Cozmo's Dev Blog

Why OO Rocks

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:15:00-0700

It is late, I am really, really, tired but I am going to weigh in on this debate over whether OO is worth it or not. I offer this nugget of fun. I wrote a wrapper for the default CFC's created by Illudium a while back. This is all the code I need to do the following database operations with only the contents of a struct (form in this case): INSERT, UPDATE, SELECT, DELETE, AND UPDATE a many to many look up table

    databaseService.Update(MyTable, form);  Select_ARTISTS = databaseService.Select(MyTable, form, orderby, "true");  databaseService.insertinto(MyTable, form);   databaseService.Delete(MyTable, form);   databaseService.saveManyToMany("ORDERITEMS", MyFK, MyFKvalue, manyfield, manyValueList);    // I even wrote a custom tag for it

Mind you I am one of those "old skool" CFers that picked up OO in the last couple of years. So it can be done. It just takes some (hard) work, but no harder than learning CF to begin with... No really. It just takes time and deliberate practice and it will pay off. Just like anything else worth while. Update: 7/20/2009 8:06:03 PM I was asked about the wrapper for the Illudium CFC's and I will be releasing it later on this week G OUT!!!

How to create insane customer loyalty

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:58:00-0700

I have been a beer aficionado, home brewer, etc for many years. My favorite beer in the whole wide world is Baltika No. 9. It is a very rich, robust, complex and decidedly strong European Lager. I like beer you have to chew before swallowing ;o). It is imported from Russia and the local shop that I get it from has had a difficult time getting a hold of it over the last year or so. So when ever I stop by, I always ask "Did my Baltika No. 9 come in yet?". So I stopped in yesterday and this is what I saw. I have been self employed for 13 years and the very existence of my pay check has often depended on my customers being happy... So this really struck me. With a very small, but genuine, personalized, and most importantly, public gesture they have pretty much insured that I will be a customer for life. G- OUT

Seeking recommendations for a drop down menu (tabs)

Tue, 19 May 2009 20:22:00-0700

I have a very finicky and non trivial CSS based layout that I have finally worked all the kinks out of. Actually it is only finicky in IE. Now the powers that be want to add drop down menus (tabs) the top nav bar that use the sliding door rounded corner technique. I have tried a bunch of menuing systems: Dynamic Drive menus, Spry, some jQuery plugins, Massimo's hiermenu and a bunch of stuff I found off of the Google and all of them have problems of one sort or another. I can't position it correctly, it trows off other page elementsm the drop down columns are mis-aligned etc... forever and ever, world with out end. Amen. I posted this to CF_talk a few months back (the site got shelved since then and it is back in production) and though I would hit up the blogosphere.. Has anybody out there had any luck with this and can recommend a tabbed menu dropdown solution? The primary requirement are:

It can have sub menus
W3C XHTML compliant.
Allows for text based links

These are the Menus that I have tried so far:

(ot) Pleas leave a comment below. Many TIA!!!

The best part about FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is not that it is free.

Thu, 07 May 2009 02:00:00-0700

I used to look at FOSS as a means to get free software: MySQL, Apache, Eclipse etc... FOSS is part of my day to day affairs and I dare say the best thing to ever happen to software and software developers. But for me, FOSS is the best programming howto guide there is. It is like a living text book that is always getting better. I have learned more from reading other peoples source code than I have from any book, blog post or article. Being an autodidact, reading source code makes much sense than reading the English words used to describe the programming concepts. Just this week I was asked to R&D a bunch of stuff and I found solutions for all the CF stuff by going to either CFLib.org or RIAForge.org. (Mad props to Ray Camden for making those sites. You saved my ass twice this week dude! Rock On with your bad ass self!) Those sites are gold mines for CF programming knowledge. I have been turned on to so many new ideas and concepts by the folks that have shared their work that I want to give a shout out and thank you to y'all.

Thank you!!

This is something I would do...

Sun, 03 May 2009 03:55:00-0700

And the same thing would happen to me. I have often said that I would write a script to wash my car if I could. It all starts out innocent enough until I have to explain it to the authorities. At times my life seems to be an exercise in taunting that Murphy's law fellow.

A Quick and Dirty CSS Viewer.

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:28:00-0700

When I work on a site with CSS that I am not familiar with I find this little widget to be very handy. I simply took Shlomy Gantz's viewCSS() function from CFLib.org and pointed it to my CSS files and voila I have a visual representation of all the CSS styles for the included style sheets. It is far from perfect and works best with text related CSS but the only real problem so far is that it tends to barf on /* CSS comments*/. But that is a pretty minor issue. Here is a zip file with the code. Here are the Styles for this site The code is ridiculously simple

  function viewCSS(cssCode) {  var i ="";  var cssItem="";  var ret="";  for(i=1;i lte listlen(arguments.cssCode,'}');i=i+1) {   cssItem = listgetAt(arguments.cssCode,i,'}');   if(findNocase('{',cssItem)) ret = ret & '#trim(mid(cssItem,1,findNocase("{",cssItem)-1))#

';  }  return ret; }               #viewCSS(cssTxt)#

A Paradigm shift (Or how to learn OOP on the job with out screwing up).

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:25:00-0700

I have been banging my head against CFOOP for about a year or two and thought I would share some of my tricks, trials and tribulations. I just noticed how my thinking has changed when developing apps these days. Huh... Thinking about thinking is meta-cognition. So what do you call thinking about what you are thinking about when thinking about metadata? I smell a cognitive infinite recursive loop in the making. (Note to self.. Tell brain to STFU for a minute so I can finish this blog entry FFS)

Anyways... 1. I write the procedural code to get the things I need done. I don't even think about OO at this point. 2. I turn everything into functions and try to atomize things as much as I can (where it makes sense to at least). 3. Then I create a CFC (or CFCs) to organise my functions 4. Then I rewrite my procedural code to incorporate my cfcs/functions 5. I turn THAT code into another function or set of functions 6. And then I turn THAT set of functions into another CFC (0ne ring to rule them all). IIRC this is your service layer. I got into this whole head set from reading Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design.

Taking on this approach has really helped me a lot. When you are getting into a new discipline /paradigm shift /cognitive restructuring such as OOP it can be *VERY* overwhelming and it is *all too easy* to think yourself utterly stupid to the point where you are a quivering blob of "WTF?" before you even write your first line of code. So much so that you say fark it and go back to writing code like you used to (not good). I have seen it time and time again both in my personal life and from reading interblargs.

What I find with this iterative, incremental approach is that if you get into time crunch, or think yourself stupid, or get in over your head, or get stuck, you can always bail out and still have a functioning app that you can go back to and clean up at a later date. This approach has really allowed me to push my limits when I can (Read: on the clock) and bail out when I have/need to. And after a while you just start to think differently about code and writing OO code becomes a natural part of your daily affairs. I find myself looking at legacy code and thinking "What can I abstract into a function" or "How can I clean this heaping pile of spaghetti into something more useable". And the next thing you know you are seeing everything in those terms. Your thinking has changed. The end result on my last foray into OOP was three tidy function calls to a cfc that turned (what was) 500 lines of copy and paste spaghetti code into: usercfc.createAccount(somestruct)
usercfc.updateAccount(somestruct)
usercfc.deletedAccount(somestruct)
Fergolicious!

This blog is Rick Roll Enabled.

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:11:00-0700

Someone actually tested my super advanced Ultramega OK anti "wow gold" spammer technology... so I rolled out a BadMotorBeta. Go ahead... try it. Add a comment and type in "wow gold" in the comment form and see what happens. I DOUBLE DOG DARE YOU. Yeah. I thought so.... ya wuss. For the record: BadMotorBeta - copyright © 2009

CF_RickRoll for comment spam (coming soon)

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:50:00-0700

My blog (and other CF blogs ) are getting hit with comment spam for some bizarro WOW (World of Warcraft) gold scam going to: wow gold one dot com I have no idea what it is about but as a former sys admin I have a borderline psychotic "I WILL FARKING CUT YOU" type hatred for spammers.. As soon as I get out of the weeds at work I am going to write something to mess with these douche bags. Seeing that comments on BlogCFC have a captcha they are probably using a cheap labor source like Amazon's Mechanical Turk service or smart bots. Either way... Infinite loops for bots or a Rick Roll or Goatse for the humans. This will be fun.

Baby Jesus, browser hell and Half Life 2 on a 42 in. screen

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:42:00-0700

My life sucks right now. All I can say is IE6 and CSS makes Baby Jesus cry. After three weeks of browser hell I am adjusting the sites on my sniper rifle and looking for a bell tower. Seriously, how (or even better WHY) can it take 12 hours to fix one pixel on 5 browser versions? Thank God for video games. I SOOOO need to kill something right now. 42 inches of flaming high def death is just what what the doctor ordered. Kill em twice.

WTF? Errr... I mean What the Font?

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:12:00-0700

This is a handy tool for figuring out what font is used in a graphic. All you do is upload an image that contains the font and it asks you to identify some highlighted letters and it will give the closest matches. http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ It doesn't provide the font for download but if you Google the font name there is a good chance you can find a free version (or a free knock off version).

Google Chrome Portable (Win only)

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:56:00-0700

Download Google Chrome Portable Google Chrome has some AWESOME debugging features including my favorite, Right Click >> Inspect Element. I would seriously recommend taking a look at Chrome for CSS debugging. I looked at the user agent and it is nearly identical as Safari. It had almost the same build so (I would assume) they are essentially the same browser. HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.42 Safari/525.19

Portable version of the Safari Web Browser

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:51:00-0700

I am a huge fan of portable apps. I like being able to drop an app in a folder and not have to install it. You just put them on a portable or thumb drive and you are good to go. Actually I have a version of almost my *entire* dev environment (sans MSSQL, that is next) on a thumb drive. I can literally set up shop anywhere (on a Win box). Any who, I needed to test a design against the WebKit browser, the engine behind Chrome, Safari and (I think) it is used by DW for it's Live View feature. So here are links to versions for both Mac and Windows: "http://www.thindownload.com/app-download/47/Safari-Browser (Win) http://osxportableapps.sourceforge.net/p_safari/ (Mac)

My Grandfathers diary as a P.O.W. in North Africa during WWII

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:05:00-0700

My Grandfather went to work in Africa (from Italy) in order to support his family during the Great Depression. We found his journal after he died. He never spoke a word of it to any of us. After many years it was translated from the original Italian dialect at great expense thanks to my cousin Angelo. We see these sorts of stories, ones of great suffering, were hundreds or thousands of men die at the hands of their captors on the History Channel and think nothing of it. This is the amazing story of a man who went though a living hell, a story of deep love and incredible sacrifice made by a man (my Grampa), in order to simply feed and support his family. During these hard times it reminds me of how much we take for granted and have to be grateful for. "A summary of ten years of my military life in Eastern Africa, Ethiopia"
By Domenico Franco

Why does Comedy Central want me to break the law?

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:54:00-0700

I catch up on the Daily Show and Cobert Report every Saturday morning on the comedycentral.com site. It used to be Bugs Bunny and Daffy back when I was a kid. Now it is Steven and Jon. It is bad enough that you see the exact same commercial 4 times per show. Before, if I want to back up and see something that I missed that crossed a "commercial line" I see another commercial. Fine. Today I am seeing the same commercial, twice, for every commercial break AND every time I even *MOVE* the the little video progress bar. So now I have to start at the beginning of the clip and hope I don't forget not to touch the progress bar because if I do, I have to watch the same commercial again (TWICE) and start from the beginning of the clip (AGAIN). My other option is to get a torrent of it and break copy right law. And no, I don't have cable TV hooked up in my home, nor has it been for 15 years.