Good presentation from Jay Pipes about big mistakes you can make when developing with mySQL. I particularly like the point of not thinking in loops but in sets.

What every developer should know about time.

Also, a guide to GNU screen.

And finally, "I think it takes a special kind of incompetence to use the same acronym in the same place for different offsets."

I'm watching cosmos on hulu on this all hallows eve. Earlier I took the dog for a walk. She does not like children in costumes.

First we are going to do a quick introduction to the interfaces we will be using. After that we will jump right into code and examples. Please keep in mind that the collection class we are going to build is more about demonstrating the capabilities of these particular SPL interfaces then actual practical use, although you could easily turn this into a useful class.

Good clear tutorial about implementing SPL interfaces.

Last night, Amanda, Max and I went to see Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. It was a funny movie, but funnier was the guy I met at the concession stand. He was very thin and dressed in jeans, a white t-shirt and a black vest. He looked a lot like an older Gilligan with bushy eyebrows that stood out about an inch and a half from his his forehead. He sidled up to the concession stand and peered into the candy display. "You got any.. uh... lemondrops or gumballs?" The teenager eyed him quizzically from behind the counter. "Any lemondrops?" "Uh... no." The teen looked around. "Mostly like whoppers and stuff." The man pointed at a bag. "What about that?" "Those is gummi bears" "What's that?" "You know like... gummi" "So they're gumballs?" "No, like they're ... gummi bears." The man furrowed his considerable brow. He squinted and pushed his face to the glass. "Licorice?" "No." "You know, I'll... I'll see what my lady friend wants..." He said as he backed nervously away from the counter.

There was a story about the Zen master Suzuki Roshi. This was a situation where his students had been sitting and they were 3 or 4 hours into a very hard sitting period, a sesshin. The person who told the story said every bone in his body was hurting, his back, his ankles, his neck, his head, everything hurt. Not only that, his thoughts were totally obsessed with either "I can't do this, I'm worthless. There's something wrong with me. I'm not cut out to do this." It was vacillating between those thoughts and "This whole thing is ridiculous. Why did I ever come here? These people are crazy. This place is like boot camp." His mind and body were just aching. Probably everyone else in the room was going through something similar. Suzuki Roshi came in to give the lecture for the day and he sat down. He started to talk very, very, very slowly and he said, "The difficulty that you are experiencing now..." And that man was thinking, "will go away."

And he said, "This difficulty will be with you for the rest of your life."

The Interpreter - sees role as interpreting the back end processes to the user - application is a specialized gui to the database The Modeler - sees application as data, information that needs to be structured. Starts with models and relationships, then figures out the algorithms that will bridge and transform the data. Winding road, developer's job is to build roads into and out of the database. Zen Unix Master - applications are tools in a box.

Graphs are ubiquitous. Social or P2P networks, thesauri, route planning systems, recommendation systems, collaborative filtering, even the World Wide Web itself is ultimately a graph! Given their importance, it’s surely worth spending some time in studying some algorithms and models to represent and work with them effectively. In this short article, we’re going to see how we can store a graph in a DBMS.

open()
{
 NO_ARGS=0
 if [ $# -eq "$NO_ARGS" ]
 then
          echo " enter a program";
 else
           $1 &>/dev/null &
 fi
}

One of the most common problems in web development in validating and sanitizing user inputted data. Often, we're tempted to reinvent the wheel when validating emails, ranges, booleans, etc. Fortunately, php has a lot of these tasks already written. You can use the built in filters to validate and sanitize in a manner that's already been tested and optimized by the core developers. Documentation:

Validation:

Sanitization:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

coding, starving hysterical naked,

debugging their code through var dumps at

dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters scripting for the ancient

heavenly connection to the starry dynamic typing

in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high

sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of

the web floating across the tops of integers

contemplating lisp,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the C and

saw Euclidean angles staggering on

algorithms illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool

eyes hallucinating data structures

among the scholars of war,

who were expelled by startups for crazy &

committing obscene codes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in novelty t-shirts,

burning down charts and sprinting toward

the Terror on their wall

Interesting analysis of creeping issues in SCRUM. Having recently adopted SCRUM I haven't seen the problems described here yet, but it'll be good to keep an eye out.

Recently at work I came across an odd bug involving gmdate(). A client wanted us to post some information to them including two fields: source_date and source_time. The values are really just the time when we're sending the information to them. However, they wanted it to be sent as GMT. So in preparing the request, I wrapped the source_time in gmdate(), tested and confirmed that it was giving the correct result. Then during an audit of their data they pointed out that around midnight our time would swing back 24 hours. Of course the issue was not wrapping the source_date in the same function. By not doing that our time would advance to tomorrow (from our perspective) but the date would be sent as today - therefore appearing to them as 24 hours previous. It's an easy bug to fix, and obvious once you think about it. I think it really shows the danger of failing to imagine edge cases - always a danger when working with dates.

In an attempt to shed some light on and to draw attention to SPL, I plan to post several articles discussing various parts of this extension. I will start with SPL Interfaces so that you can grasp immediately the usefulness of the SPL.