From the category archives:

General

Choose better passwords

A friend of mine recently fell victim to the Facebook 419 scam (basically someone logs into your Facebook account and asks your friends for money).
There are lots of ways bad things can happen to your computer and your online accounts, but if you use weak passwords, you’re increasing the risk that something bad will eventually [...]

Read the full article → September 29, 2009

Doing more at once

I’ve been doing a lot of work with curl_multi in PHP lately because it just makes sense to do as much work in parallel as possible (in most cases). I’ll be writing up my experiences with curl_multi later.
So, yesterday’s announcement by the Facebook development team about fql.multiquery couldn’t have come at a better time for [...]

Read the full article → June 17, 2009

Google Chrome for Linux

On Monday I downloaded Google’s Chrome browser for Ubuntu to test it out (against all warnings).
I’m happy to say that despite the missing features, this browser is absolutely amazing on Ubuntu. It’s lightning fast and very stable. I can’t browse to pages that require HTTP AUTH — but that’s the only thing I’ve found that [...]

Read the full article → June 10, 2009

Memcache, memcache, memcache!

Possibly the single-most important piece of advice I give to every software developer right now is to use memcache (or memcached to be specific). I’ve become an evangelist of the software since working for Squidoo.
Memcache is just exactly what it says it is — a memory cache daemon (service). It’s lightweight and very fast and [...]

Read the full article → May 20, 2009

Use Twitter, Facebook, OAuth or OpenID for login?

Now that OAuth is officially available for accessing the Twitter API, it’s technically possible to use Twitter’s services as an authentication method for logging into your web site. In fact, when setting up a new Twitter OAuth application, there’s an option suggesting that very use.

This is not a new concept, but with the recent proliferation [...]

Read the full article → April 22, 2009

Get latitude/longitude of Google map

I do a fair amount of work where I need to quickly get the latitude and longitude of a given address. Most of the time I just head over to maps.google.com and type in the address, then use the link button and copy/paste just the latitude and longitude. I find this method to be workable [...]

Read the full article → April 10, 2009

The right tools

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Mark Twain

I recently took down a pool fence. It required cutting sections of steel fencing, removing rusty nuts from large bolts in the ground and walls, and cutting bolts. I had been delaying this job for a long time because I’m not a handyman and [...]

Read the full article → March 31, 2009

Your choice

On my flight home from Chicago to Phoenix Tuesday, I sat behind someone who spent the first twenty minutes of the flight complaining about how much she hates living in Phoenix and wishes she could move back to Chicago. She moved from Chicago in 1988 and has apparently lamented the move for the past 21 [...]

Read the full article → March 19, 2009

Don’t reinvent the wheel

As a programmer I’ve heard the phrase “don’t reinvent the wheel” dozens (if not hundreds) of times in my career. It’s generally a reference to reusing existing source code to perform routine, well-defined programming tasks — stuff like sorting, searching, parsing and much more.
Within the past few years, however, the scope of what can be [...]

Read the full article → March 4, 2009

Don’t fear the propeller head

Because this is a blog about web technologies and because I am a real nerd at heart, there are definitely going to be times when I focus on the implementation of the ideas presented. That means you might run into code samples, technical documents and other propeller-head information.
When that happens, I’ll go out of my [...]

Read the full article → February 14, 2009