Darryl Lyons’ Blog

I was mucking around with the application.cfc the other day, and I found the following to be true. If you use the onRequest method, and CFINCLUDE the target page, every method you define within the application.cfc will be copied into the variables scope of the included template. This feature of course has been around for ages (reintroduced with one of the MX updaters I believe).

Just recently, Sean Corfield posted a link on the CFCDEV list to the LiveDocs, which explained it in more detail:

If your Application.cfc implements the onRequest method, any utility functions that you define in Application.cfc are also directly available in to the target page, because Application.cfc and the target page share the Variables scope.

If your application requires utility functions that are used by multiple pages, not just by the methods in Application.cfc, and you do not use an onRequest method, Macromedia recommends that you put them in a separate CFC and access them by invoking that CFC. As with other ColdFusion pages, Application.cfc can access any CFC in a directory path that is configured on the ColdFusion MX Administrator Mappings page. You can, therefore, use this technique to share utility functions across applications….

Google has acquired Urchin, producers of Web Analytics software which they claim is the world’s most widely deployed. Do you think that Google will release it for free? They did it with
Picassa…

For over a month the Firefox download counter has been offline, and a new counter has been promised shortly. However, spreadfirefox.com has just posted an update for those of us who just can’t wait! The count is now up to 40,000,000 downloads. They are also working on a way to report the average usage measurement, which should be a whole lot more interesting.

Came across an interesting problem today. Users of Macintosh Internest Explorer were receiving a “Security Failure: Data decryption error” alert box when trying to view a SSL encrypted Web site. After doing a quick search on Google, I found that there is a bug in how MAC IE implements SSLv3. This error of course does not ocurr on Firefox or Safari.

This begs two questions:

1. How many ecommerce sites out there are losing transactions because of this bug?

2. Why do people keep using Internet Explorer on the Macintosh after it was discontinued by Microsoft two years ago?!

Just thought I’d share a tool called Log Parser 2.0 with the rest of you. I haven’t used it myself, but I worked with a guy a while ago who loved this tool.

Log Parser 2.0 is a powerful, versatile tool that makes it possible to run SQL-like queries against log files of almost any format and produce the desired information either on the screen, in a file of any desired format or into a SQL database. Log Parser is available as a command-line tool and as a set of scriptable COM objects.

Microsoft Watch is running an article on some of the new features we can expect from IE7. It is not a surprise that Microsoft are focusing much of their attention on security. What is surprising is the inclusion of tabbed-browsing. Seems like someone is playing catchup.

Today I learned some golden rules of indexes in SQL Server 2000. It seems I’ve been doing a bit of SQL Server stuff today!

Clustered indexes

• Use for columns that contain a large number of distinct values

• Queries that return large record sets

• Columns that are frequently found in WHERE clauses (BETWEEN, , etc)

• Never use on a GUID column

Non-clustered indexes

• Use for columns that contain a large number of distinct values (if a clustered index already exists).

• Queries that do not return large record sets

• Queries that are frequently found in WHERE clauses (exact match)

I just learned about table data types in SQL Server from some posts in the CFAUSSIE mailing list (via Scott Thornton). It looks like table data types are meant to replace temporary tables in SQL Server 2000, and have a very similar syntax.

Temporary table

CREATE TABLE #tmpTable(Col1 int, Col2 int)

Table variable

DECLARE @tmpTable TABLE(Col1 int, Col2 int)

I did some searching, and one of the first results was this site. Interesting read, even though it was only the first part of a subscription only article. It turns out that table data types are slower than temporary tables for large sets of data, because SQL Server doesn’t maintain statistics for queries on table variables.

I guess it’s a valid question. Why is a ColdFusion-related blog using blogger instead of a ColdFusion-based blogging application?

Well, the answer is pretty easy. I’ve been trying to recover the registry key/password for my domain name, acheron.org, since I left my previous job. As soon as I get that domain name back, and a ColdFusion host, I’ll probably move the blog over. For now, I’m using the free service provided by Google.

I’ll probably use Ray Camden’s Blogging tool (its almost the defacto standard these days!)

CherryOS, the controversial MAC emulator for Windows, has been released. One of my previous posts on MossyBlog spoke of the plagerism allegations against Maui Xstream, the Hawaii-based developer of the $50 product.

According to Wired:

“Dave Schroeder, a senior systems engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looked at both October’s preview release and Tuesday’srelease and did not like what he found. “

Essentially what this supports are the wide claims that the software has “stolen” (or used) code from the established open-source PearPC. Under the GNU license, Maui Xstream is entitled to use the code, but they must also make their own codebase freely avaiable to anyone that asks for it. This looks doubtful given that they are wholly denying any wrongdoing.