When creating a new column, I have always put the max number of digits in parentheses after INTEGER.  For example, if I didn’t expect a particular field to ever be more than 9,999 (in value), I would create the column as INTEGER(4).  This is dead wrong, and according to my teacher quite a lot of people do this.  The number after INTEGER is actually the minimum number of characters that you want to show if you have  ZEROFILL turned on.

For example:

CREATE TABLE myintegers (theints INTEGER(4) ZEROFILL);

INSERT INTO myintegers VALUES (3),(333),(33333),(3333333);

SELECT theints FROM myintegers;

will return

In actuality, if you don’t ever plan on a column going above 4 digits long, you should use a small int datatype.  Not only is it more specific to what you want, but it results in only 2 bytes of storage space being allocated versus 8 for an INT.  On a high performance database, this can make a big difference.

Finally, while I’m on the subject, I thought I’d mention the UNSIGNED option.  Adding the UNSIGNED option tells the storage engine that there can be no negative numbers.  Because negative numbers are disallowed, your upper limit for the value of your column is twice the value minus 1 what it would be if you allowed negatives.  A lot of you my be saying ‘of course’, but that was one of those things I always wondered about and never bothered to look up.

The storage space and lower/upper limits for MySQL integer (lowercase) data can be found here.

In order to add CVS into ColdFusion builder, go to Help > Software Updates.  Sam had to add the Eclipse update site to his Software update sites, but the version that I installed (which I downloaded from the public beta site on 7/17/09) had the site already included.  In Sam’s experience, the CVS Client was under the Eclipse SDK category, while I had to go into the “Uncategorized” section.  Below is a screenshot of the trees that I opened.  I neglected to capture the actual CVS builds that I got–there were several to choose from–but I just chose the highest version number listed: 1.1.2.x

After selecting the updates, click Install, and agree to the terms of use.  CFB will ask to restart, and once it comes back up, if you previously used the same workspace for CVS in CFEclipse, CVS in CFBuilder will automatically attach itself to your projects.

The first thing I did when it opened was point it at my old CFEclipse workspace so that I wouldn’t have to import my projects. In order to do this CFEclipse must be closed. Go to File > Switch Workplace > Other and browse to your old workplace folder. CFB will have to restart itself, but it does so very quickly. After starting back up, the first thing I noticed was that the snippets were missing. Snippets and shortcuts are important to me, and I really didn’t want to have to create them all over again, so I dug around in my workspace metadata and found them.

By default, cfeclipse seems to store them all in [workspaceroot]\.metadata\.plugins\org.cfeclipse.cfml\snippets.  If you changed this folder in CFEclipse, all you have to do is (in CF Builder) go to Window > Preferences > ColdFusion > Snippets and update your snippet path. Since I’m moving away from CFE, I figured it would make more sense to not rely on a CFE folder to store my snippets, so I copied all the xml files from the default path above into [workspaceroot]\.metadata\snippets, closed the Snippets view, and opened it up again, and they all popped up.

1.  Go to Computer, right click and choose “Properties”

2.  Select the Device Manager

3.  Scroll down to Portable Devices, and find the device with the missing/bad drivers.  On the blog I found, the device was listed as an iPhone.  On my machine it was called a Digital Still Camera.  Right click on the device, and choose Update Driver Software.

4. On the next screen choose “Browse my computer for driver software”

5.  Browse to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple and select this folder.  After a minute or so of updating, all should be well.

select lookupID, lookupValue, lookupType, @rownum:=@rownum+1 as rownumber
from lookup, (SELECT @rownum:=0) r

This will return the lookupID,  lookupValue,  lookupType, and a number for each row, beginning with 1.

All the credit goes to this blog post, but I feel it’s always good to propagate tips like this.

Trigger text: Eclipse allows you to assign text to a snippet and then launch the snippet by typing the trigger text and pressing Ctrl+J to insert it.

AutoHotkey (Windows only) is a small utility that runs in your system tray and lets you use any combination of keystrokes and mouse actions to script virtually any activity on your system.  You use a config file to set up your shortcuts, and each key has a corresponding AHK code (a on the keyboard=”a”, b=”b”,^=Ctrl, +=Shift, !=Alt, etc.)

AutoHotkey has gobs of features which I won’t get into, but the key here (no pun intended) is the “Send” command, which sends keystrokes to the active window.  By sending the trigger text, followed by Ctrl+J to Eclipse, AHK completely opens up your shortcut options.  This is what my config looks like:


^!o::Send object{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^+a::Send cfargument{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^q::Send qp{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^!g::Send getset{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^+g::Send getarg{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^m::Send mailtome{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^+q::Send query{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^+v::Send var{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^+r::Send reqarg{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^!e::Send cfargevent{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^!q::Send fq{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}
^!s::Send ske{CTRLDOWN}j{CTRLUP}


Each line represents a keyboard shortcut and the corresponding keystrokes it sends to Eclipse.  The first line sends “object”Ctrl+J (without quotes) to Eclipse.  Then in Eclipse I have the following snippet

Theoretically, you could use AutoHotkey for the entire snippet, but Eclipse’s snippets do add the value of the {squiggly brackets} which allow you to set up arguments for your snippet.  When I launch the snippet above, for example, Eclipse will ask me the path in a popup.  There’s much more complexity to this, which I won’t get into here.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what AutoHotkey can do.  For more you can look at Lifehacker’s extensive posts about it.

I graduated from Georgetown University in 2003, began doing QA for Interfolio.com and soon became the sole full-time developer.  Like many in our trade, I’m self-taught, rather than a CS major or the like, so while I learned the basics, those basics were all I knew for the first 3 years or so.  In 2007, the company grew enough to warrant a second developer, and we hired Sam Farmer.  Having an experienced developer to bounce ideas off  was a revolutionary change for me, and it helped me get to the next level as a CFer.  Additionally, Sam opened my eyes to the ColdFusion’s incredible community, which really put my growth in fast-forward.  Now 2 years later I feel ready to start making my own contributions, and I hope I can be half as helpful to a few people out there as the ColdFusion community has been for me.  I look forward to sharing my thoughts and ideas with everyone.