Thursday 28 February 2013

Another serious struct-literal syntax balls-up in ColdFusion

G'day
Ray hit me up about this the other day, and I've only just been able to look at it now.  He's written a blog article about a bug someone mentioned to him, which they had raised on the bug tracker (3505517).

As far as the investigation had gone at the time, it seemed like a pretty edge-case sort of bug: if one has a CFC method call within a transaction block, and the method call used struct-literal notation for named argument values, then there was some execution duplication.

I've had a bit more of a look at it, and it's actually more far-reaching than we initially thought.

Update to / reminder about @CfmlNotifier

G'day (again):
A very quick one. Brad Wood is a very helpful community bod, he's one of the main evangelists for Coldbox, and keeps an eye on my prattlings on this blog, keeping me on the straight and narrow.

Adobe offers free installation support for ColdFusion. With a list of caveats

G'day:
We were reminded by Rakshith on Twitter this morning (well: "morning" for me, anyhow) that Adobe offers free installation support for ColdFusion. His Twitter message was a pointer to an article on the ColdFusion Blog explaining it .

Taken at face value, this seems really great. And it is, to a degree. However - as is often my wont - I have managed to find things about it that rankle me. Which is handy on this somewhat-jetlagged "slow news day" for me.

Wednesday 27 February 2013

How ColdFusion makes a pig's ear of ordered-argument argument collections

G'day:
Apropos of nothing, I'll just point out I'm writing this en route back from Auckland to London, via Kuala Lumpur. This entails a 10 and a 14 hour flight, with a stop to change planes at KLIA (the break is about three hours, I think). It's a bloody long haul. Worse: I did the reverse trip only a fortnight ago, so I've already seem the decent movies they have on offer for Feb (I watched Lincoln, Dredd, Seven Psychopaths, Alex Cross, Taken 2, in decreasing order of quality. The first three were good; the rest watchable). I'm writing this on my wee netbook, which runs for about six hours if I turn the screen brightness down a bit. It's awkward to type on, but it gets the job done. And happily runs CF10, Railo 4.0.2 and CFB simultaneously.

Sunday 24 February 2013

Email address validation (#1 in a series subtitled "Fool's Errands")

G'day (from sunny New Zealand):
The sunshine has been too hard to resist, so I've only been looking at my computer superficially over the last coupla weeks. That and typing anything of any length on this netbook is a bit of a pain in the butt.  However I have an hour or so downtime before descending on my sister (who I've not seen in three years) and reacquainting myself with her brood - including a new niece I have not yet met - so I'll rattle something off quickly about one of my pet annoyances.

Email address validation.

For goodness sake: don't do it! You'll probably get it wrong. Most websites I encounter do, so I don't see why you'd be any different.

Saturday 16 February 2013

Operator precedence: difference between ColdFusion and Railo

G'day:
This thing still remains a bit quiet. I'm currently in New Zealand and it's nice and summery here so there's less motivation to be sitting in front of the screen typing stuff about ColdFusion. And "the screen" is only my little wee netbook which isn't the most conducive to writing code & blog articles simultaneously as I can only fit one app on the screen at a time, and even then it's only  about 2/3 the size to be useful (1024x600). Still: it's good for watching movies on the flight from London (25 hours for those who haven't done it), and it is quite impressive in that it will run CF9, CF10, Railo and MySQL simultaneously without a problem, as well as a couple browsers and CFB.

Monday 11 February 2013

Thread longevity weirdness

G'day:
Man, I've been slack recently. Sorry: sickness, my "actual real life" getting in the way of sitting in front of the computer all the time, and general malaise have been pre-occupying me. I'm sure y'all been coping without a blog article to read. I have actually been beavering away with a coupla articles, but it's all just investigation at the moment, and I've nothing written down yet.

Here's an interesting thing I encountered on Friday, and just got a chance to write some test code now.  Consider this code:

Wednesday 6 February 2013

Completely and utterly off-topic: Waitangi Day

Kia ora:
Today is Waitangi Day, which is NZ’s national day.  It’s usually marked by Maori sovereignty protests and flag burnings. Oh, and it’s a nice day off in the middle of summer for the non-political types.

Anyway, here are some significant New Zealanders, by way of a reading diversion.

Tuesday 5 February 2013

"Is it safe?"

G'day:
Hey, I'm not going to go into too much detail, but this is in reference to the recent security hole in ColdFusion that did the rounds a few weeks back.

One thing to consider is that simply putting the patch on (CF9 + CF10), or manually tightening up security (earlier versions of CF) is not all you have to do.

Closure and bindings and that sort of bumpf

G'day:
I was gonna put this reply on the Railo mailing list where the question mark was placed in my head, but figured I've been a slack-arse over the last week or so, so will post it here instead.

BTW: sorry for being a slack-arse, but I've been sick for the last week (just the dregs of it left now), so my attention-span for looking at computer screens is at a minimum, and all of that is occupied by my work requirements. Outside of work I've been sleeping-off this 'flu, or watching DVDs (which equates to watching the first 15min of a DVD, then resuming with the "sleeping-off this 'flu"... I'm turning into my father and his amazing ability to be put to sleep by anything).