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Here are my slides for the presentation that I gave at the Utah Open Source Conference on Friday. It was an awesome conference, and I am glad that I was able to be involved. Real Life Scaling: A Tale of Two Websites View more presentations from Justin Carmony. If you have any questions or comments, …

<tangent> This last week I’ve been talking with my brother Brack, who to say the least, absolutely abhors his job. Well, maybe abhor is a little strong, but he is extremely frustrated and unsatisfied. He works at a air force base in the human resource department and he basically helps provide statistical data for departments …

Today I just had the terrible experience of having a database lose data, need to restore, only to not have a recent backup. If you haven’t had this experience before, please, take this serious. My wife was home for lunch as it happened, and she watched as the blood drained from my face. It only …

These last few days I’ve been trying to get XAMPP to work on my MacBook Pro these last couple of days and it has been frustrating! It seemed I kept running into more and more problems. For those who don’t know, XAMPP is tool for developers to run a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) …

Warning: This blog post is NOT a walk-through or tutorial. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could seriously screw up your database. This is just talking theory and ideas on how I solved my problem. The other night (really, the other morning) I had the wonderful pleasure of trying to convert a table …

Over Christmas my wife and I visited my father in San Diego, CA. Several members of my dad’s side of the family were there, and one day we had a discussion about being “wired.” What does that exactly mean? Well, how fast would a person respond after any form of electronic communication were to be …

There are times where you would like to know if a table exists before executing an query. Most solutions require having MySQL throw an error saying “table does not exist,” but I prefer a cleaner way. I found on this forum post a clean way to do it: This solution will return 1 row if …

Over the last three years I’ve had the opportunity to work on several PHP projects, some of them having grown rapidly and required to scale quickly. Three in particular have been a fantastic learning experience for me. Now I don’t consider myself a total expert, but I thought I would share my experiences. Many PHP …

This week’s blogging challenge was our computer software now and then. Lorelle talked about the different versions of WordPress over time. I thought it was an interesting article. 10 Years Ago I started web development back in 1997. My tools back then were: Notepad – That right, the one and only. It was how most …

Here is a little trick I found awhile back. I faced a challenge several months ago where I had to query a large, complex data result from MySQL. I “paged” through the results using LIMIT and OFFSET. However, I wanted to know the total number of rows w/o the LIMIT. The previous coder accomplished this …