John Mason gave a great presentation on CFCUnit. I've used this on a small project last year and was flying blind. Watching this presentation really gave me a new appreciation for the power of this tool, in particular the integration with CFEclipse and ANT.

This presentation was give to the Coldfusion Meetup group. There are usually one or two online presentations a week and they are almost always informative. I'm looking forward to ANT presentation next week and the MXUnit presentation to the same group in two weeks. Automation is the easiest way to increase your value and productivity.

A friend of my sent me this amazing story of a hurricane hunter in trouble during Hugo 1989. As a ground zero Hugo Survivor (Charleston, SC), I find this just a truly unbelievable story. I feel in part that I owe my life and those of my friends and family to the bravery of these Hurricane Hunters. So, thanks to these folks 19 years after the fact.

You can never predict what a user will do as this xkcd comic illustrates.

I've been working on a custom design for the site for a while. I'll say that the MT template system is quite powerful (which is code for complex). I'm still having some issues with the content font, but everything else is looking good. It's amazing how easy things are with CSS these days. The navigation rollovers are nothing but an unordered list with some background images switched out when the mouse is hovering over them.

Over on CF-Talk today, Dennis Powers had a problem with selecting the correct records when dealing with bit flags. I'm a big fan of flags and bitwise math, so I jumped in and helped him out. I had to think about the operations a bit (no pun intended) too long, so I decided to drop myself a note as a refresher.

When dealing with bit flags, here is a handy cheatsheet:

myMask = 1st and 8th flags set (10000001 -> 2^7 + 2^0 -> 129)

myVar & myMask = myMask (All masked flags are set)
myVar & myMask > 0 (At least one masked flag is set)
myVar & myMask = 0 (None of the masked flags are set)
myVar = myMask  (All masked flags set, all other flags not set)

Happy masking!

I have a client that manages and resells domains to their hosting customers. Currently, they just purchase them from a registrar and then bill their clients and do it all manually! Does anyone know of a registrar with a good reseller API? The only ones I've been able to find are WildWestDomains (part of GoDaddy), eNom and ResellerClub. Anyone that has any experience with any of these, I'd appreciate it if you'd drop me a note with your experience.