Code

I'm a hobbyist developer. I was a web application developer professionally a long, long time ago, and I've continued to work on various scripting and programming projects for funsies.

You can find my most complete projects at code.abettergeek.com. Some projects include a detailed breakdown on the project's wiki page.

Articles in this section

Adobe ColdFusion
- ColdFusion: Browser identification in web applicationsplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigColdFusion: Browser identification in web applications
  
  I’m really, annoyingly, obsessively anal about browser compatibility in web design. Even if you’re convinced that none of your users will ever touch Opera, there’s no reason to not make sure your site is usable in Opera…or Lynx, or IE 5.5, or anything else.
- Internet Explorer and images as form input controlsplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigInternet Explorer and images as form input controls
  
  I like to provide clear visual or textual cues for an application. In the admin interface for one of my apps, I provide a pretty easy way of rejecting or accepting form submissions for a class – a red “X” to reject, and a green checkmark to accept. In order to pass these actions to the ColdFusion page on the server side and rely on
- Coldfusion 8 and Microsoft SQL 2005 : @@IDENTITYplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigColdfusion 8 and Microsoft SQL 2005 : @@IDENTITY
  
  There’s a handy little query you can run in SQL to retrieve the identity (primary key) value of a record you just created. So, you can do something like this:
  
  INSERT INTO People ( Name ) VALUES ( 'Joe' ); SELECT @@IDENTITY AS NewName;
- ColdFusion: Generating and parsing RSS feedsplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigColdFusion: Generating and parsing RSS feeds
  
  One of my current projects at work has an RSS requirement. I’m redesigning the university’s policies website. My customers are concerned that other departments at Purdue have previously copied the content of a policy and placed it on a different site, which is problematic when policies are revised, superseded, or retired.
- ColdFusion: Encrypting sensitive data in URL stringsplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigColdFusion: Encrypting sensitive data in URL strings
  
  On one of my current projects, I’ve found myself in need of passing sensitive data through a URL string. I could use an individual form for each link and pass it via POST, but I wanted to see what I might be able to do by way of encrypting the data. Turns out it’s quite easy.
JavaScript
- JavaScript: Dynamic Form Element Namesplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigJavaScript: Dynamic Form Element Names
  
  Purdue, like a lot of enterprise-level organizations, uses LDAP to manage certain things. One of the advantages to LDAP is that it can provide information about users on a domain. Our organization uses some globally-accessible ColdFusion functions to quickly get user information based on user ID data.
- TLA3000: Authenticating to Microsoft services with vanilla JavaScriptplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigTLA3000: Authenticating to Microsoft services with vanilla JavaScript
  
  One of my current projects is focused on improving the developer experience when it comes to getting up and running with the numerous cool things possible with Microsoft Azure.
PHP
- PHP: Browser identificationplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigPHP: Browser identification
  
  Not too long ago, I wrote a short tutorial on using ColdFusion to identify the user’s browser and add extra browser-specific CSS files. Today, I found myself in need of similar functionality for PHP. The code isn’t quite the same – PHP doesn’t have a direct clone of CF’s contains decision operator; you have to use the
- PHP: Dynamically generating images from textplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigPHP: Dynamically generating images from text
  
  If you’ve visited my site more than once, you might start to notice that the silly little tagline next to the logo in my header changes, in both content and appearance.
  
  This is accomplished by way of a fancy little bit of PHP. The image generation uses the GD library (with FreeType support), and the fonts are all TrueType.
Swift
Windows Scripting
- Batch Scripts
  - Guest post: Checking user permissions on a Windows networkplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigGuest post: Checking user permissions on a Windows network
    
    Recently I needed to find out which folders a certain person was able to access on our Windows network. Apparently, this was extremely easy in Novell. Since it isn’t 1995 anymore, I tried to find a way to do this on the Internet. I couldn’t, so I set about making my own.
- PowerShellplugin-autotooltip__default plugin-autotooltip_bigPowerShell
  
  PowerShell is Microsoft's interactive scripting engine, allowing you to create powerful scripts for many purposes. PowerShell can easily import and use any .NET library or type, making it very powerful for automation and sophisticated processing of dirty inputs, such as badly-formatted text.

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