chapter31

development in a land far far away…

at the moment

History is not what happened. History is what was written down.

Archive for April, 2008

Yesterday I posted on a handy MySQL feature where you can combine an INSERT and UPDATE on a record in the one statement.
Someone asked about the performance of this so I ran a little test to get some basic numbers.
One thing to note is that even when MySQL is actually UPDATING your record (ON DUPLICATE […]

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INSERT or UPDATE in one statement with MySQL

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

A little while ago I mentioned combining multiple INSERT statements with MySQL, here is another helpful approach to a common problem.
In many systems you will give the user a chance to ADD and EDIT a record, a News post for example. As usual there are many ways to handle writing any changes to the database, […]

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Apparently the CAPTCHA for Windows Live Mail can be cracked in as little as 60 seconds and Gmail’s CAPTCHA has also been cracked.
Does this mean the beginning of the end for CAPTCHA?
There are some other interesting solutions to spambots out there, it’ll be interesting to see the future landscape of this infestation and the methods […]

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Workaround for cfscript bug in varscoper

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Those that use the sensational varscoper tool from Mike Schierberl know that cfscript is still a little experimental with the current release.
One of the things it can do is return variables that are actually “var” scoped as not var scoped when using cfscript. This seems to happen most often when you have a comment directly […]

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Flushing a cached web service

Monday, April 7th, 2008

When you use WebServices with ColdFusion, the WSDL ’stub’ is cached in CF Administrator (presumably for performance reasons).
This can be a pain when you need to change the WSDL and you don’t have access to CF Admin to flush the service which is the scenario I found myself in today.
Luckily for me I sit near […]

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