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…)

When browsing the documentation for chrome, I came across this: (more…)

Most of the development I do that needs to be tested on android is on a local subnet. Generally, this is because I am running the servers in virtual machines that mimic the production environment. When I want to test these websites via the android emulator, it would be nice to be able to surf to them locally (without putting them in a public QA environment) - as well as have the ability to use... (more…)

Had the pleasure of speaking at the 2nd annual Milwaukee WordCamp this last weekend. Just got my Joind.in claimed, and my slides are here. (more…)

So I decided that I wanted to challenge the concepts I know about online photo booths. What are those? (more…)

Someone from Packt reached out to me the other day to ask if I’d do a review of a newly published book called Learning JavascriptMVC. I said sure. So, they gave me a free e-book to read. Let me give my honest review: (more…)