Enhance performance of Joins / Queries: Make sure all columns share the same collation

At tunesBag.com, we're storing most of the data in UTF-8 / Unicode because we've customers from all over the world. Some internal data like userkeys, entrykeys etc are stored in latin1 because it needs less space. I recently came accross a query which was very slow without any obvious reason and after some research I found out that in a left join, the column A from table A has a different collation than column B from table A.
I changed the collation for column B to the same as column A - and the query executive time dropped from about 1300 msec to 100 msec!

So always make sure you're using the same collation if possible when performing joins!

JavaScript variables set in onclick - different behaviour in IE / FF

I recently discovered that the behaviour of internet explorer and Firefox is quite different when it comes to settings variables in an onClick event - in Firefox these variables will become global variables, in IE they are just "local" and will nur be available for other functions.

An example:

a onClick="variableA = 'peter';CallFunction();return false;" ...

function CallFunction() {
alert(variableA);
}

In FF, an alert box will show "Peter", in IE you'll receive an exception.

How to solve that? Simply declare variableA on top of your JavaScript file, this way IE will modify the global variable.

var variableA = '';

Railo - important path placeholders

I'm playing around with railo, a full featured alternative CFML engine and so far, I'm very impressed. During testing my existing applications with this new environment I had to add some custom mappings in the administration (by the way, there are two admin engines, the first one is server-wide, the second one just for the current webroot).

When creating these custom mappings, there are some very interesting path placeholders you can use:
{railo-web}: path to the railo web directory typical "{web-root}/WEB-INF/railo"
{railo-server}: path to the railo server directory typical where the railo.jar is located
{temp-directory}: path to the temp directory of the current user of the system
{home-directory}: path to the home directory of the current user of the system
{web-root-directory}: path to the web root
{system-directory}: path to thesystem directory

This way you can create mappings without using the full path to the directory - very cool!