Where I've Been

posted on june 11, 2003, tag: site

Work has been really busy lately, as I've been trying to tie up a project for the United Nations that has been going on for way, way too long. This project has been an assault on me from multiple fronts, since it involves so many different variables. Most recently, I had to convert the website part of the project from ASP to ColdFusion—a task which sounds worse than it is. Surprisingly, I think I almost like ColdFusion more than ASP from time to time, only because of how much I hate ASP and VBScript (even though I use it every damned day). The hardest part of the transformation was the fact that CF5 (yes, we're not even using MX) has a COM bug built into the server that doesn't allow you to use the Microsoft DOM object to properly use XML and XSLT. Basically, you can't send parameters to the XSL files, which was a serious problem since I had to do that for this project.

I eventually ended up writing my own COM object (a wrapper, really) that allowed me to circumvent CF5 to send parameters, and it worked. Thank god, because we were getting to the point of giving up on the CFML conversion and admitting defeat. Since then, I've been working on a really complicated JavaScript-based form that allows users to get all sorts of statistical information about 173 different countries. I've never pushed multidimensional arrays so hard in JS before. It's actually been kind of fun.

Aside from that, there's been some other personal work I've been trying to get done (not involving this website), so that's the real reason for the dead feeling around here. I finished the code rewrite of this site about two weeks ago—I just haven't found a new design I've liked yet. As soon as I do, I'll try to finally finish the redo here. In the meantime, I'll also attempt to sneak some new entries in.

Hopefully by next week everything will be back to normal. Thanks for your patience.

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