Programming Articles
- Automate or Not? Sometimes it takes longer to automate something than it would to just repeat it yourself. Sometimes it's worth doing anyway.
- Broken HTML Email on Lucee CFMAIL on Lucee through 5.x uses an encoding that can break minified HTML or CSS when sending formatted email.
- cfspreadsheet + GetTempFile() = NullPointerException In ColdFusion, CFspreadsheet expects to write to a .xls extension, not .tmp, so you have to make sure the name ends in .xls before you write to it.
- Cloning a GitHub Repo via Mobile Firefox Even on a tablet with a big enough screen that GitHub looks like it's showing the desktop version, you might have to insist on it to get all the buttons to appear.
- Combining RSS and Atom Feeds with Python How to build a combined feed from multiple sources that you can publish for followers to subscribe.
- Dates and ColdFusion Query of Queries ColdFusion's Query of Queries is very particular about the format of dates on both sides of the comparison.
- Don’t Hide Version Numbers It breaks user expectations with no real benefit, and makes it hard to tell if you've *actually* gotten the latest security fix.
- Empty AJAX Replies Working on ColdFusion But Not Lucee The default response type on Lucee is text/xml, and some front-end code will try to parse the empty response and throw an error.
- Groovy, null, and ‘null’ Sometimes you get a null value, and sometimes you get the word null. Make sure it checks the one you expect!
- How to get Grails to use a reserved word with Microsoft SQL You can use a custom database mapping from reserved to [reserved].
- Incremental Updates and the Problem of N+2 It's one thing to provide an updater that goes from version N to version N+1. But what if someone doesn't run the updater until N+2 is available? Or worse, N+3?
- Is the Xcode Updater Stuck? Watching install.log will show you whether the Xcode updater is still doing something or not.
- Java/Groovy Overloading and Null Parameters When you overload a Java method to accept different types of parameters, it can't always determine which to call when one of the inputs is null. Here's a hacky workaround.
- Java: Annotate Your Overrides Always use the Override annotation when you’re overriding a method, so the compiler will TELL you that you made a typo.
- Reusable PHP Please, when developing your plugins, be sure to always use the full opening tag for PHP instead of just <?
- Split Up One Old Git Commit Into Several Yes, you can use git rebase to split a really old set of changes into several.
- Tell Me What Changed! When you release a new version of your software, tell me what's new!
- Update Checks Should Be More Honest Software updaters have a bad habit of telling you they're up-to-date before actually checking - and worse, telling you they've just confirmed it's current when they actually couldn't get an answer.
- Variables vs. Autocorrect Avoid naming a variable one letter off from a real word. Autocorrect can really mess up your documentation or email.
- What to Put In About Boxes What I want to see when I open the About box for your application
- WordPress Plugin: Combined Readme You can use a README.md instead of a readme.txt so the same file works for both the plugin directory and your git repository.