So my team wants a "Flex and AIR rawkstar". Someone to fly in, throw down an app or two, revolutionize our development mythologies*, but looking through these resumes, I wonder if such a person exists. This is my first chance to be a part of the hiring process from the other side. And if nothing else, I've learned some great tips for building my own resume. I skipped the list of "technologies and stuff I know".

I hit a weird... thing in ColdFusion this weekend. I have a table with an identity/autonumber. When an insert fails, it's still incrementing the autonumber. So I insert a good one, #1, then three bad ones, and another good one and it's #5. It's just an autonumber so I shouldn't care, but I want to understand this. Does it increment because it starts the insert, then fails? Might help to say it's failing because of a foreign key restraint.

I'm currently debugging a Flex program I wrote 18 months ago. My very first "big" Flex app. All the variables and functions are public. Data is passed around by tightly coupled components. The database is requeried CONSTANTLY. I went into this thing to make a text change a few weeks ago. While in there, I wanted to make some little efficiency upgrades and ended up rewriting half the thing. Going back to your own old code is actually more frustrating than picking up someone else's.

A non-WoW related post? For realz? I've been working on a Transfer/ColdSpring/ColdBox site. I've got one word for Transfer: voodoo magic. The powers-that-be for this project decided yesterday to abandon Transfer and go back to generating CFCs. I don't exactly know why it was abandoned, but it was cited that Transfer is causing more work arounds than its solving problems. Now I'm just a code monkey on this project.

Joshua Cyr's done a sweet job setting up a CF/Flex/Air cruise! http://www.riadventure.com/ I immediately couldn't help but imagine certain big names in the Adobeverse... in swim wear. I then immediately bashed my head against the wall until I stopped.

The other component to cf_armory, FactionCapture, is a mess!! A while ago I added the option to chose what factions to graph, and I just changed it to only store faction history for 6 months (filling up my database!), but the page is still so ugly. I'm thinking this is a good candidate for a Flex app. I love the idea of graphically seeing your faction values change over time, but the current conception of it that I have stinks. So I played with some Flex and came up with this design mock up...

After a year of ignoring it, I've finally gotten back to enhancing UpgradeCentral. I used JQuery to break up the data into tabs. Now you'll immediately notice the tabs are too much to fit on the screen, so go into a weird second line. That's because I don't know jack about JQuery ... yet. Note, UpgradeCentral uses Armory to determine what is an upgrade, based on the character's current spec. And a lot of it is rubbish. It generally ignores items with a "chance on hit" sort of bonuses.

Current setup... I'm on MSSQL Server and autogenerate my bean, DAO, and Gateway with the wizard in Adobe's CF extensions. A lot of the code it generates is crap, but still it saves me a LOT of time and keeps some level of consistency to my code. On an insert, the generated code puts a cftransaction around the insert, then immediately queries the record to get the autogenerated ID.

This time next week, I'll be sitting in the Adobe opening keynote at CFUnited. When my manager told me he was sending me again this year, I was excited and looking forward to it. Then my WoW guild announced plans for a BBQ in Toronto next weekend. That would have been even more fun, to meet the people I've been "hanging out with" for a year. But oh well! I've signed up for some great sessions at CFUnited. Lots of OO, ColdSpring and frameworks, unit testing, automation, and data security.

I'm in the process of making some new banners for the top of the blog and want one to show up randomly. I did this on a site I made for the Anime Group at college.