A Developers Past time

Today I realized how much I love owning my own domain!!  Since 2002 (ish) I bought lonestarbandit.com and have been using ZoneEdit.com to forward my email addresses to yahoo.com account, but 2 weeks ago I bought a moto-droid and it beautifully syncronizes with gmail, so today I am making the switch to gmail.  And if I didn't own my domain, I would have to let everyone know about my mail switch (which would of been a nightmare).  But with zoneedit.com, I made a configuration change and whoola my mail is now at gmail.com How SWEET is that!!! Thanks ZoneEdit!!!

While I usually try to keep my posts too dynamic web content, today i'll be posting about android apps... You might be wondering why, well I got the Motorola Droid on the Verizon network.  1.) Verizon Network - I know this isn't an app, but keeping with the largest 3g network while getting an iPhone like appliance is GREAT!! 2.) Music, Camera, Gallery, Maps, Browser, Messaging, Facebook  - I might have missed one, but the apps that are installed by default are awesome.  The maps is probably the best since now I have a GPS navigator in my phone.  Don't have to worry about carrying a GPS with me at all times.  And that goes with all the base installed apps, it reduces the number of electronics I carry.  Before the Droid, I felt like batman with a belt full of gadgets. The real list, I had trouble creating a priority, so this is in no particular order... There are so many GREAT apps. 3.) The Weather Channel, Accuweather or WeatherBug - They are all g...

Background I know this is a no no, but our office uses subset of production data in our test system to have final sign off on new or changing applications. So when we decided to move to coldBox for a framework, I wasn't sure how environment safe coding was accomplished. I quickly learned about the interceptor EnvironmentControl, which was a great first start. But there wasn't any settings for plugin MailService to stop emails from being sent. So my first inclination (and coding attempt) was to change mailService.cfc directly. Well I learned that is a mistake. We are now moving from 3b1 to 3b3 and realizing it is a pain when you change the core. Enhancing Coldbox Now that I understand a lot more on how Coldbox is running, i realized that my solution can be handle by an interceptor.  Using the announcement of afterPluginCreation, I created a EnvironmentSafeMailService.cfc interceptor that inject methods and properties into MailService plugin.  THIS IS AWESOME! So h...

Thread safe never crossed my mind.  I never put CFC in the application scope to allow quicker execution (bypassing the createobject function).  But now that my office has implemented ColdBox, it cache's a lot for you, including its handlers - which are CFCs.  Well, we got bit by that evil words "THREAD SAFE".  Our code WASN'T... yes including my code. So what does that mean.  Well I'll try to do a quick explanation, thread safe is any variable that is dedicated to a SINGLE user will NOT be shared to other users.  For example, in a object a "private" variable is NOT thread safe.  So if many users use the same object (implementation of a class), then we must make sure the variables being passed around are LOCAL to that function.  Therefore, in a CFC (depending on language) you must force your function variables to be LOCAL to the function only. In CF8 use of the VAR keyword provides this <cfset var myLocalVar = "" /> In CF9 the use o...