the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for February, 2010
A Quick Thought About the "Penalty" of Human Sinfulness
Feb 28th
The consequence of sinfulnesss–being cut off from the life and goodness of God–is so perpetually annihilating in and of itself that no additional “penalty” needs to be imagined in order to increase the disaster of sinfulness. If God does nothing in regard to sinfulness, the consequence to the sinner is just as terrible as if God somehow actively brings about the same end.
Why, then, do we conceive of the consequences of sin within the framework of penalty? It’s simple: because at the core we are sinful, vindictive creatures that desire a vision of God wherein God reacts along the lines that we, as sinful creatures, would act. We want God to respond with violence and hatred because these are what fundamentally characterize the neurosis of sin. If our God behaves in similar ways, we have–in a very small and neurotic way–legitimized the categories of our behavior, and God is simply the biggest and most violent one in the end.
Fortunately, the truth is that God does not pile “penalty” upon our heads, but quite to the contrary invades our sinfulness in the person of Christ to rescue us from the fear of death and dissolution (Hebrews 2:14-15) so that we might More >
Ext to ColdFusion…Nice!
Feb 21st
So I know a lot of the posts I’ve been writing recently have been about stuff that’s been around a while–Ext helper functions, CFScript, etc. Nonetheless, I post them because some of the answers to questions I’ve found in developing solutions have been less-than-easy to find, so perhaps repeating some of the same things again will help Google find it a bit easier for someone else someday.
On with redundancy!
Obviously, JSON-related technologies have been around for a while, and with ColdFusion 8, a lot of native JSON handling was added for the creation of some sweet AJAX-y goodness. While I’ve dabbled with these, I’ve never really had a need for them…until now.
I recently developed a remote CFC function that required about 12 different arguments. On the client side, I also developed a quick EXT Ajax.request() method to pass these arguments into the CFC function.
Now with Ext, it’s incredibly simple to pass arguments to server-side functions, as this example illustrates:
Ext.Ajax.request({
url: 'com/functions.cfc',
success: successMethod,
failure: errorMethod,
headers: {"Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8"},
params: {method:'setupLife',argument1:arg1,argument2:arg2}
});
I like this alot, because it allows me to treat each argument as its own “thing,” rather than stringing together a bunch of “&argument1=arg1” in the query string.
But what if More >
30 Seconds with Ext
Feb 11th
Ok, so this is not earth-shattering, but I came across a pretty cool feature in Ext's DomHelper class the other day.
But first, a little context. Don't you just HATE creating new HTML elements with JavaScript? If you go the route of explicitly pasting them together, your code ends up looking like spaghetti…and I hope you're good at tracking down escaping errors 🙂
And what about wrangling with createELement, appendChild, and the ilk with their corresponding unpredictable behavior across browsers?
It's a gigantic pain in the butt, but as I found out recently, Ext makes it SUPER simple. Using the DomHelper class, you can easily leverage Ext to confidently generate any number of elements without having to worry about escaping characters or remembering the nuances of creating elements for each browser.
Let's say I just want to make a new table:
Ext.DomHelper.append('cart-details', {tag:'table', id:'detail-table'});
In this super simple example, I'm adding a new table element to an existing div with an id of "cart-details." To add the table, I simply invoke the append() method from the DomHelper, and 40 characters later I'm all set.
But what is even cooler is that the DomHelper class allows you to create NESTED elements as well! Check this out:
Ext.DomHelper.append('detail-table', { tag: More >
