I've built and consumed SOAP web services. I've consumed REST web services. It wasn't until a couple days ago I got a chance to consume an XML-RPC web service. I'll readily admit, I'm still a little unsure of the exact differences between the two, but the more I Google, the clearer it is becoming.

I was working on a friend's multi-meter today and found myself needing to run to RadioShack. I'd rather not elaborate why I needed to fix my friend's multi-meter. It involves a test lead in the Ohms plug, 120 Volts AC, 2 blown fuses, 1 smoked capacitor and me. Suffice it to say I set out to fetch a new ceramic capacitor with radial leads, measuring 82 pico farads that wasn't shorted out.

If you have ever used the iif() (inline if) function in ColdFusion you have probably found yourself using the de() (delay evaluate) function as well. I remember using that function for quite some time without ever really understanding when I needed it and exactly what it did. I found myself explaining it to someone last week and thought it would be an interesting topic to blog.

I installed SQL Server 2005 Express today on my home PC. For the most part it was painless, but there were a couple snags. First, it took me a couple tries to find the right download page. A bunch of the links on Microsoft's site kept redirecting me to the 2008 page. Still other pages wouldn't even mention 2005.

Have I been the only person constantly annoyed by the JavaScript error that pops up on EVERY SINGLE page at feeds.adobe.com? Apparently you only get the message in IE. It is related to some site tracking code called SiteCatalyst and apparently doesn't run for Firefox. I kept assuming Adobe would fix it, but it's been weeks, so I finally fired up MS Fiddler to have a look.

Adobe announced their free academic version of ColdFusion at CFUnited this year that would be available to educational institutions teaching ColdFusion. The release has been plagued by delays, but they promise it is coming soon. During a discussion today on the CF-Talk list about it, the topic of textbooks for teaching ColdFusion came up. I bugged Ben Forta about it and he stated that while they would love to release official teaching materials with it, they haven't received approval for it from the Adobe big cheese yet and he's not holding his breath.

I had a little time tonight to download and install FarCry 5.0.0 to play around. I mainly just wanted to see how it worked and what all you can do with it. It seems a lot of people complain that it is too complicated. I guess I'll see for myself.

Today over lunch I was recounting my first hour on the World Wide Web. I was in middle school (I'm 28 now) and we had visited a friend's house. He told me if I was good he would give me one free hour on The Web.

It has been mentioned in several places that MySQL 5.0.1 has a NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES mode it can be run in to prevent backslashes from being an escape character. Thanks to Azadi Saryev for pointing it out on my blog and Mark Krugers as well. Jake Munson even posted instructions for applying the setting to your SQL server at startup. For the record, you can also use this setting on a specific data source.

I've been staring at my computer monitor trying start this paragraph for about 10 minutes now, so I'm just going to start typing. I've been thinking about system design. Organization versus performance. Design patterns versus efficiency. We adopt some code without thought to its performance because we're talking about milliseconds, and the readability, organization, and structure gains our apps enjoy are well worth it. I'm not sure that is always the case though, and we don't notice it until too late.