I came across this blog posting about optimizing order by rand() and decided to make my queries better. Here is my real life example on how to optimize this query: (more…)

(“the triangle”) wants to keep implementing more and more AJAX based systems - but no one ever took time to research into the security issues with this. I did a proof of concept one time with a zip-code function when Big Boy was working there, and from there, they just thought it was amazing. Most recently, some AJAX functionality was proposed for our LIVE public web servers… but I was very hesitant. I don’t know... (more…)

Today, Big Boy sent me an e-mail at work talking about emulation of collections in his .net programming. He included a code sample (after the break). This got me thinking about how I am planning on handling data going forward. Do I want to handle data as keyed arrays, objects, complex objects, or… ? Additionally, I started thinking about the Null Object programming pattern, and how this can fit into my data handling pattern. I’ve... (more…)

I just finished reading a snippet of a book about design patterns - of which Strategy, Adapter, Decorator and others were discussed. It got me to thinking about my design patterns that I used in JEMDiary - and what I’ll be using in this project. (more…)

So, I started looking at a few load time analyzers for my sites - and I found an interesting plugin for firefox. I wasn’t too entirely sure what I was going to find - but I figured I’d try it out and figure out if it was useful. (more…)

I just wanted to point out that I am the world’s newest Zend Certified Engineer - as of this morning at 10:00a.m. CST. PHP 5 ZCE :-D (more…)

I was recently reading an article (while researching for my website monitoring project), and there was a comment about PHP5’s lack of flexibility in its Object Oriented usage. Some people were arguing for it - and some against, the typical ranting that goes on in blog comments, etc. Instead of joining the argument, I wanted to do my proof of concepts myself. I’m going to explore (well I already know some of the answers -... (more…)

There seem to be two schools of design lately: Feature rich, RIA designs and simplicity. (more…)

In my “younger years” in the coding world, I’d have an idea like I have right now with the website monitoring project - and immediately start coding. I’d get the framework done, implement a feature or two, and then finally start thinking about my requirements. Predictably, the code would turn into an unmaintainable mountain of crap - and I’d be wasting more time rewriting and refactoring than I wanted. For this project, I decided to... (more…)

(“the triangle”) just recently purchased a book for the library at my request, Test-Driven Development by example by Kent Beck. The current Amazon price for this book is $35. The book took me about 2 weeks of sporadic reading to finish. The first section took the first week, the remaining 2 sections and appendix flew by. (more…)