was left wondering how much time to budget to learn the language.  A good friend of mine is fond of saying that a coder should be able to write in any language and I do believe that.  I also know that I do not know everything, though.  I’ve had good experiences previously with koans.  This week, I’ll probably download and check out C# Koans.

Useful and/or interesting stuff I found this week:

The effect of positive/negative attitude in system development

IronGate: ColdFusion Exception Manager

Man puts plane engine in bike

Using closures [I just started looking into this]

Georgia Tech / Udacity $7k MS in Computer Science

Send money for free, with gmail

Make/keep an off-site copy of your MSSQL Database

Monitor website up-time for free [I love this]

So, this week, I was asked to write a chunk of PHP code to interact with the PayFlow Pro APIs.  It was my first ever chunk of production PHP code.  I have to admit, I was not necessarily impressed with PHP.  What’s up those weird data masks?

I also used cfthread for the first time (that I can remember).  I came across a chunk of ColdFusion that was running as a scheduled task but it heavily leveraging JavaScript.  Essentially, it was building a list of tasks and spinning them off using ajax.  I didn’t think that would work, so I threw a cfmail into the code to verify that.  The cfmail tag never triggered.  So, how did I fix the code?  Instead using JavaScript to spin off the task, I just included the subtask’s code into a cfthread block.  It works well now.

Useful and/or interesting stuff I found this week:

Planet Money is making a T-shirt [kickstarter]

Add “Login using Twitter” to your ColdFusion App

Real programmers use … [xkcd]

fartscroll.js [The Onion]

How to (actually) eat healthily on £1 per day

Pictures of food cut in half

So, this past week, I spent a lot of time working on basic clean-up and security tightening.  I was thinking, though about how to improve development of CRUD code.

I read a reddit post a few months ago, that talked about reddit having only two tables per thing.  There is a thing table (holding common attributes) and a data table (holding ID, key, and value).  I could see this as speeding up development of CRUD code.  If all schemas are essentially the same, you would only need minor tweaks from CRUD app to CRUD app.  It feels like a little bit of a deal with the devil, though.

I have always liked the thought of bottling up chunks of CRUD and calling them as methods of a crud class.  You could have a date-picker method, a file upload method, a record list method, etc.  I’m not sure if such a thing exists in the ColdFusion world.  One of these days, I might need to pick it up as a task.  That, along with use of ORM should make CRUD development reasonably easy and uniform.

Useful and/or interesting stuff I found this week:

Is It Worth the Time? [xkcd]
Microsoft Puts Free Portable WiFi In Forbes Magazine Print Issues
CRAPCHA
“Google’s Self-Driving Car gathers almost 1 GB per SECOND”
Eat This Much [Automated Meal Planner]
Super Mario Bros. Characters Reimagined as Hipsters
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in Milwaukee
$50, Starbucks-based application testing
Embed Photo Spheres on Your Website
Ghost: Just a Blogging Platform [kickstarter]
Tool for checking a vehicle’s VIN for free

I am planning on doing something new, here.  I am going to start writing a “week in review” post where I talk about something that I worked on over the past week and maybe provide some links and/or photos from the week.  This is meant to be 50% brain dump and 50% “I hope this helps someone”.

Early this week, I was given the task of double-checking the output of an international website.  The site was written in ColdFusion 8 and I inherited it when I entered the organization.  It has a “local site” for a dozen different countries and there is a mechanism for determining which content is visible for which country.  I changed this mechanism, with the goal of making it more efficient and maintainable.  I believe I succeeded in that, but I was left with the task of making sure that the correct content was still displayed in the correct place.  After all, there was a lot of legal disclosures to compare.

At first, I started looking at writing a script that would get each page, trim it, and show me the differences.  The problem with that is that tools like Beyond Compare and WinMerge already exist.  Why reinvent the wheel?  I then started looking at writing a script to just get the versions of the sites so that I could compare them.  I quickly remembered (or was reminded) that wget can do that for you.

I wrote a bash script to get all of the local versions of the site and save them to the local disk.  I then started doing comparisons.  That is when I realized something that stopped me cold.  ColdFusion outputs spaces and line breaks in parts of the code that don’t output anything (like cfloop, cfif, etc.).  Since I changed the way the content inclusion worked, it moved a lot of those spaces and line breaks.

In the end, I had to go from page to page, manually copying text into Beyond Compare and marking each page as checked.  It was a good idea but not all good ideas work out in the end.

Useful and/or interesting stuff I found this week:

Passwords for the manly man

Open … the … door.

Boy scouts vaporize watermelon