In September 2001, I had just gotten a job working at the University of Houston doing web development. As a temporary thing, they put me at a desk in a computer lab, which was annoying because I was constantly asked questions and expected to fill the printer with paper, even though that wasn’t my job. That morning, the lab monitor was coming over every minute or so and asking me how to spell things. A little before 9, a guy came in and asked, “Do you guys have a TV or something? A plane just hit the World Trade Center.” I didn’t really believe him, so I tried to check it out online. All of the news sites were down, so I immediately figured out that something going on. After a long time of trying, I finally got CNN’s site to load. It was a blank page with a small, single image of the second plane hitting the towers. The whole time the lab monitor was asking me how to spell this and that. I stopped answering her. A little bit after that, I finally got a streaming news report to load and heard the full story. Just outside the building there was a breezeway where a cart was set up to sell food and drinks. They had a radio on. A large group of people was just standing there, staring at nothing and not say anything, listening to the radio reports. We were all just listening, not really knowing what to say or what to do.

The instructors had been told not to say anything about what had happened, and most didn’t, although some acted kind of crazy, while others attempted to talk about it. The next day I went into a class, and the instructor, right at the start, said “Could we have a moment of silence for those killed yesterday?” Aside from the sniffs and crying, it was silent for over a full minute. Then he proceeded to go on with class as normal. That was a really powerful moment.

• Alabama: N/A
• Alaska: Alaskan, Anchorage (cheap shot, is there another brewery there?)
• Arizona: Sun Up, Phoenix
• Arkansas: Diamond Bear, Little Rock
• California: Ale Smith, San Diego
• Colorado: Avery, Boulder
• Connecticut: N/A
• Delaware: Dogfish Head, Milton
• Florida: Cigar City, Tampa
• Georgia: Terrapin, Athens
• Hawaii: Kona, Maui
• Idaho: Sockeye, Boise
• Illinois: Two Brothers, Warrenville
• Indiana: Bier, Indianapolis
• Iowa: N/A
• Kansas: Tallgrass, Manhattan
• Kentucky: N/A (Bluegrass kinda sucks, sorry)
• Louisiana: Abita, Abita Springs
• Maine: Allagash, Portland
• Maryland: Flying Dog, Frederick
• Massachusetts: Cambridge Brewing, Cambridge
• Michigan: Jolly Pumpkin, Dexter (big runners up: Dark Horse & Founder’s)
• Minnesota: Summit, St. Paul
• Mississippi: Lazy Magnolia, Kiln (only one in the state, but it’s actually very good)
• Missouri: Six Row, St. Louis
• Montana: Bitter Root, Hamilton
• Nebraska: Upstream, Omaha
• Nevada: Chicago Brewing, Las Vegas
• New Hampshire: Smuttynoise, Portsmouth
• New Jersey: N/A
• New Mexico: Marble, Albuquerque (High Desert is a close 2nd)
• New York: Ommegang, Cooperstown
• North Carolina: Wedge, Asheville
• North Dakota: N/A
• Ohio: Buckeye, Lakewood
• Oklahoma: Coop, Oklahoma City
• Oregon: Rogue, Newport
• Pennsylvania: Victory, Downingtown
• Rhode Island: N/A
• South Carolina: Thomas Creek, Greenville
• South Dakota: N/A
• Tennessee: Smoky Mountain, Gatlinburg
• Texas: Live Oak, Austin
• Utah: Epic, Salt Lake City
• Vermont: N/A
• Washington: Marine Pacific, Seattle
• Virginia: Legend, Richmond
• Washington, DC: Capitol City, DC
• West Virginia: N/A (only been to one place and it was awful)
• Wisconsin: N/A (only been to a couple, so I need to come back)
• Wyoming: Bitter Creek, Rock Springs
• British Columbia: Steamworks, Vancouver (need to come back and try more)
• Newfoundland: Quidi Vidi, St. John’s
• Ontario: Mill Street, Toronto
• Quebec: La Barberie, Quebec

1. Holy Fuck – Latin
2. Bonobo – Black Sands
3. Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record
4. LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening
5. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
6. The Octopus Project – Hexadecagon
7. Maps & Atlases – Perch Patchwork
8. Foals – Total Life Forever
9. Sia – We Are Born
10. Damien Jurado – Saint Bartlett
11. Local Natives – Gorilla Manor
12. Vampire Weekend – Contra
13. Fang Island – Fang Island
14. El Guincho – Pop Negro
15. My Education – Sunrise

In Oracle, as many other things, this is actually pretty easy. Oracle has its “DUAL” command, which essentially creates this empty recordset. In SQL Server, you don’t use a FROM and can return a recordset, but I wanted the columns from the table to be optional but could not use a left join as you can’t join a table on to nothing.

The first thought was to simply bring in another table that I knew had a record, then join on that. However, this table included almost every US zip code (including PO Box-only zips, military zips, overseas zips, etc.), so it was an enormous recordset and, not being the manager of the data, I hadn’t added an index, so its performance was horrendous. When I added this to the ColdFusion script, what was taking roughly 35 seconds now timed out after 120 seconds. I could increase the timeout, but over two minutes is somewhat unreasonable.

What I ended up doing was to just do a direct insert, then do an UPDATE/SELECT after all of the inserts were done. Not ideal, but it actually ended up being pretty fast. But that got my curious: what are other ways to do this in SQL Server, and how would they work out from a performance persepctive?

So, enter SQL’s nice Client Statistics window to tell me all about it. I did three different cases of running the base select query (the insert would be more, of course, but I didn’t want to do it) and checked the execution time of each.

• The join: As I said, the table I have to actually select from has a row count of about 41,000 rows. Not huge, but not quick either, particularly with no index. This query ended up taking 266 milliseconds.

SELECT a.zip,b.state,b.county
FROM bigZipCodeTable a
LEFT JOIN slightlySmallerZipCodeTable b ON b.zip=a.zip
WHERE zip='85701'

• The table variable: This was not technically an option in ColdFusion scripting, since it doesn’t support this, but I had the idea to create a pseudo-temporary table using SQL’s table variable and a quick T-SQL script. I created the table definition in the declaration with one column for the zip code, then inserted a single record with the zip code I wanted to pull data for. I then selected from that and joined the table that I wanted to pull data from. Surprisingly (to me, at least), it actually ended up taking almost twice as long: 469 ms. So that’s out.

DECLARE @tbl TABLE(zip VARCHAR(5));
INSERT INTO @tbl VALUES('85701');
SELECT a.zip,b.state,b.county
FROM @tbl a
LEFT JOIN slightlySmallerZipCodeTable b ON b.zip=a.zip

• My third idea was to create a false recordset using a sub-query in the FROM clause. In my experience with sub-queries, I know their inefficiency in the WHERE clause and thought that, surely, this would not do well. But, you know what, it did okay. 156 ms, which beats out the join, but not by enough to actually let me use it in the script. It would add up, but not enough to save me from the script taking much longer than it should.

SELECT a.zip,b.state,b.county
FROM (SELECT '85701' AS zip) a
LEFT JOIN slightlySmallerZipCodeTable b ON b.zip=a.zip

So there ya go. I hope that helps someone out.

• Brick Oven Pizza: Unfortunately, I can’t recall the specific name of this place (anyone?). It was a pizza restaurant on Westheimer at Taft that just happened to have live music some nights. It was open for less than a year while I was there, then abruptly shut down. I saw Pop Unknown here once and remember thinking that I would love to come back. Too bad.
• The Metropole: This was in the basement of the Metropole Hotel Downtown, which was kind of a flophouse and doesn’t even exist anymore. I believe it was on Travis though, but I could certainly be wrong. It operated for two years, at the most, ditching the live music for the later part of its existence. Very briefly though, this was the hip club in Houston. I spent several evenings here and caught a Gloria Record show.
• The Proletariat: This existed up until about 2007 and, throughout the middle part of the decade, was very much the hip club. They had the best jukebox in town. I once played Black Sabbath’s “Warning” and Mogwai’s “Christmas Steps” with $1 to maximize my money. I can recall seeing The Octopus Project here, years ago but don’t specifically recall other shows.
• NotsuoH: “Houston” backwards, this faced Main Street in Downtown and was a coffee shop by day and a venue by night, with shows upstairs. The building used to be a shoe store, so there were boxes of ancient shoes everywhere. The second floor could only be reached by a rickety, narrow staircase and the floor shook to the point that you were sure it was about to cave in. The power would often go out during shows because the place had few outlets and had ancient wiring. They were also famous for their “special coffee” and being the only place where you could get liquor after 2am, as they were 24 hours but were not licensed to sell it anyway. They were shut down sometime around 2002 but have since reopened at the same location but in a very different form.
  I saw I Am Spoonbender here, in what I believe was their only Texas show ever. I still remember it well. I also saw Cursive with the Paper Chase as an opener soon after. Strangely, while I Am Spoonbender set up at the back by the window, Cursive set up right by the stairs. Maybe for the sake of electricity access.
• Mary Jane’s: This also existed for several years in the late 90′s and up until about 2002, when it suddenly became “Mary Jane’s Fat Cat” and, soon after “Fat Cat’s,” and it change drastically. I played here once in either 1999 or 2000, opening for Antarctica and The Gloria Record. I saw The Gloria Record (again) and Karate here, as well as a number of other shows. This was the best venue in town for a while.

More to come.

Scenario, you have a component and declare a valid function in that CFC that steps on the name of a built-in ColdFusion function. In my case, it was “log,” which CF uses as a logarithm function. Code:

<cfcomponent>
<cffunction name="log">
<cfargument name="anything">
</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

In version 8, this will throw an exception error. In version 9, it works fine.
This seems like a bug as you should, in theory, be able to name your component functions whatever you’d like as they’re always going to be referenced with the object and never directly like the built-in function will be. Obviously Adobe also thought it was a bug and has fixed this issue with version 9.

Scenario: you have MySQL in any version that supports the handy and fantastic GROUP_CONCAT function. If you’re familiar with it, GROUP_CONCAT takes what would multiple rows from a join and, instead, using the GROUP BY clause in the query, groups those extra rows into a delimited string. It helps a lot in application development because you can then get your one-to-many column values while still returning the actual number of rows for the purpose of paging and such.

ColdFusion 8 is what I’ve tested this on, but I’m sure it’s on other versions as well.

If you have a GROUP_CONCAT on a field with integers, ColdFusion will implicitly convert this value to an array when you try evaluate it. In my example, I had a GROUP_CONCAT on two fields, one an integer and the other a VARCHAR. When I tried to output the integer field, ColdFusion told me that it was actually an array with one index, 51. Problem is that the value returned (only one value in this case) everywhere else was 3. The weird thing was that the VARCHAR field came through fine, as a string.

I poked around online and found the answer: you have to run ToString() on the value, and it comes out correctly. I’m not going to say that I understand the error, but I would chalk it up to some sort of Java conversion, probably in ColdFusion’s MySQL driver. Therefore, if you used other flavors of drivers for a MySQL connection, you may not see this issue at all. But running a ToString() on your field is not going to hurt you if done correctly in the first place, so it’s probably a good idea to do that anyway because, if your code gets on a server that has this bug, it will stump whoever’s working on it.

Just to the west of Appalachicola sits the town of Port St. Joe. You can see the namesake peninsula with its state park through much of the town, although the town itself is not actually on the Gulf which, 100 years ago, made it an ideal port. When the railroad came through back then, things ran on Eastern time so, when the country standardized into time zones, the town’s tendency stuck. Now Gulf County, of which Port St. Joe is the seat, is the only county in Florida to be within two time zones. Just down the coast, the little town of Mexico Beach sits in Bay County, and in Central time. Here, I finally got my picture.

Interesting article from the St. Pete Times on this subject.

The most interesting part about this is the confusion this causes. Do a Google search for “port st joe florida time zone” and, just on the search results page, you will see at least one reference to Port St. Joe being in Central time. Personally, I could have sworn that it was at one point but, in researching this today (I’ll be in the region again and wanted to make sure I would gain the hour before reaching my hotel), I guess it’s always been like this.

Interesting article about this subject from the St. Pete Times.

I Googled and found an interesting “bug” in ColdFusion. If you have content in your application.cfm/cfc, then <cfajaxproxy> will just not work for you.
I write “bug” because it has more to do with following proper ColdFusion coding convention: you should always avoid outputting content from your application file. I’ve broken this role and some of the more recent apps I’ve done in the area of <cflogin>, where the login and password change forms are actually outputted from the application file. However, I’m comfortable with this, only because, if they are reaching the script where your <cfajaxproxy> sits, they would presumably always be logged in as that same application file would be called for that script also.

The work-around here was to build another application file into the CFCs directory. However, I wanted to keep it with the other CFCs and, unfortunately, there were other CFCs in there already, so I wasn’t sure what sort of issues this change would cause (although I’m certain it would cause issues). So I’ll just have to find a way around it.

So, yeah, I don’t know if I’d call that a bug or not. I have the feeling that, if brought to the attention of Adobe, it probably would not be a high-priority fix. And a lot of that may have to do with <cfajaxproxy>’s relative obscurity (which is a damn shame, because it’s such a cool tag).

In moving over the most recent changes to the code, I found an interesting difference between version 8 and 9: in version 9, they’ve changed it so that you can have structure keys in the short-hand version of structure creation encapsulated in quotation marks, but also allows for structure keys to have dashes and underscores. I had a CFC where I was creating a structure in the short-hand form. It worked fine on version 9 but broke when I pushed it onto the version 8 server.

Example of what works in version 9:

<cfset myStruct = {
‘test’='This is a test key.’,
‘test-fail’='This is a failed test key.’,
‘test-anotherFail’='This is another failed test key.’
}>

This is more in-line with conventions in Java and JavaScript, which the Adobe crew seems to be working for.