Double Disc Version of Jerry Cantrell’s Degradation Trip

I’ve been listening to the double disc version of Jerry Cantrell’s solo album Degradation Trip a lot this week.

Anger Rising was the big single off the initial single-disc release of the album. It was a very Alice In Chains sounding song. Now listening to the double album version its obvious he left most of the songs that sounded like AIC off of the single-disc version.

The second disc is very much a AIC album. Especially now that AIC did release a new album… that sounds a lot like solo-Jerry Cantrell.

There’s a bunch of excellent songs on here that weren’t on the single-disc release which is to bad since I think most people who bought the single disc version wouldn’t buy the two disc expanded version.

Songs I’d highlight are Dying Inside, Pig Charmer, and Thanks Anyway. All of which would sound at home on any of AIC’s albums. Like the new album, Black Gives Way To Blue, the subject matter seems to be about Layne for many of the songs.

Bottom Line: If you liked the new AIC album consider picking the double-disc version of Degradation Trip.

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Using MSSQL to Find a Substring From the Right

Recently I had to add a column to a table that stored urls. The field needed hold the directory that site the files actually live in. So if the record’s url was:

“www.somesite.com/blah/blahblah/thisDirectory/”

I needed to update record’s new field with: “thisDirectory”
The table was large and I needed to update all the records.

I approached this thinking that I’d be able to Update all the records using MSSQL’s RIGHT function to get the characters from the right side of the string, but I’d need to know where the ‘/’ character was.

MSSQL’s CHARINDEX function would allow me to search for the index of the ‘/’ character, but only going forward. I of course needed to search from the end of the string. I know SQL is a limited language, but the ability to search a string backwards seems liked fairly standard functionality.

MSSQL does provide a way: you need to reverse the string and then search it forwards using the REVERSE function.

CHARINDEX('/',REVERSE(urls.server_path))

Below is the MSSQL statement I ended up with:

REPLACE(RIGHT(urls.server_path,CHARINDEX('/',REVERSE(urls.server_path),2)),'/','') AS website_directory

I was glad that there is a way to get the job done, but it feels like a hack.

AnythingToXML and XMLToAnything Updates

I spent some time updating AnythingToXML last month with a feature that allows for type hinting. I was trying to avoid this, but XMLToAnything really can not be made smart enough to know that something was once an array with only one element in it. Instead it will interpret it as a Coldfusion struct. Since XMLToAnything was written to reverse XML created with AnythingToXML I added the type hinting to the XML generation. If there is no type hinting it will still work as before and attempt a best-guess on what the XML should become.

Coldfusion’s Missing Huffman code table entry error Round 3

If you’ve been following along I’ve been trying to track down why some JPGs create errors when using CFIMAGE but most JPGs do not.

The work around I posted previously still did not work for some JPGs.

Looking back at the error reports I received a co-worker and I noticed that most of the errors came internationally from one locale. When we contacted that office we discovered that they were using MS Paint to edit and save their JPGs before uploading them. Switching them over to using MS Office Picture Manager to save the images made everything upload correctly.

I’m not sure if the bug is with MS Paint, Coldfusion, or the underlying Java, but if you’ve done everything and still are getting an error when working with images in Coldfusion (or Java?) then checking the source of your images may be be helpful in debugging.

Did anyone find MS Paint to be the root of their JPG image problems?