Page 12 of Software Development Articles

Blocking Proxy Sites with JavaScript

Social websites don’t always attract the most desireable patrons and often times those users opt to hide their identity (as well as blocking banner ads) behind a proxy server. There are quite a few free web-based proxies out there (generally ad funded, some have premium tiers) and they typically have […]

Going Vanilla with MySQL

Over the last few years I’ve gotten down and dirty with MySQL’s config file, my.cnf. I read and re-read the MySQL documentation as well as any blog posts I could find on the subject. I was able to keep my connections low with caching and fought against the InnoDB buffer […]

Node.js for Web Apps? Not so much.

I’m sure I’ll catch some flak for this from the Node.js community (which does seem to be thriving) but I’m just not seeing Node.js as a viable platform for building web applications. When I say web application, I specifically mean websites. The platform seems great for building small servers and […]

Lessons learned about directory based sharding

“Too many files?” is what I said in disbelief when I was having issues restoring a Linode backup a while back. I was sitting on over 10 million files after I had moved a metric shit ton of data from MySQL to disk and restructured the data structure for the […]

Review: Anatomy Framework

From the developer, Nick Justice: Anatomy is a light-weight and responsive front end framework that invokes rapid development. I don’t usually review anything on here, let alone a framework, but it’s also not often that I get to use something new that’s built in my backyard of Tampa, FL. As […]

Command line website uptime checker using the OS X Notification Center

Honestly, the title of this post covers all the bases of my pre-Turkey consumption proof of concept turned full on project. Just a simple Ruby script that parses a configuration file and checks to see if the site is up (returning 2xx or 3xx code). If the site appears down […]

DKIM with multiple domains with Exim4

Maybe my Google-fu was off when I was originally trying to figure this one out, but when searching for setting up DKIM for multiple domains on the same server all I came up with were complex ways to serve up domain-specific DKIM signatures. This seemed like overkill, especially going as […]

Go fork yourself you forking fork

So even with the recent ship jumping over to a plethora of Apple products, I still find myself to be an open source supporter, contributor and maybe even a part-time aficionado. But as of late, I gotta say, I’m starting to hate the ecosystem a bit, from at least two […]

Drain your InnoDB Buffer Pool by moving large fields out of MySQL

This was supposed to be a “SceneKids.com the first year” post, but nothing has really changed too much since the 8 month post with the exception of expanding out with additional websites on the same platform. Instead, I’m going to discuss a dilemma I ran into with MySQL’s InnoDB data […]

Why developers (maybe everyone) suck at estimates

I’ll be the first to admit that I feel like my estimating abilities are horrible, but today I did an estimate, felt confident that I did enough due diligence and amazingly enough, even with a bit of justified padding was viewed as a reasonable estimate. So why after all these […]

Version Control: It doesn’t matter what system you use

CVS vs SVN, SVN vs Git, Git vs Mercurial… who fucking cares. I’ve been through my share of version control systems (CVS, Visual Source Safe, SVN, Serena PVCS and Dimensions and as of late, git) and the one thing that stands out to me is that it doesn’t matter which […]

WorkFlowy: Adventures in Text Parsing

First off, if you’re not familiar with WorkFlowy you may want to watch this video. WorkFlowy is quite simply a list maker and based on my own usage of planning out a program / script I decided to create a script to take an exported list and convert it into […]

Why you don’t make $80k+ and how you can get there

First off, you’re going to be offended by this, partially because it’s true and partially because I’m right. The reason you don’t make $80-100k (or whatever the magic number of deservingness [my word, you can’t have it] is as per Hacker News) is because you don’t deserve it, for one […]

TeuxDeux: Adventures in Screen Scraping

Been a busy week, still dedicated to blogging regularly though. Decided the best way to balance out my busy weeks is to post code that I had on github but decided to pull down as I wasn’t maintaining it, and no one else was following or forking it. If you […]

Quality over cost or how PennySMS sucks and I switched to Twilio

For nearly the last two years I’ve run a simple SMS reminder service known as ReminderWire. The site was initially built around the idea of using the built in carrier email addresses for cell phones to send the SMS messages. The major drawback to this was that I had to […]

What could you do in 10k?

I’m typically not the type to engage in any sort of popularity contest, especially those of which include either musical or technical ability, as it’s all so opinionated. That being said, I decided to enter something in the 10k An Event Apart as it was suggested to me by Justin […]

“Oh, how awkward.”

So I recently met an individual who took over a project of mine at my last job. Now let me preface this all by saying that this project that he took over was not my magnum opus or anything, just a fairly simple process for loading a gigantic spreadsheet into […]

Are Flash developers the new COBOL developers?

The game’s changing with HTML5 and I’m starting to hear the same type of comments from the mouthes of Flash developers that I’ve been hearing from COBOL developers for years. The gist of the comments is that what they use is never going away (which in the case of COBOL […]

Super massive content update

Gutted just about every page on the site. There’s more of a focus on trim information without a lot of BS. No more links to friend’s sites and software and shit that didn’t really matter. Rewrote / updated the text on some pages to update their accuracy and revamp based […]

Smarty Function: State Drop Down

Today is the last day I will have to dig around for a drop down of states to use on a web site. I’ve finally stopped being lazy and added a Smarty function to PICKLES to allow for easy insertion of a state (50 + DC) select box. Later enhancements […]

Using SQL’s IN syntax to search multiple fields

This may not be something new for anyone, but figured I’d post it anyway. I needed to check for a certain date in multiple fields, instead of listing each one out, I used IN but used the value on the left side, and listed the fields in the parenthesis. Before […]

Nonogram Demo in PyGTK

So a while back I had gotten 3-in-1 Sodoku Garden on my cell phone because I like Sodoku even though I’m not that great at it. I figured, 3 games for the price of 1, wicked cool. Turns out one of the 3 games would later steal my heart. It […]

All Music Guide (AMG) Tagging Script

So recently I decided that I hated how my music collection was tagged. I try to break apart the genre’s but ideally most of my music falls under multiple genres. Well All Music Guide (AMG, allmusic.com) does a pretty good job of classifying everything. They use broad genres, and then […]

PHP Warning: Module ‘mcrypt’ already loaded

So the other day I realized that my concert spider stopped running. To my surprise I had a lot going wrong on my local machine (which runs the spider). First and foremost, MySQL wasn’t running. Still not sure why, but I manually started it to get it going. It ran […]

Firefox 3.0.1 on Mac OS X weirdness

So I ran into an interesting problem today. A site I built (validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS level 2.1 and runs in Standards-mode instead of Quirks-mode in Internet Explorer 6.0) renders great in Firefox 3.0.3 (tested on both on Linux and Windows), Internet Explorer 6.x (tested in Wine […]