Community Member Profile

A little bit about me...

I'm currently working as a contractor at the US Small Business Administration. Now that I've said that, I also have to say this:

I don't speak for the SBA. The Agency doesn't endorse any particular products. The Agency's use of particular products is not an implicit endorsement of those products. Your mileage may vary. Any opinions I express, especially those that contain profanity, are my own. And when I see "we", I'm referring to myself and other peons who also don't speak for the Agency.

That said, the SBA's a great place to work for exploring new technologies. There's a political party who resents our very existence and is always looking for any excuse to get rid of us. (See previous paragraph.) So we always have to exhibit success with everything they throw at us. We've really pioneered a lot of the Federal Government's entry into Service Oriented Architecture, E-Authentication, etc, and ongoing stuff (CF, CSS, HTML 5, jQuery, etc), and even the web itself. When we got into putting applications onto the web, only NOAA's NWS (to my knowledge) beat us to it. When other agencies need to see a prototype of success in a new congressional mandate, we're often it. Challenging and fun like you wouldn't believe.

So you see why I like Ben's blog.

Recent Blog Comments By WebManWalking

• Strange Interaction Between DeserializeJson(), ArrayContains(), And Database Values In ColdFusion

  Posted on May 24, 2013 at 11:18 AM

  @Ben, Ah, so it was indeed how I vaguely remembered it to be: A direct assignment value = users.id[ i ] causes value to retain the sticky datatype of the query column. Although unnecessary in all other situations, n00bs are right to use read more »

• Strange Interaction Between DeserializeJson(), ArrayContains(), And Database Values In ColdFusion

  Posted on May 23, 2013 at 11:06 AM

  @Ben, Are you talking about As Number: YES As String: YES As Java: YES? If so, that's with 3 different ways of referencing the constant 1, not users.id[1]. Query object references(*) are what seem to be adversely retaining their datatypes in CF9. (*) It's possib... read more »

• Strange Interaction Between DeserializeJson(), ArrayContains(), And Database Values In ColdFusion

  Posted on May 23, 2013 at 9:49 AM

  @Ben, I think the problem is that we're used to loose typing in ColdFusion, like JavaScript. If a value is a number but it's needed in an expression to be a string, noooo problem. I've encountered this CF9 problem before. It's not really related to SerializeJSON or DeserializeJSON. I... read more »

• Using CSS Pseudo Elements :before And :after

  Posted on Jan 23, 2013 at 8:09 PM

  @Ben, You know what's even more appealing about :for(subselector)? It fits some of the things they're doing in CSS4 selectors: http://coding.smashingmagazine.co... read more »

• Using CSS Pseudo Elements :before And :after

  Posted on Jan 21, 2013 at 10:50 AM

  @Ben, Speaking of CSS and mandatory fields, y'know what I wish you could say? :for(subselector). Example: label:for(input[required],select[required],textarea[required]) {font-weight:bold} label:for(input[required],select[required],textarea[required]):aft... read more »

• Using CSS Pseudo Elements :before And :after

  Posted on Jan 21, 2013 at 10:15 AM

  @Ben, You know those websites that mark mandatory form fields with asterisk on the label? :before or :after is usually how they do it (hopefully with redundant styling for graceful degradation): label.mand {/* font-weight:bold or whatever */} label.mand:... read more »

• What The Heck Is Business Logic Anyway?

  Posted on Dec 15, 2012 at 2:50 PM

  Redundancy's okay. In one of my banking applications, fixed interest rate loans require initial interest rate but not spread over prime. Variable interest loans require spread over prime, but not initial interest rate. In the web pages, users have come to expect immediate feedback.... read more »

• What The Heck Is Business Logic Anyway?

  Posted on Dec 15, 2012 at 1:21 PM

  Don'tcha just hate it when you write something long and thoughtful, but your proofreading breaks down in the very last sentence? Not enough coffee, apparently.... read more »

• What The Heck Is Business Logic Anyway?

  Posted on Dec 15, 2012 at 1:13 PM

  ... er, I meant, TOO specific to user interface. Sheesh.... read more »

• What The Heck Is Business Logic Anyway?

  Posted on Dec 15, 2012 at 1:09 PM

  Welcome back, @Ben! To avoid confounding the topic with software engineering jargon: Business logic constitutes the rules the business wants the software to obey. If you're a contractor/employee, the business is your customer/employer. If you're the boss who commissioned the software to be... read more »

• Are HTML FORM Tags Required To Display Form Input Controls?

  Posted on Oct 31, 2012 at 11:50 AM

  @Ben, I'm sure you got into the habit of always coding a form tag because of Netscape. Early versions of NS used to refuse to render form elements on the screen if they weren't in a form. Just for jollies, I wrote a little tester page and brought it up in NS 8.1. (Yes, I still have i... read more »

• Are HTML FORM Tags Required To Display Form Input Controls?

  Posted on Oct 26, 2012 at 5:45 PM

  It gives you the ability to do convenient document.formname.elementname references. Don't have to code id attributes and document.getElementById() all the time. Less overhead to looping over a document.formname.elements array. Don't have to include 90K+ jquery.min.js just use $("input... read more »

• Calling CFFile-Upload Twice On The Same File For Security Purposes

  Posted on Jul 17, 2012 at 7:11 PM

  @Ben, Yes, cffile action="upload" is essentially a write operation, so you can do more than one. Once upon a time, I wrote a multipart/form-data handler in C. (Not C++. Good ol' C.) So I know how it works at the HTTP level. The entire file is in memory at the time you decid... read more »

• Movies As A Religious Experience

  Posted on May 15, 2012 at 6:03 PM

  @Ben, I don't know whether you'd consider this a religious observation, but it seems to me, in a sense, movies multiply how many lives we get to have. Each movie is like a little extra life we get to live, if only for a short time.... read more »

• ColdFusion 10 - Don't Use Dynamic Query Values In CFLoop

  Posted on Apr 19, 2012 at 7:03 PM

  @Ben, Can cfcase value attributes be dynamic in CF 10 too? Really tedious maintaining a long string cfcase value that you can't even break up with ampersands. I didn't see it in the CF 10 beta PDF, but then, I didn't notice dynamic query attributes either.... read more »

• Calculating CSS Selector Specificity Using ColdFusion

  Posted on Apr 17, 2012 at 9:24 PM

  P.S.: Thanks for this post. I already knew how specificity was calculated, but I hate it so much, I never bother explaining it to anyone. :-) You've done the fledgling CSS coders a great service. Might be worthwhile to comment rules with your calculated values: read more »

• Calculating CSS Selector Specificity Using ColdFusion

  Posted on Apr 17, 2012 at 8:57 PM

  @Ben, Don'tcha just hate it when you add a class to something, and it doesn't work, and you end up having to add that stupid "!important" to styles in the rule? Well, I do. The problem with the specificity rules are that we don't compose selectors for specificity... read more »

• ColdFusion 10 - Parsing Dirty HTML Into Valid XML Documents

  Posted on Feb 28, 2012 at 7:07 PM

  @Ben, This may give XHTML the biggest boost it's ever gotten! Rapid Application Development + cleanup = actual use!... read more »

• ColdFusion 10 Beta, Apache Tomcat, And Symbolic Links On Mac OSX

  Posted on Feb 23, 2012 at 12:05 AM

  @Dik, Thanks. I've had the Lion installer for a while now. Your post has inspired me to go ahead and do it. But first... How did you install the Java Runtime if it's not included in the Lion installation? Where'd you get it from?... read more »

• Printing To The Primary Output Stream From Within A ColdFusion CFThread Tag

  Posted on Feb 8, 2012 at 9:03 PM

  @Ben, Soon I'll be implementing my bad guy scenario, doing (cfcontent reset="true") without saving the content first. In the process, I've discovered something pretty interesting (and dangerous) about calling cfcontent inside a custom tag: It's as if the (cfcontent reset=&q... read more »