As I wandered around an electronics store the other day on my lunch break, I was reminded of a disturbing price-gouging scam that seems to be so widely accepted that it has become status quo. I'm talking about cables; specifically, digital A/V cables like HDMI, DVI, optical TOSLINK, etc.

Big-box stores are expoliting confusion about the differences between analog and digital signals, and the effect that small changes in the signal quality might have on the picture you see on your TV or the sound from your audio receiver. See, in the dark ages (up until a few years ago), A/V signals were commonly transmitted in an analog format, which turns out to be remarkably inefficient in comparison to digital. Another downfall of analog signals, more pertinent to this discussion, is that they are susceptible to a number of adverse distorting effects caused by loss of signal strength.

You've seen the effects that moderate to severe interference or attenuation can have on an analog TV signal - snowy, ghost-like or rolling images, rendering your favorite shows unwatchable. You've also seen the effects of minor signal interference, which can typically be ignored but are annoying nonetheless. Cable manufacturers have a rich history of fighting against common causes for analog signal weakening. Many household devices produce some level of electromagnetic interference, so manufacturers introduced magnetic shielding. These higher-end cables made a real, perceivable difference in picture clarity.

The time of battling the shortcomings of analog signals has passed. Today, digital video and audio devices are the standard, Digital signals are based on a simple protocol that consists of 1s and 0s. There is very little room in a digital signal for errors. Either the picture appears on your TV, or it doesn't.

Expensive brands like Monster Cable want you to believe there is a difference in the signal carried by their product. This just isn't true. So please, if you're looking for an HDMI cable to hook up your new 52-inch plasma, don't spend more than $10.

I use monoprice.com (unsolicited plug!) They carry quality products and their prices are second to none. Try them or another online retailer, and save 80% of your hard-earned money.

Today I found myself chasing my tail for a bit. This function threw an exception at runtime, which indicates that the argument passed in does not match the designated cfargument type. I spent a half hour finding different ways to verify that both inputs, Group_ID and Max_Allowed, were indeed of type Numeric.

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I spent most of my morning chasing a sneaky little bug. Basically, once upon a time one of our tables contained a column (to protect the innocent, let's say it was called Meaningless_Data). Several months ago, my team removed the column from the DB schema as well as all references to it in the code.

I grabbed the changes and continued on my merry way... until today, which apparently is the first time I've tried to use a function that touches that particular table. I kept getting an error:

So it's looking for the column and not finding it. Not surprising, since we deliberately deleted it a long time ago. I triple-checked the code, but couldn't find a single reference to Meaningless_Data in any SQL statement (or anywhere else in the codebase, for that matter).

I drove myself batty for way too long before copying the query straight from CFCATCH.SQL and manually running it against my local DB. Same error. Okay, it's not a Coldfusion issue...

Then I ran it against the DB on our development server. Worked like a charm. Getting warmer...

I generated SQL scripts for the table on each machine and diffed them, and the culprit was revealed. A trigger was pointing to the missing column, and was firing every time I touched the table. The other developer had updated the triggers on his local DB and the dev server, but when I grabbed the schema and code updates, I didn't think to look there.

File under lessons learned.

As a web developer, I often find myself in need of professional help. (Don't we all?) Sometimes all that stands between me and a completed project is a quick Coldfusion, SQL, or Actionscript example. At times like these, I turn to Google.

Much of the time I can find what I need in the first few search results. A code example here, a syntax clarification there. One site that used to bug me, however, was Experts-Exchange.com.

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I've been wanting to get a blog up and running for some time, and so a couple of weeks ago I downloaded BlogCFC, an absolute work of art spearheaded by Raymond Camden.

I popped open the zip file, read the documentation, saw how easy it was to set up BlogCFC, and basically got my hopes up. Then I remembered that my site is hosted by GoDaddy, and as many of you already know, this generally means headache and heartache for a Coldfusion developer.

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