Christine and I, having settled into our new jobs, are rolling up our sleeves to dig in and start some hardcore re-factoring. The legacy applications we are dealing with run smoothly and quickly for the most part, but are teetering on the edge of being un-maintainable. They suffer from the standard trademarks of any legacy code which has seen many programmers over the years-- lack of code reuse, absent standards, poorly normalized data structures, and minimal separation of view, business, and data. Don't think I'm knocking it too hard though. It's probably not much different than a lot of the code bases out there. We believe it can be better though. Easier to maintain, understand, and extend. Enter our plan for world domination...

I found a humorous bug in Yahoo's news photos tonight. After reaching the last image in the "Most Viewed Photos" the "next" button brought up a list of "Most Viewed Slideshows". Three of the slideshows listed looked like this:

I can't tell you how excited I am to be going to Adobe Max in San Fran next month. This will be the first real conference I have ever gone to. I'm very glad my employer sees the benefit in the training I am looking forward to getting. So far there has only been one thing about Max that really sucks...

I had the need to calculate how many week days existed in an arbitrary range of dates today. I Googled for a while but didn't find anything I liked and I really didn't want to iterate over the entire range and count. For what it's worth, this is what I hacked out.

I was just staring a a piece of ActionScript code trying to figure out why the two date objects I was comparing were not coming up equal. I'm ashamed to say I didn't notice the problem at first because I had mistakenly typed if(date1 = date2) Two equals signs ("==") work a little better than one since the single operator obviously changes the value of the former operand. :) Once I fixed that, I found my real problem.

In case you are wondering, "Axes" is the plural form of "Axis" and it is pronounced "Axees" with a long e as in "see". Perhaps you have never pondered that one, but it's been driving me crazy. In this post I wanted to demonstrate a little experiment I did tonight to try and not duplicate as much formatting when it came to my charting data tips. I can already think of a few problems with it, but I wanted to try anyway.

Well, once again this is a pretty basic post of information readily available on the Internet. It took me seemingly forever to piece it all together, so I am blogging it to cement it in my mind and hopefully help someone else down the road. This week I have conquered the formatting of my X and Y axis labels for my charts. As usual, the hoops are a little bulky to jump through when you just want to add a very simple bit of formatting, but the flexibility is awesome.

I came up with a ColdFusion-only hackish solution for the whitespace problem caused by query of queries. Brad suggested I hardcode a temp table into a random SQL database on our server, which is also a good hackish solution, but required database access. Because I was doing all of this work without accessing the database, I wanted to come up with a solution I could implement just in ColdFusion.

I've been working on modifying the QueryParamScanner to have a new screen that will allow me to fix the queries and update the files automatically. I finally seem to have everything working and I have the code setup so I can edit the suggested changes to fix anything that the regular expression didn't guess correctly. Last night I was running a final test and I noticed that I had lost all of the whitespace at the beginning and end of each query.

Recently Yahoo's home page changed for me. Interestingly enough, I only get the new page at home while using Internet Explorer. Apparently they are "easing" their redesigned site into the market a few users at a time. I didn't start getting it until I cleared my IE cookies last night. Even after clearing my Firefox cookies, I still get the old school page there.