Coder's Revolution

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.

My partner in grime, Wes Bondy, has been filling my garage up with old car parts since-- well, since I've had a garage. If it was made in the 20's or 30's, came off a pickup truck, or has Hudson, Federal, Mack Jr., Diamond T, Stewart, or Studabaker stamped on it, we're interested in it. Today, after finally getting our Ford Ranger donor stripped down to the frame, we accomplished a mockup of what our first Rat Rod will look like-- the Federal Express. Oh Lord, haste the day. Check it out at http://www.diamondtbucket.com/index.cfm?do=projects

So I clicked my Microsoft Word 2003 icon just now with my hand resting on the keyboard. After a second this message popped up: "Word has detected that you are holding down the CTRL key. Do you want to start Word in safe mode?" How did it know that?? It must have been looking through my monitor! Now I'm afraid to type anything bad about Microsoft. WORD IS WATCHING!!

I love infinite loops. They're sort of the black hole of programming. No one really knows what you code does when it reaches the last iteration of an infinite loop, but I speculate it has something to do with String Theory and unbounded time and space increasing proportionately to the rate of dense matter being compressed by gravitational forces so strong even light can't escape. Well, that's what I came up with off the top of my head anyway. Speaking of infinite loops, I found one happening on my server today.

In the beginning was assembly, and it was with the programmer and it was good. Through it all programs that have been made were written, without it no programs were written. The compiler shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. Then came a design pattern sent by Alan Kay, its name was OOP. The other day, someone asked me a really dumb question. "Why are there so many programming languages? Why don't you just all use one?" Ok, that was two questions, and they aren't really dumb, but I felt kinda' dumb trying to answer them.

This little guy isn't actually part of w3c spec, but it is supported by IE and Firefox and can be very handy. This method is inherited by any visible DOM element and when it is called will cause the page/frame/div to scroll until that element is in view.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye! I hereby declare Friday, July 25th as the first ever International Operation cf_SQLprotect. In response to the massive amount of SQL injection attacks in the past few weeks I want the ColdFusion community to be doing our darndest to keep our applications safe from harm. This Friday, I want everyone who has a site big or small, well known or obscure, to join the world and scan their code base for vulnerable queries and fix them.