muddylemon

Waiting for the baby

I'm hanging out at the hospital with Amanda waiting on this baby. Had a slightly scary moment a bit ago. After they started the epidural Sagan's heart rate slowed down to 100 bpm from 130. They flipped amanda over and gave her some oxygen and that…

as the drain swirls

We have a system in place that rewards power with power; corporations, political parties, the media all feed off each other in a vicious cycle of corruption. Change is their real enemy. In the same way that citizens (tend) to get more conservative…

How to get Xinha Wysiwyg editor to work in S9y

For some reason I hadn't been able to get any of the wysiwyg editor plugins in my serendipity install to work. It's been a minor annoyance, so I decided to figure it out tonight. Here are the steps: Go to Configure Plugins and download/install the…

Smart up and down on the command line

I bet everyone already knows this, but I just learned it and love it: put this in ~/.inputrc By default up/down are bound to previous-history and next-history respectively. The following does the same but gives the extra…

mySQL Murder

How to Kill Mysql Performance 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.

I love how complicated time is

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."

billions and billions

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.

Building an Object Collection Manager with the SPL

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…

Gilligan goes to the movies

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…

Zen Cynicism: maitri

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…

The Mind Models of a Developer

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…

Graphs in the database: SQL meets social networks

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…

PHP Validation and Sanitization with filters

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.…

Howl

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…

The Insufficiency of SCRUM

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.