FUblog

Moving On

Tue, 29 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

As you can see, there's not much activity here anymore. You can find more of Nat's wisdom at webapper. Erik is now blogging at psykel. Happy Trails, grumps

appending an ntext field

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 14:50:00 -0400

Say you want to do something like this: update table set ntextThing = ntextThing + '!' where id = 1 That's not going to work. This does, though:


DECLARE @ptrval binary(16)
SELECT @ptrval = TEXTPTR(ntextThing) 
FROM item 
WHERE id =1
UPDATETEXT table.ntextthing @ptrval NULL 0 '!'
GO

Selenium Uses?

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 16:31:00 -0400

Has anyone used Selenium IDE? I'm anxious to hear from someone who has used it in practice. Of course it looks cool, but, like LiveHTTPHeaders, it would remain an unused Firefox plugin until that one day when I couldn't live without it. (Of course now I use LiveHTTPHeaders about once a week.)

Exporting DTS Packages

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 12:43:00 -0400

When you backup and restore an MSSQL database, or use DTS to move schema and/or data between servers, you won't get the DTS packages that apply to that database. But what if your application relies on those DTS packages? You're gonna need to DTS the DTS packages. And here's how you do it. [More]

FileZilla aliases

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 15:39:00 -0400

Grumpy, Fusium's Senior FileZilla Administrator (in addition to Junior Arctic Silver Engineer) found out (the hard way) how to add aliases to FileZilla. See, the little helper text on the Alias dialog box is very cryptic. Here's how you do it. Go to User management, then pick the user, then shared folders. Then enter the path to the target of the alias in the left column (via the folder browser popup), then dbl-click the white area to the right of it (under the Alias column), then type in the full path to an imaginary folder based on the ftp user's home directory. So if the user's home directory is c:\ftproot\user and you want them to be able to cd to c:\somedir, you enter c:\ftproot\user\somedir as the alias. But don't actually make that folder on the file system. Goofy, but now it's documented for the next time we need to add an alias.

Nested Query Loops - Worst code ever

Thu, 25 May 2006 22:44:00 -0400

I had no idea how bad nested query loops are. But oh man, they are BAD. I came across this "technique" this week when a very busy site started resonding extremely slowly - like 30 seconds per request, sometimes more. I didn't write the code, but I "got" to fix it. Check this out, if you have a strong stomach: [More]

SeeFusion really saved our asses

Thu, 25 May 2006 20:54:00 -0400

This past Sunday, the 21st of May '06, DNS transferred over to our servers for a big client site we rebuilt. Monday was sketchy with uptime declining, our server monitors beeping pretty much all day and us pulling our hair out trying to figure out the problem. Since then, we've been locked in a fight-to-the-death for the last few days with our monster server. [More]

Keep it scalable, kids

Mon, 22 May 2006 23:55:00 -0400

We had a lot of trouble today with some really bad code that looked to be written about 10 years ago. It was simply horrible. Nested loops, tons of CFIFs, you name it. Opening and editing this one CF file felt kinda like fixing a leaky pipe in my crawlspace. Dusty air, spiders all over the place, dark, no room to move...yuck. Anyway this one page suddenly became very popular, and was definately NOT scalable. I rewrote it so the server would stop crashing (!) and it is now seriously about 100 times faster than before. If, by chance, you are a person looking for web development services, be sure to get someone who knows what they're doing. If, by chance, you are a developer, make your code scalable. Most of you know this, but I'll say it anyway -- Just because your code runs well on your dev box, it doesn't mean it will perform the same way when it's hit by 50 concurrent users. And if you have to write nasty slow code, at least cache it. Thanks, I'm going to bed now.

International Characters

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 15:07:00 -0400

Every now and then you get a little job that seems simple and straight forward, but is anything but. I just encountered one of those. I recently inherited an old CF application, written in CF 4.5 or 5.0. The cfml templates have Japanese characters simply pasted in the file, with a meta tag in the HEAD section of the HTML that sets the character set to x-sjis (shift japanese). [More]

SES can cause trouble if you're not careful

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:36:00 -0400

So I recently deployed some SES URL code to a big site we did. One thing I forgot to do was adjust a layout file that is used by sort of sister site - same content, different layouts. Anyway, I did not add the BASE HREF tag to this layout file. The layout file uses about 50 images or so, all called via a virtual directory.

Since I forgot to add a BASE HREF, each image call was preceded with the entire SES url:

So each image request actually called a page of the site! Worse yet, the code took MYDIR as a url parameter, which caused the code to throw an error (an unexpected value). So each page request was throwing about 50 or so errors, each of which resulted in a robust error report sent to my inbox. I'm still getting email messages 30 minutes later. Ugh.

SES lives on

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:00:00 -0400

I've done a lot of work with SES, (Search Engine Safe) URLS in the past. I new project has recently required I use them again. This client knows a lot about Google placement so it's quite interesting. We'll see how they work. Changes will probably be made to the red viper systems and green viper systems websites based on the lessons learned here. See here for our sesConverter stuff, or see it in action.

base href breaks javascript form submit

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:56:00 -0400

I placed a BASE HREF tag in my application the other day. To my dismay, it somehow screwed up all of my links that submit a form. For example:

I still am not sure what the issue is. I worked around it fairly easily so I guess I'll put off investigation for when I have the time. But it's a very irritating little problem that took a while to diagnose.

Steal all the links on a page with JavaScript

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:59:00 -0400

Today I had a bitchy requirement from a client. He had a particular form on which he kept forgetting to click the save button to submit the form. He would make some changes, scroll around a bit then click off the form - maybe to another tab, maybe another nav link on the site - and lose his form changes. The most straightforward solution would be to modify all the links on the page to set a hidden "nexturl" value on the form, then submit() the form instead of going to their designated URLs. But there were 27 links on the page, some in nav headers, many on includes, nested layouts, etc. Not gonna happen. I'm not putting code like this in every link on the whole site.

<a href="<cfif attributes.fuseaction is "admin.bigform">javascript:setvalue("index.cfm?fa=main.foo");theform.submit()
<cfelse>index.cfm?fa=main.foo</cfif>">Main</a>

The answer lies in the document.links JavaScript array. I was able to rewrite every link using the following code:

Good luck!

<TBODY> is handy

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 22:12:00 -0400

TBODY? I never used it before. I thought it was just something Dreamweaver put in HTML for some reason. But the other day, TBODY came in handy. I used it to make a quick and dirty blowout user interface like this:

[+] Thing 1

The code is very simple - and I got to finally use TBODY: [More]

RegEx Backreferences

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:47:00 -0400

Backreferences are cool, but I've never needed to use them before. I just ran into something where they were quite handy. I had to manipulate a string like the following:

TNF S/S VENT POLY SHIRT W

The end goal was to see if the string had either a S/S or L/S in it, along with SHIRT. If both substrings were found, remove SHIRT and move the S/S or L/S to the end of the string. It's not hard, but a one liner kind of is. Backreferences really helped out here. [More]