development

If you've ever drawn a graph (manually or with a computer), you know that you have to pick upper and lower bounds for the x and y axes based on the data points you're graphing.  Usually, this is a relatively simple matter, but, at least for me, it's proven to be a difficult problem to [...]

I've been using Subversion for a while now.  Not sure exactly how long, but about a year, I'd guess.  Before that it was CVS for a number of years.  I have to say, first of all, if you're not using version control, start.  It's worth a bajillion times more than the few hours it'll take [...]

I like Firefox.  A lot.  Enough to want to run three
copies concurrently, each with different options and different
purposes.  One for work, one for my personal stuff, and one for
some monitoring apps.  Main differences include two different
GMail sessions, some different prefs for auto find, and completely
different bookmarks, of course.
With 1.0.7, the setup was simple.  Just create [...]

I'm currently in the process of rebuilding my main app using ClearSilver,
and it's really slick. In a nutshell, it's a presentation layer (view)
for an MVC-style application.  Your controller (the 'C') uses the
model/backend (the 'M') to create a dataset that it passes to
ClearSilver (the 'V') to render the actual page.
This is a good idea for several [...]

As is pretty obvious, I'm a big fan of good OO design.  But I'm
a bigger fan of maintainable apps, and one of my favorite tricks when
evolving apps is what I call the "encapsulated hack."
Take, for
example, a CFC that needs access to an
application-scope variable.  What's the right solution? 
Package the variable up in such a way that [...]