Out of some sheer boredom, I started looking at the top 25 used passwords (from articles here and here). (more…)

My talk at thatConference went great today. You can download them here. (Also, not sure why, but the second slide would just not download the image of my kayak…) (more…)

I had this idea about doing interactive screen share and code review. I wrote it about it earlier and even asked for feedback. (more…)

I was talking with one of the junior programmers on my team about naming method names. He was having problems coming up with ones that seemed to make sense to him and to the application. I broke it down how I think about it: (more…)

Ugh. I really want to contribute to the community. I do! If others before me wouldn’t have done it, I wouldn’t be where I am. (more…)

Here is an interesting proof of concept that the ‘rows’ column of the explain output is actually an estimate, and not the real amount. I KNEW it to be true, but somehow I didn’t feel like it was right. I always thought “the closer the rows # gets to the exact amount of retrieved data, the better. Exact is what you strive for.” Turns out, that’s not true. The closer the number, the better, but... (more…)

Hello friends - I’m trying to get an idea if this would be a good idea. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. (more…)

Perhaps this trend is going away, but it used to be a “good thing” to make people validate their passwords. I did all kinds of silly things in Zend Framework Form and jQuery Validate plugin at first - but then I finally settled on a good solution. It’s quite simple actually… (more…)

PHPStorm has an option to install an icon for your Unity Dash on ubuntu - you can do this through the menu system. But, if you use this, it always opens to your last project. I have a number of projects running simultaneously, so this is no good. I could, of course, stop it from opening the last project, and just display the splash page menu. But I didn’t like that either. I wanted to... (more…)

One of the worst things with CAPTCHAs are actually having to solve them. One of the things my team and I use for our projects is the hidden field CAPTCHA. This is a technique that adds a field to a form, but uses CSS to hide it. If that form value is filled in, we can guess that the submitter was a bot reading the HTML - and not an actual user. (more…)