The Lighter Side of Code

I just watched a video from UGTV on Charlie Arehart’s website done by Jacob Munson.  Near the end of the presentation Jacob was talking about how he changed his form names and it broke the spam bots that were hitting his site.  He also talked about the concept of using a special key loaded into the session that could be used to check if the person was real or not.  The consensus was that manual spammers sucked and you have to use something like Project Honey Pot to try and stop the manual spammers.  Well, I agreed with Jacob and the others in the audience, that you have to employ a few different methods to feel even a little safe, but I liked the form name change and session key, so I put together a simple proof of concept.  I am still trying to figure out how this method wouldn’t work for bots, so if you know of something let me know.

I started out by setting the appkey and then using it to encrypt the form:

<form action="processForm.cfm" method="post">
 
        <input name="#cfusion_encrypt('firstname',session.appkey)#" type="text" >
 
        <input name="#cfusion_encrypt('lastname',session.appkey)#" type="text" >
 
    <input type="submit" value="go" >
</form>

Then, I run through the form and convert out the keys to usable strings, you simply use the new form instead of the form scope.

<cfset newFrm = StructNew()>
<cfloop collection="#FORM#" item="g">
	<cfset clearFormName = cfusion_decrypt(g, session.appkey)>
    <cfset structInsert(newFrm,variables.clearFormName,FORM[g],'true')>
</cfloop>

I figure if the bot is going to be looking through form definitions, then the constantly changing key will mess that up.  I think it would be best if you used a really good key for the encryption and then used a different encryption method than the cfusion_encrypt.  I just used that for a test.  Any thoughts?

Hello all,

Well then, I spent a few hours today trying to troubleshoot a little problem without any luck.  I noticed that my machine was running crazy slow and when I looked at my services, I noticed that CF was running at 600MB by itself.  This has never happened to me before, so I went poking around trying to find the culprit and I still don’t know what’s up.  Has anyone had an issue with CF running on Vista or any OS where JRun peaks at 500MB or more?  I haven’t changed any settings since the first install, soeither CF doesn’t like my machine or there is something sitting on my machine that is in conflict.  Any help is much appreciated.

A few days ago Ben Forta posted, on his blog, an article about the costs of ColdFusion. Well, I read it and I commented on it based on a lack of research on the pricing of other technologies specifically .NET and I apologize. A guy named David posted after I did and was talking about the pricing for .NET. After looking around at all the prerequisites needed to run a Windows .NET environment I realized that running a .NET environment is pretty expensive as well.

Also, now that I think about it, people say that ColdFusion is not learned by new programmers and I think that Adobe should do something about that with the Universities. It’s completely free to learn CF with CFEclipse and the developers version of CF server. The problem is that most students are learning C# and VB in school and when they come out they further saturate the .NET job market. That’s why it’s so hard to find CF developers, because the new brood aren’t picking it up until later in life.

I love ColdFusion, and I have been successful in converting other developers away from .NET in the past. The biggest reason they move to CF is the learning curve and the ease of development. I have met some developers who don’t know some of the tricks in HTML, Javascript, and CSS because VS does a lot of it for them. Anyway, I retract my comment in Ben’s blog…ColdFusion is better priced than .NET, at least according to the pricing above.

I saw that Raymond Camden posted an example for this in June, and I decided to play with it a little. I am working on a project that needs to grab html files and display thumbs, and I modified the code some and dumped it in a CFC. What I am doing, in a nutshell, is cfhttping to a supplied url and resolving the urls. From there I am stripping the javascript and changing the tags for css files to css @import. I found that if you don’t do this, the css will not render the page correctly. After that, I create a pdf out of the file and then convert it to an image. Everything is great until the image conversion, at which point all the images get a border on the right and bottom. I have no idea what is causing this, but maybe someone out there knows. Anyone know?

Oh yeah, here is the code in case anyone wants to use it: Code is here

Just because I typed it doesn’t mean it is true. I for one am a little annoyed that there are people who say things like, “ColdFusion is a dead language”. I am looking in your direction Mr. Lowe. Ok, I get it…you don’t like that there isn’t a framework to do all the work for you. Ok, I get that you don’t like the fact that you can’t use polymorphic design principles or interfaces and the like. ColdFusion isn’t OO enough for you. We all understand that, just leave the language and enjoy the greener pastures. It makes no sense to bash a language because it doesn’t coddle you enough. Why not switch to .NET, there you can let the IDE do all the main tasks for you and all you have to worry about is how you set up your objects and interfaces and data models.

I always thought it was a little lame to say that a language is dead and that another language is SO much better. Especially when you complain about how the previous language didn’t have a framework that did everything for you. If I don’t like a language, I just stop using it. I don’t go around telling the masses how much it stinks. Truth be told, it probably doesn’t stink. Maybe it doesn’t fit my needs for a given project. Maybe I don’t know it well enough to use it. It could also be true that I don’t want to invest the time to design/develop a framework to “make life easier”.

As a developer, and aspiring pragmatist, I tend to use the language that suits my needs. I don’t go trudging into the dark with one language because it is good for me at the time. That would lead to me proclaiming that the new language is dead when I find something better.

I just hope that Python and the DJango framework, the most ultimate in programming, don’t become dead languages in a few years just because another language is better at the time.