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Sometimes I wonder about ColdFusion. Mostly when it gets depressed and locks itself in the bathroom with a box of chocolates. Seriously though, the identity of CF can sometimes be illusive when you listen to what everybody wants all at once. ColdFusion is different than most languages and I think that's a good thing, but what pushes us to request the changes we want? Do we wish CF was easier to pick up for the beginner? Perhaps we want it to behave a bit more like our favorite scripting language for our benefit or to impress our friends.

I have been pouring over the latest Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, and particularly liked Sean Cornfield's article "Beans and DAOs and Gateways, Oh My!" I am pretty familiar with the four application layers he describes, but have had difficulty at times reconciling all the diverse ways I see those implemented. (design patterns) I feel I have a good grasp on OOP, but most of my current application is still on a version of Fusebox 4 which was modified to the point of not being easily upgradeable. We have tried to do new development in MachII, but my exposure has been modest.

In a very cool announcement today the Google Blog announced that it will be able to index Flash content. Google doesn't go into details, but they did mention that they used "Adobe's new Searchable SWF library". I'll have to look into that. So what do you guys think? Will this make Flex a real player? Will this give Flex a distinct advantage over SilverLight?

If you haven't seen it yet, Adobe announced their "official MAX NA Experience website" last week. It has session, speakers and event details. Ben Forta himself is in a humorous little video for which I have provided a quick screen shot of here.

This has been around for while, but I just came across it. There is a company on Amazon.com seriously selling a network cable for $500. Read the comments, but warning-- you may laugh so hard you wet your pants. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000I1X6PM/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Well, my church's website got bit this week. I'll point out that I have nothing to do with the hosting or security of this site, I just help them keep it updated. The site is hosted at IPower, which in my overall opinion as a hosting company falls somewhere between pond scum and moss. No wait, make it rock. Scum or moss would be giving them too much credit. (That's another story though) Fortunately for IPower, this one can't be blamed on them. It appears someone guessed our FTP login's password, (probably a port scan and brute force attack) and recursively perused through our site modifying any file which was named index.*

Coding is JUST like carpentry, except with keyboards and mice instead of hammers and saws. Ok, ok, that analogy breaks down pretty quickly, but the thought did occur to me today. Let me explain. During the summer months my church spends the summer doing service projects like picking up trash and painting houses. With our recent tenant finish snugly under our belt we ventured out into the construction field to flex our power drills and sawzalls and help a smaller church in need.

I was working with URLs last week while working on my Is It Flex utility and I was looking for a handy way to take a base URL and a path/file relative to that URL and come up with a fully qualified combination. For instance, let's say you have the page http://www.mysite.com/pages/about.html and that page contains a relative reference to an image like this: The fully qualified path to the image would be "http://www.mysite.com/pages/my_photo.jpg". Ok, but given those first two pieces of information how do I consistently come up with the full path while taking into account any number of subdirectories, possible non-standard ports, and query strings with goodness knows what in them. My example at the time didn't have all those factors, but I figure any problem worth solving is worth solving well.

So I was working with CFHTTP the other day and noticed a strange behavior. There are two attributes I want to focus on: resolveurl and redirect. When setting redirect equal to true, ColdFusion will follow up to four 30x redirects (if a location header is provided) the most common being 302 (moved temporarily) and 301 (moved permanently). Redirects actually happen more often than you probably think. Did you know every time you type in a URL like "www.server.com/folder" your browser has to make two requests to get the page. There might be a file called "folder", but if there isn't, a 302 comes back and says check out "www.server.com/folder/" (with the trailing slash). A very common example of the 301 redirect is when you type in "yahoo.com". The server comes back and says try "www.yahoo.com".

Well I've put off doing this for a very long time, but now I've officially entered the blogosphere.