Today I was working on creating a CSV file that required numeric columns to be a fixed number of digits, using leading zeros to make up the difference. So, for example, if the column required 5 digits, the number 123 should show up as 00123. This is super simple using the NumberFormat() function in CFML, simply specify a mask like so:

But, in my particular case, I had several columns that required 12 and 15 digit numbers.

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This is a repost of a news item I put up on the Nashville ColdFusion User Group website earlier today.

I just wanted to take a minute and spotlight some of the guys from the Nashville ColdFusion User Group that are going to be speaking at some upcoming conferences. These guys are really sharp, and if you get the chance to attend any of their presentations I highly recommend it.

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Here's the full article, with links to a more detailed article.

How bad is it when the best fix for problems with one of your services is to recommend people use a competitor's product?

I've been putting this announcement off for a while now, because I wanted to make sure I had everything in order before I really started talking about it. I have officially taken over as one of the co-managers of the Nashville ColdFusion User Group. Aaron West, our previous manager, made the announcement on our local user group mailing list back at the end of May, and since then I've been working hard to try to get things revamped for the group. I'm not taking on this task alone, though. Rather than have the traditional manager and assistant manager for the group, J.J. Merrick and myself decided to split the responsibilities and both of us run the group as co-managers.

I'm really excited about some of the things that are in the works, and can't wait to get things kicked off with our CFlunch meeting next week. So, if you're in the Nashville area and want to come have lunch and hang out with some fellow CF'ers, be sure to RSVP today!

This is a pretty cool feature built in to ColdFusion that I'll wager many people don't know about. I had certainly never hear of it until this morning. Did you know that ColdFusion has a built in component.cfc component that is automatically inherited by all CFCs on your server?

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I like SQL Server. It's always been my RDBMS of choice, and has pretty much been the standard at most places I've worked. But here at my current gig we use Oracle, and we recently purchased a third party application that requires SQL Server. Since this application wasn't going to be working with a ton of data, and it's probably the only thing we'll use SQL Server for, we opted to go with SQL Server Express instead of actually purchasing a full-blown edition.

One of the limitations of SQL Server Express is that you can't automate backups in it like you can the other versions of SQL Server. You have to manually write the backup scripts and then schedule them to run in Windows Scheduled Tasks. This really isn't a big deal, but it is annoying. So, as you can imagine, as soon as we got our databases up an running, the first thing I had to do was create some backup scripts.

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InfoWorld recently published an article titled Top five scripting languages on the JVM. It gives a comparison of Groovy, JRuby, Scala, Fantom, and Jython, and even winds up talking a little about Clojure, JavaFX, and NetRexx there at the end. (Thanks to John Sieber for blogging about the article, that's how I found it.) It gives a nice detailed explanation of each language and lists a few pros and cons, all without getting too technical. It's very informative and unbiased, which is a nice change from the language comparison flame wars that seem to be so prevalent today.

This is a really good article for someone like me, as I know very little about any of those languages. For a while now I've been wanting to add a new language to my utility belt, and I've been saying that I want to learn Java and Groovy. But a recent discussion I had with Sean Corfield about this had me thinking about trying out Scala instead. Now, after reading this InfoWorld article I think I'm probably going to give Scala a try. I don't know when, but when I do get around to learning a new language Scala will be at the top of my list. I still want to learn Java and Groovy, though. :)

So, I'm not much of a gadget guy. I know it's strange with me being in the tech field and all, but I just really don't care about having the latest and greatest smartphone/laptop/e-reader/gadget of the month. When I upgraded my last phone almost 2 years ago, I had been out of contract for so long that Verizon offered me any Blackberry I wanted for free, any of their other smartphones for free or under $50, and up to a $150 discount for any other phone that didn't fall in those categories. You want to know what I got? A Boulder, so when I drop it (over and over again) it won't hurt it. That's all I need. It makes phone calls, and if I get lost it has a compass. ;)

All that to say, you'll rarely hear me talk about gadgets. But, last week I got a new DSLR camera and I'm pretty excited about it.

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This may be a no-brainier for some, but I fought with it for about 2 hours yesterday so I wanted to make note of it in case it happened again.

I had a situation where my code worked correctly on my local development machine, but wouldn't work in our staging environment. The exact problem was that I was using jQuery to call a CFC, which returned some JSON, and jQuery then populated a div with it. Pretty basic stuff. But for some reason, on our staging server jQuery encountered problems and would never populate the div, even though I could see in FireBug where the CFC call was returning the JSON correctly. All code was identical in every comparison, and both sites were using the same database so the data was identical as well.

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Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where I work, currently has an opening for a full time mid-to-senior level ColdFusion developer. A minimum of 5 years ColdFusion experience is preferred, and Oracle database experience is highly desirable. While the posting states that a degree is required, experience may be substituted for education.

If you're in the Nashville area (or relocating here), and looking for a ColdFusion job, we'd like to hear from you. This position is onsite, for local candidates only. Sorry, no recruiters, contractors, or telecommuters.

You can view the full job description and application here

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