Blog

My Experience with Wizpert

For those that aren't familiar, Wizpert is a platform for chatting with people (Skype, Gtalk and their site) that are experts (referred to as "wizperts") of specific topics. Earlier in the year I was sent a beta invite to become [...]

How to convert a negative number to a positive number with PHP

Converting a number from negative to positive is a pretty simple process using the absolute function abs(): $positive = abs(-123); // = 123 $positive = abs(123); // also = 123 Absolute returns a positive integer or float based on what [...]

DirectNIC may have been compromised

Didn't see any news about it this AM but it seems that DirectNIC may have been compromised. My wife just spoke with Bank of America regarding fraudulent activity on her credit card. According to the person she spoke with, DirectNIC [...]

PHP's HereDoc versus NowDoc

We've previously discussed how to assign variables and add in variables and all of that good stuff, but what about if you are dealing with a large block of text? There's many approaches, most that require you to be mindful [...]

Book Review: Remote: Office Not Required

I'm back on a reading kick as of late having knocked out 3 books in the last few weeks (Web Performance Daybook Volume 2 and Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising) including the [...]

One Year Quitaversary!

Last week (October 30th, 2013) marks the one year anniversary of quitting my day job at CrowdSavings and pursuing my own startup dreams / running my own company. At the time I had only 3 social networks up and running [...]

How to handle daylight savings time in PHP

If you've ever dealt with time in PHP you've probably been burnt by daylight savings time before (quite possibly yesterday ;). I've been there, waking up on the Sunday of the time change with an email about timestamps being an [...]

Temporary ufw rules or How I learned to stop scripting and love the shell

This post was originally planned to be a social commentary on the potential for riots this coming Novemeber (a/k/a The 2013 Food Stamp Riots a/k/a The Backlash of the Entitlement Society) but that seemed like such a fucking downer. Then [...]

Split an array into chunks with PHP

Array chunking is a great way to paginate large arrays and as I found out recently, makes it very easy to map a large array from Redis (by way of mget and/or pipelining) back to the original data. Chunking an [...]

Were termites the least of our problems?

I'm definitely starting to think so at this point. If you're not aware, last week our house was tented for termites and we took a mini vacation to New Orleans. What most don't know is that this tenting was over [...]