All entries of my technical and business blog

Slides from thatConference

Aug 15, 2013 misc-web
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…)

My StackOverflow Rant

Jul 30, 2013 business

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.

MySQL Explain rows column really IS an estimate

Jul 23, 2013 mysql

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 its still just an estimation. Sometimes its estimated accurately, other times its not. See this example:

PHPStorm Project Launchers for Ubuntu

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 be able to type in the lens search box what I wanted.

Zend Framework 1 Form Captcha Idea

Jul 2, 2013 zend-framework

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.