General on Justin Carmony

Ferguson

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 06:00:37 +0000

Posted on my Facebook, keeping a copy here:

Given that my twitter feed has been full of news about Ferguson, and Facebook has been completely void of it, I should post something here.

Tonight I watched the live streams of the “No Indictment” announcement. Then moments after the announcement, the police announce that the gathering of protestors was no longer legal and began to fire tear gas into the crowds. I listened to President Obama’s speech urging peace while juxtaposed to the footage of tear gas and riot gear.

Vagrant Alias to Make Life Easy: vurp

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 12:01:15 +0000

I’ve been using Vagrant on a daily basis for over a year now, and there is one common issue I run into: Sometimes VirtualBox’s network will hang and I need to force shutdown & re-up the instance. If you use NFS on Mac, this will also require some administrator privileges half the way through the process.

So what did I do? I made an alias for my terminal. In my ~/.bash_profile file I added this line:

Why You Should Attend a Tech Conference

Tue, 15 Oct 2013 06:37:33 +0000

Ever since 2006 I had always wanted to go to a technology conference. I’d see titles of talks for ZendCon and think “Wow, that would be cool to learn about!” In 2009, I finally went to the Utah Open Source Conference (now called OpenWest), and I was blown away with all the stuff to learn. Then, in 2011, I shelled out my own money and flew to Chicago for PHP Tek, and it cost me around $3,000 after conference ticket, flights, hotel, & other expenses while at Chicago.

Vagrant, VirtualBox, & Guest Additions

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 02:17:42 +0000

If you use Vagrant & VirtualBox often, its important to to keep your Guest Additions up-to-date. Occasionally you’ll run into weird network or shared folers bugs, and it is important to rule out the guest additions as the problem. The most simple way it to use the vagrant plugin vagrant-vbguest. If you’re on Vagrant 1.1 or higher, you can simple use the follow command:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

The Power of "You Are Awesome"

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 21:10:52 +0000

I received a very nice email today from Elizabeth Naramore, someone who I’ve met through the PHP community. In it she made a simple statement:

“You are awesome.”

Now, I don’t know how much I deserved this email. The other people on the recipient list I’m guessing have had to go through many more trials than I have, but I’m very appreciative never the less. It got me thinking about the power this statement can have, and how this type of positive & sincere compliment can have a profound affect on people.

Lunch & Responsive Web Workshop

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 17:06:44 +0000

At Deseret Digital Media (DDM), we were looking to bring in a Responsive Web Design expert to do some training with our team. However, if we were going to go to the expense of flying in someone to do a workshop with our team, we figured other people would benefit from it at as well.

So DDM is hosting a Responsive Web Workshop & Lunch on Monday, July 29, 2013 from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM. We have invited Ben Callahan to run the workshop. He is the President of Sparkbox and the founder of the Build Responsively Workshop.

Thoughts on HBR's "Seven Rules for Managing Creative People"

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 05:29:59 +0000

Today I saw a few mentions on twitter about a blog post by the Harvard Business Review on the Seven Rules for Managing Creative People. The reaction has been rather, well, negative from those who are “creative people.” Some thought it had to be an April Fool’s joke, but it was published on the 2nd, not the 1st. The article acknowledges the great value creative people have in a company, but then is condescending in it’s recommendations for managing them. The big issue was #5: Pay them poorly.

Up Next: 2013

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:15:33 +0000

Eh, I know I’m late publishing this post, but oh well! 2012 was an amazing year for me: new job, first baby boy, new responsibilities. There were a lot of firsts for me in 2012. So now as I look at 2013, I pretty much think it’s time to iterate over the year again and just try to improve in several areas.

Several changes in 2013 are that I’m now the current President of the Utah PHP Usergroup, which is awesome and daunting at the same time. This year it will be celebrating it’s 10th anniversary as a group, and has been meeting regularly since it’s inception. Which to me means: crap, don’t mess this up! We’ve had a lot of awesome guys run the group over the years, and I hope to be able to do as good of a job as they have done.

Startups and a Reality Check

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 01:03:53 +0000

I read an article about startups that just really just summarized one of the greatest struggles that they face, and how so many of them are oblivious to the problem.

Here’s some stunning, Earth-shattering news: You know all those hundreds of incredibly stupid startups that have been raising seed money in Silicon Valley despite the fact that the people running those startups have no experience doing anything, ever, and have no idea at all how to generate revenue (let alone profit) with their lousy ideas, because, in fact, there is no way to make money with their lousy ideas, because in fact their ideas are lousy?

Customizing Graphite Charts for Clearer Results

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 14:59:48 +0000

So if people couldn’t tell, I’ve been having a lot of success with StatsD, Graphite, and Graphene. One of the problems I faced was data that was too small to gather distinct trends. Here is one example:

While still useful, it is much harder to detect a small change with a chart like this. The jump between highs and lows is greater on this data. This normally occurs when you have smaller sets of data to look at. So we have two options (that I’ve discovered so far). The first is to summarize the data using the summarize function. If you are using graphite, and haven’t checked out their awesome list of functions, you really need to.

A New Chapter In My Career - Deseret Digital Media

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 03:49:22 +0000

As several people know by now, I have accepted a position at Deseret Digital Media as Director of Development. For those who don’t know, Deseret Digital Media is owned by the LDS Church, and is in charge of all the web & mobile technology for the church’s for-profit companies. This includes KSL.com, DeseretBook.com, DeseretNews.com, and several others. I will be the Director of Development for Deseret News’s website, mobile applications, etc.

For the last four years I’ve been working at Dating DNA, LLC as the CTO, and have enjoyed every moment. It has been a great ride and a lot of work. When I started we had one website on one server. Dating DNA now has over 40 iPhone Apps, several APIs powering the apps, and dozens of servers and services. It has been a challenging and rewarding experience scaling and doing just about everything from the servers to the front-end. From only a thousand users to reaching millions of users and devices, it has been a wonderful experience.

httpie - A Pretty Way to cURL for APIs

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:14:34 +0000

Thanks to Ben Ramsey for sharing this nifty little tool called httpie. What it does is it makes calling APIs from the CLI easy as pie. With curl you’d see something like this:

curl -i -X PUT -H 'Content-Type:application/json; charset=utf-8'
-d '{"hello":"world"}' http://httpbin.org/put

Where as with httpie, its a simple:

http PUT httpbin.org/put hello=world

This is great for working with JSON based APIs. It also will pretty up the output:

Website: https://github.com/jkbr/httpie

Letter to Senator Lee

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:19:47 +0000

My letter to Senator Lee:

Senator Lee,

My name is Justin Carmony, and I am the C.T.O. for Dating DNA, LLC, a company that makes iPhone Apps. This is my first time writing a senator, but I feel it is important to convey my thoughts on SOPA and PIPA.

We have struggled with people downloading our Apps from 3rd Party Websites and not paying for them. We are able to monitor and track these “cracked” apps when they connect to our services, and these “cracked apps” number in the hundreds of thousands over time. That is potentially millions of dollars in lost revenue.

My 2011 Recap

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 02:00:20 +0000

As I look back on 2011, its been a pretty fun year technology & work wise. While I have a few more draft posts to finish up, I thought I’d hit some highlights from the past year.

PHP

Its been a fun year with the Utah PHP Usergroup. I look forward to it each month, and if you’re in Utah, you definitely should come. We’ve had a lot of interesting talks, such as running your app in different clouds, several MySQL Forks and NoSQL stuff.

Helping Daniel Buy A Water Buffalo

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:44:58 +0000

I have a very good friend, Daniel Allen, who is living in China for 18 months for his work. It’s been very interesting to hear about how life is like in China, and how the culture is “on the other side of the world.”

Well, this year for Christmas, Daniel wanted to help raise up $250 for… a water buffalo. Yup, thats right, a Water Buffalo.

What in the world for? To donate for a family in a rural. Why? From the Heifer International website:

Sonora Grill - Amazing, Unique Mexican Food

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 06:06:58 +0000

I know from running a business, the best compliment a customer can give is their referral and recommendation. So this is my best complement to Steve, Courtney, and the rest of the staff at Sonora Grill:

Sonora Grill is one of the best Mexican restaurants in Utah. Not only is it great food, it is very unique. The best way I explain to those who have never been is that it is “gourmet mexican food.” Most people I tell this to seem rather confused by this, and think it is some kind of oxymoron. When they think of Mexican restaurants, they think of those we have around here.

Don't Punish Everyone

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 19:50:31 +0000

I found this little gem on Matt Mullenweg’s blog. I couldn’t agree more.

MySQL, Redis, and a Billion Rows - A Love Story

Mon, 23 May 2011 15:20:35 +0000

This last week we pushed live a very large architecture change for Dating DNA. For those who know me, and have heard me talk about the Dating DNA Scoring System, they know how big of a problem we faced. For those who don’t know, let me give some background:

The Problem

With Dating DNA, our goal was to display a compatibility score with every other user. This score is generated by taking two sets of answers to our 20 page survey, and running it through our algorithm. While it is super convenient for our users, this poses a problem. We wanted not only for people to be able to visit a profile and see a score, which is easy to generate a score on demand. We wanted our users to be able to browse other profiles sorted by their score with them. This requires us to pre-generate and store these scores, and then later query them.

Attending PHP Tek 2011

Sat, 14 May 2011 15:24:20 +0000

I’m excited to say I will be attending PHP Tek 2011 in one week. This will be the first “PHP” conference I’ve attended, and hope I will learn a lot while also having some fun. It’ll be nice to meet some people who I’ve only talked to online.

I’ve always wanted to attend a PHP conference for quite some time now, but it seemed for several years either it wasn’t in the budget, or I was just too busy. But I kept hearing great things about Tek, and it’s organizers, so when the Call for Papers opened up for Tek 11 this year, I submitted. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it on the presenter list, so I immediately registered and booked my flights so I wouldn’t find an excuse later on to not go.

Tacos al Pastor - The Quest Begins

Sat, 07 May 2011 04:07:36 +0000

I lived in Mexico for two years when I was serving my LDS Mission. There I discovered my favorite food of all time: tacos al pastor. Also known as “Shepherds Tacos.” They were awesome. I’ve found similar tacos here in Ogden at the Sonora Grill. However, there is one problem: the food health codes in the USA prohibit the tradition methods of cooking tacos al pastor. Here is a traditional method of cooking:

Excellent WSJ Article: Public Employment

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:45:01 +0000

I read an opinion article that put into words exactly my opinion on the trends in the public and private sector. Now, I have family and in-laws who work for the government, as well as relatives who have worked a long time and retired. I believe the government has it’s place to do thing in our country.

However, the trend is that more and more people are working for the public sector, and this article puts it into perspective.

How I Became a Web Developer & CTO

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:57:56 +0000

Note: many of the screenshots of websites I had done in the past are from the Internet Archive and many of the images are missing. But it can give an idea on the projects I had worked on. One day I’ll try and track down the original files and update the screenshots.

Today some memories came from when I first started with web development. So before I forget anymore of the details, I thought I would share my unique way I became a web developer. I never went to school to learn Computer Science or Information Systems. I’ve had a total of 2 programming classes, which were my in sophomore and junior years of High School, one of which we lovingly nicknamed Warcraft 101, because we would spend the entire time getting out butts kicked in Warcraft 2 by my classmate Daren (We all got A’s, we had just finished the entire coursework in 2 and a half weeks).

MySQL Sleeping Connections & PHP

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 20:51:48 +0000

If you want to skip to the explanation, just read below. But before then, here is a little background.

A Little Background

On January 2nd, we started to run into some serious performance problems with Dating DNA, so we began the process of going and deciding what were our problems, and how to optimize them. At the beginning, the Database was the bottleneck. It would get flooded with requests, and unable to handle them all, each query would slow down. We were using a tool called Jet Profiler (which I will post about more in detail later), but here is a graph it would output before we started out optimizations:

New Job: CTO of Dating DNA

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 06:45:02 +0000

I’ve had a few friends ask me about my current employment, and if I ended up switching jobs. So I thought I would answer them here, or at least have somewhere to point them to. The answer is: yes and no.

A quick recap: a few months ago I was given the chance to apply for a position at ARUP Laboratories, which is the medical testing facility for the University of Utah. It is a great company to work for, and listed by Forbes’ as one of best companies to work for. During the interview process, when I made it past the initial rounds and was invited down to interview in person with the developer team, I told my biggest client (Dating DNA) I was interviewing with ARUP. If I got the job, I wouldn’t be able to do the same volume of work they needed from me, and they would have to find someone else.

UTOSC - Day One

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 06:16:36 +0000

Tomorrow is the starting day at the Utah Open Source Conference (http://www.utosc.com/) , and while I’m down here attending, I have a ton of work I need to get done for my day job. Hopefully, however, I’ll be able to sneak into a presentation or two while conversion scripts run, moving 3 million internal user messages for Dating DNA to a new table structure that is much more efficient and scalable.

Music in a Digital Age

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 05:54:38 +0000

Ten years ago, I remember my father introducing me to a band named Guster. They were opening for Barenaked Ladies (BNL) and he wanted to check them out. That CD, Lost and Gone Forever, became one of my favorite CDs. I remember driving on the highway to get to Media Play, searching through all of their records and buying it. It was then lost to a friend, and I had to go drive down again to a store and buy it. I owned maybe 20 CDs total my entire teenage years.

UTOSC 2010

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:10:19 +0000

One thing I haven’t mentioned much this year is the Utah Open Source Conference that is being held in two weeks. Larry Cafiero, a.k.a Larry the Fedora Guy, has written a nice summary of how he feels UTOSC “has been building up to a top-notch, not-to-be-missed show.”

During the course of the year, the FOSS traveling salvation show in North America wends its way around the nation to end up, finally, at the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC) in Salt Lake City in October before taking a hiatus for the holidays. Then of course the new year, FOSS-wise, starts with the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in February.

Alaskan Cruise - Very Fun

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:34:06 +0000

I think it’s important for technology folk, especially programmers and system administrators, to take breaks and such that allow for us to be completely disconnected from our work. Its a very hard thing to do, especially if you work with very small companies. With Dating DNA, when I go on vacation, I’m the only Sys Admin and all of our web development stops for the time I’m gone. So if there are Web Service APIs that need to be updated for our iPhone Developer, he has to wait as well. Also, if something goes down, I’m not around to fix it. Not a very fun situation to be in.

BestBuy Gives Me $8,770 -- Wait, Just $87.00

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:01:37 +0000

So I thought I would quickly throw this up here. I have a Best Buy within minutes of my house, and shop there frequently. Between a TV, and washer/dryer, we’ve spent enough money there to have a “Premier Silver” account. Today, I received an email from BestBuy with my correct account number, stating I had spent enough to keep my Premium Silver status. Then I looked up at how many points I had accumulated. 438,606 reward points! Right next to the points, it says they are worth a total of $8,770 dollars! I was shocked, which quickly turned to a chuckle. I knew it couldn’t be right, since I hadn’t spent even close to $8,770 dollars, so BestBuy must have found a crazy revenue stream to do this.

The Skill of Making Habits

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:39:17 +0000

Each New Year, people around the world make their resolutions. While I’m not big into making new year resolutions, I thought I would give it a shot. Well, one month later, I was only really successful at one of the goals. I’ve stopped drinking coke completely, and my overall sugary drink consumption has drastically dropped. Instead of several cokes a day, it more of a root beer once or twice a week. However, my other major goal of working out every morning was a total flop.

Dear 2010 - My Plans for Next Year

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:27:02 +0000

Update: I started to write this post on the 31st, but the good thing is since Jan 1st I’ve been keeping my goals. Only four days so far, but its a good start.

I can’t believe that 2009 has gone by so quickly. Its been a blast of a year. My last post was a little recap of it, but I’m hoping to make the best of 2010.

I’ve been thinking of a few things I want to accomplish in 2010, and here is a quick list of some of them. I’ll blog at a later date in more detail on exactly how I’m planning on accomplishing this.

My 2009 Technology Recap

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:55:31 +0000

Its been two years now that I’ve been a more or less “serious blogger.” I had using the term blogger, since when people hear about blogs, they think of people either detailing their entire lives, or pumping some angel. For me, blogging has just been a way to share information with people I know locally, and those I don’t even know who find my blog via searching. I’ve had a few spurts where I blogged quite frequently, but for the most part it was just here and there.

My PHP User Group Experience

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:46:09 +0000

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for awhile now, but never got around to it. I woke up and couldn’t sleep only 1 hour before heading out for some Black Friday madness. Might as well make some use of me being awake.

I will have to say that belonging to a local PHP user group has been an awesome experience. A little over a year ago I somehow stumbled upon the Utah PHP Usergroup, ran by a now good friend Victor Villa. I had no idea other people were meeting on a monthly basis to talk about PHP and web development stuff. I joined their IRC channel on freenode, and I instantly found a great little resource for myself. Within two months of regularly using the IRC channel, I decided to drive the hour down to where the meetings are held. I now go almost every month whenever possible. I miss now and then due to family functions and such, but for the most part I make the trek down from Ogden to Murray to enjoy the meetings. There are a few things that I found local user groups (LUGs) can provide others that I’d like to share.

Awesome Animated XKCD

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:07:17 +0000

This comic is awesome. If you haven’t heard of xkcd then you are missing out. It is tied with another comic for my favorite comic on the internet. They did a funny comic on making a spoof of the Discovery Channel commercials. Now someone has made an animated version of the xkcd comic, and it is just awesome. Enjoy

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7151435&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

Here is the original comic:

The LDS General Conference

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 17:14:03 +0000

For those technology blog aggregates that view my blog, I apologize for the deviation from my regular posts, but I’ve had a few friends ask me about this topic. I decided to post a full reply on my blog.

This weekend, millions of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which I am a member of, will be listening to the General Conference this weekend. Every six months, leaders of the church and members gather at the LDS Conference Center. Five sessions, two hours each, will be broadcast across the world in 60+ difference languages.

TGIF: IT Crowd - The Internet

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:54:42 +0000

I think on Fridays my blog posts will be a little fun. Besides, we could all enjoy a little amusement, right? To kick it off, a great little video about the thing that makes the world go around: The Internet!

Happy Weekend!

My iPhone Has Hindered My Email

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:17:40 +0000

What!? What is this that I speak of? My very favorite feature of the iPhone has actually hindered it?! How can this be? Its really straight forward actually. Before my iPhone, when I checked my email I was at a computer and typically would respond to emails immediately. Now, however, I read most of my emails first on my phone. The problem is that sometimes I would forget about an email when I finally arrived at a computer, and some things have fallen in the cracks. Nothing catastrophic, but I feel bad when I get a second email asking “Hey, um, did you get my first email?” The iPhone has been pretty disruptive in my typical email habits, and so I’ve been trying to figure out how to manage it. I actually love it because it keeps me more aware throughout the day. I just can’t forget to respond to certain emails.

SwiftMailer - Sending Mail in PHP With Ease

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:06:30 +0000

The other day someone was looking for help with sending emails in PHP. I’ll be honest, the methodology for sending mail in PHP is haphazard to say the least. At least with the built in functionality. The documentation is lacking and there are a lot of undocumented pitfalls.

This is where SwiftMailer comes in.

SwiftMailer is an OOP based PHP5 library for sending email. It supports multiple SMTP servers, batch sending mail, etc. It doesn’t require any php.ini configurations, and its very straight forward. If there are errors, it throws exceptions instead of returning weird functionality. I highly recommend it for sending email in PHP. There are other mailer libraries, however I really like SwiftMailer the best. It has great documentation, and every PHP developer should check it out.

Scheduled Posts in WordPress

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:33:35 +0000

So I’ve already had a few mess ups with the scheduling of posts in WordPress, where I on accidentally schedule it for an odd time, or publish it immediately. So I’m trying to find a plugin to help me keep track of scheduled posts. I’ve found a plugin for my dashboard, so it shows what it upcoming, but doesn’t help me easily manage them. What I’m looking for is something that allows me to re-schedule my posts quickly. Lets say I have 7 scheduled posts, one for each day. Now lets say some major news breaks, and I want to blog about it. But I want it to be current, and not wait 7 days by putting it at the end of my schedule. I could publish it immediately, but then I want to bump my entire schedule by a day.

Great Eats: Grideli's In Ogden

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:03:12 +0000

Tonight Joanna and I realized we had forgotten to take some chicken out to thaw from our freezer. So we decided to pick up some food from our favorite burger & yummy food place in South Ogden: Grideli’s.

I highly recommend it to anyone looking grab something tasty to eat. During lunch, it is the hot spot for all the local businesses, and it is packed! If you’re smart, you go in the evening for dinner and it is a lot less busy.

Speaking: Utah Open Source Conference 2009

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:00:13 +0000

I will be speaking this year at the Utah Open Source Conference this year. My presentation is “Real Life Scaling: A Tale of Two Websites.” Here is the abstract:

Scaling is a real issue for many websites. However, many developers try to implement solutions used by the giants of the internet: Google, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc. However, many of these techniques are designed for very unique and high demand situations. Implementing these techniques prematurely to smaller websites can lead to overly-complex solutions that can be difficult to manage, and even hinder progress.

Being a Productive Developer

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:50:59 +0000

Doh! I meant to schedule this for Thursday, so oops! Already off my schedule, but oh well. :P

These last few weeks my productivity seems to have been fluctuating, and it has been irritating. So I’ve decided over the next few weeks to keep track of how I work, see what works well and what doesn’t, and figure out how I can be more productive.

Just as I would suggest any company with scaling/growth problems, I’m going to do the same with me: metrics. You can’t really know where and what to fix if you can’t tell how they are performing. So I’m going to start to keep track of my time in a lot more detail. I think this will help me in so many fronts, and I’ve known for a long time I need to do this. I’ve signed up for a demo account with Harvest, a time tracking software. Why? They seem to have a great interface, both Windows and Mac apps, and iPhone web and native app. So it will be easy to keep track of what I’m doing no matter what or where I am.

A Post A Day, Getting Back Into Writing

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:00:03 +0000

I’ve decided as of Today, September 13th, 2009, I am going to try to publish a post a day. My reasoning is simple: I want to improve on my writing and proof reading skills. One can never be too good of a writer. I hope to achieve this by several ways.

Smaller, Concise Entries

I have a tendency to write longer, more in-depth posts about subjects that are more like full fledged articles rather than blog posts. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, its difficult to have long drawn out posts and post frequently. These posts can take a week or two to put together over the little spare time I have. I think if I have a more in-depth topic, either I’ll work on it while publishing smaller posts, or split it up into small sets of series.

Project Management & Entrepreneurship

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:51:51 +0000

My dear friend Eric Ping pointed out I only had a few days left before I’d break my year and half record of posting at least every month. I was wondering what to write about, and last night I figured out what to write.

Yesterday after going to dinner with Joanna, my wife, we went to our guilty pleasure store: Barnes & Noble. Since I already have the entire Wheel of Time series to re-read for the upcoming books, I walked over to the technical section of books. I looked over the majority of titles, most of them for beginners learning a new type of language. It got me thinking. Over the last five years I have spent most of my time and energy working on becoming a great web developer. I’ve been working hard on my design skills, searching the web for examples and resources. I’ve been trying to make my PHP code more maintainable, efficient and clean. These last years I’ve been asking myself over and over “how can I do this better?” “How can I be a better developer?”

Google Wave Jargon

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:55:57 +0000

I got my new Google Wave Demo Account. It is very, very alpha, but the concept is pretty awesome. I saw a funny “wave” and thought I would share.

Here is a list of Evolving Google Wave Terminology:

Sea Sick When a wave is way too busy with activity, causing dizziness

Wavejacking When you post a wave and someone hijacks the contents to where it no longer resembles the original idea

Writing Effictive PHP Caches with Memcached

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:52:15 +0000

**** Update: I gave a presentation at the Utah PHP Usergroup about memcached that went really well. Here are the slides I used:*

Effectice Caching w/ PHP + Caching http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=memcachedandphppresentation-090821151850-phpapp02&stripped_title=effectice-caching-w-php-caching

View more presentations from Justin Carmony.

Delayed, yet again, at the airport. Time to get this article written once and for all.

This is a rough draft, I still need to go through and proof read this article. However, several friends were anxious to read it, so here it is rough for now. :P

Utah Monthly Geek Lunch

Thu, 28 May 2009 19:27:28 +0000

Just thought I’d advertise this a little. I’m going to this month’s Geek Lunch in Layton at Pad Thai. I’ve never actually been there before, but I’ve heard goo things. If you’re in the Layton area on Friday around 12:30 to 2:00, come have some Thai food! They are also having one in SLC and Provo area. Here is the info:

Salt Lake County

Fri, May 29, 12:30pm – 2pm My Thai, 1425 S 300 W, SLC, UT (map)

Data Backups - There Are No Excuses

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:04:48 +0000

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 took a few seconds for the loss to happen, and immediately I knew exactly what the repercussions where. The immediate second thought that passes through your brain is “Where are my backups?” That is when I realized I didn’t have my nightly backups set up on this server. I quickly checked the file date on the last known backup I had.

Quick Update

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:16:28 +0000

I’ve written at least one blog post per month since Dec. 2007, and I almost let this month slip by. The other day a good friend asked where I had been since I’ve been so busy, and he mentioned no blog posts. While I have several drafts in progress, instead of rushing one of those I’d just give an update on what I’ve been up to. So while I wait for gigabytes of images to be transferred from an old web server to a new one, I’ll write what I’ve been up to.

New Blog Design

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 02:08:21 +0000

I’ve finally gotten around to putting up my new blog design. It based off the Carrington theme for WordPress. It isn’t 100% complete yet as I have a handful of more tweaks to do. The archive pages aren’t formated correctly, and I’m sure I’ll find some more changes to make. I’m still playing around with the side menu to find a nice balance for all the content there.

XAMPP for Mac - My Frustrations & Solutions

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:15:34 +0000

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) on your machine locally. I’ve been running it on my Windows machines for years, and I have been running my production servers on Linux.

Interesting Poll on PHP Hiring

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:29:42 +0000

http://twtpoll.com/badge/r/?twt=mqszyl&s=200

My Tumblr Blog For My Randomness

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:59:32 +0000

I’ve been contemplating making a second blog for what I would consider my “non-technical” stuff. Random YouTube videos, funny websites, etc. Things my friends and family would enjoy, but not things I would not considered a part of my “profession.” I like trying to keep things on my blog on the professional side. However, I still want to share the funny things with friends, family, and co-workers. Today I found my solution:

The Dangers of Twitter!

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:00:34 +0000

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 sent.

We decided, that hands down, my father was the most wired. One evening my wife and I stayed in the car while my father ran into a grocery store to pick up something quickly. I made a tweet about our trip to Barnes & Nobel, and how I spend so much money there. By the time my father came back to the car three minutes later, he commented to me about my tweet. He had set up that all my tweets are sent to his phone. I laughed and told him he definitely was the most wired.

Happy New Year - Snowmobile Trip

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:08:42 +0000

I’ve just created my flickr account and trying it out. I thought I would upload the photos of new years snowmobile trip I took with my wife & in-laws. It was a great get-away, especially as tech guy. To give you guys an idea of where we went, there is no internet or cell-phone reception. It was too cold to bring up my laptop, and I didn’t want to risk breaking it, because we can only snowmobile in to the cabin. I didn’t feel like strapping my laptop to a snowmobile going up a mountin.

Yay.... gotta love delays at t...

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 22:23:22 +0000

Yay…. gotta love delays at the airport! Woohoo!

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 03:02:17 +0000

Joanna and I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays! I’ve included a funny little christmas video about a guy with WAY to much time on his hands:

XKCD & 11th Grade

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:38:02 +0000

I saw a great cartoon today on xkcd.

Replace Perl with PHP, and that is how I feel about my public education. Granted, there were several teachers that had a large impact on my professional life, but over all my self-education has had a much bigger impact than my overall public education.

Also, if you’re a technical guy, and you’ve never read xkcd, you must read it. It is a fantastic cartoon series, especially for those with a little geek in them.

Useful Shell Commands

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:45:44 +0000

I’m not an expert at all with the linux shell. I know how to run a LAMP stack, but that is about it. Every blue moon I need to use a command that I used last blue moon, but forgot how. This list will now be my list to write down the cool “commands” I learn to accomplish different tasks. That way I don’t have to bug people on #uphpu about it. ;)

iPhone App Development Experience

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 17:30:49 +0000

I usually don’t post frequently about work projects, especially one after another. I apologize to the aggregation blogs I’m subscribed to, please don’t think I’m trying to “pimp” my clients websites. However, today we had our iPhone App approved for the App Store in . This app integrates with our Dating DNA website so people on-the-go can browse potential matches. We have a video showing how it works.

I helped with the coding on this project. I was in charge of the API that the iPhone used. We created a SOAP API because we assumed the iPhone would have built in SOAP support. We were dead wrong. I had already been frustrated with the iPhone SDK for many reason, and no SOAP was a big one. The fact that they didn’t have anything for any type of web services was mind blowing. So much for using SOAP and having a very well defined WSDL. It made testing the API easy, but implementation was a pain.

Pizza Hut Ordering Online - 3 Hour Wait?

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:44:35 +0000

Okay, I order a pizza from Pizza Hut online at 11:44 AM. I was expecting it to take, you know, 30 to 45 minutes. One hour tops. After an hour waiting, I check the email to make sure that I got the conformation correct. In the email, this is what I see:

Hey, I would expect a pizza sooner than 2 1/2 hours! Such a pain…

Bad Website Usability - TGI Fridays

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 01:36:54 +0000

Here is a little usability lesson for everyone: vertical text can be very hard to read, especially when it is rotated. Here is a video taken of TGI Friday’s website. Hopefully this can be a lesson for web developers about how frustrating these kinds of techniques can be for users.

http://content.screencast.com/users/JustinCarmony/folders/Jing/media/8605f50b-0ac2-41aa-b4dd-560fc711a627/bootstrap.swf

WordPress 2.7 - I Love It!

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:41:34 +0000

All I can say is I love the new version of WordPress. It makes my life so much easier! I love the new control panel, and it just works. I didn’t have a single problem navigating the new layout. It is fantastic.

100th Blog Entry - First Year of Real Blogging

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 05:03:48 +0000

This is my 100th entry into my blog, and 25 days before my first year mark for writing on my blog. It’s been a great experience, and I’m starting to see some real traffic. I’ve found that publishing meaningful content, whether a simple bug fix, or a full blown tutorial, can be very satisfying. Seeing the handful of thankful comments has been great, and even the contentious comments have been fun.

Streamlined Web Development: In-Depth

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:26:44 +0000

Note: This is a work in progress. I will finish the rest after the presentation. I just wanted to publish the post to link to. If you have any questions, please post them below I will try to answer them as fast as I can. I probably won’t have time to finish this until Sunday, due to several critical projects that are due ASAP.

This in the “In-Depth” part of my presentation on “Streamling Web Development with SVN & Trac.” I can’t possibly cover all the aspects of this topic. I like to post a “in-depth” article right after my presentation with links, tutorials, and all my resources used for the presentation. This allows for me to spend more time on questions & answers. I’d appreciate any feedback on the presentation, and if you have any questions feel free to ask. This article is an extension to the presentation, so I suggest listening to the presentation first if it seems like there are any pieces missing.

Digital Conversion Video

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:29:40 +0000

This made my day, and I thought I would share it.

Father Sued Over Freedom of Speech

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:22:31 +0000

I thought I would step in and write about the total non-sense that has been going on with the Linspire/Freespire debacle. Today I just found out my father, Kevin Carmony and ex-CEO of Linspire, is being sued by Michael Robertson over “… cybersquatting, trademark infringement, and unfair competition…” for “$100,000 and other damages.” You can read the entire post on Kevin’s blog. He summarizes the real intent behind this lawsuit well:

The lawsuit even states, “Although the FREESPIRE mark was recently assigned as part of an asset purchase, [Robertson] expressly reserved all rights in and to all claims against Carmony arising from the freespire.com domain name and website.” Now, why would Robertson want to carve out that one thing to hang on to? He’s no longer involved with Freespire, so why does he care? Is he desperate for money? With Robertson’s companies struggling and laying employees off, does anyone really believe this is the most important thing Robertson should be concerning himself with? His motives are pretty transparent–to suppress freedom of expression that is critical of Robertson.

Empowering JavaScript Through jQuery

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:31:27 +0000

Once I discovered jQuery, my life as a web developer changed. There are few libraries, tools, etc. that I can honestly say have completely changed the way I code. In all honesty, jQuery makes the difficult aspects of JavaScript and turns them into a strength. I recommend it over any other JavaScript library I know. It is smaller, leaner, straight forwards, and more powerful than anything out there. Large companies like Google, Microsoft, and Dell use it. Microsoft is now including jQuery in Visual Studio, their powerful IDE for making websites. If anything, I have yet to meet a person who has used jQuery and has gone to anything else.

PHP Video Tutorial – Getting Started – Installing XAMPP

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 01:32:30 +0000

I’ve decided to give this a try and make a video on Installing & Running XAMPP, the easy to instal web stack for developing websites on your own computer. This video is for beginners who need help walking through the installation of XAMPP.

View Video Tutorial - Installing XAMPP

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them here. If you enjoyed this tutorial and are in need of a web server, check out Layered Tech, a server host that I highly recommend.

Jing - Sharing Made Easy

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:55:19 +0000

I’ve found this really cool program, and it is awesome. I think Jing has stumbled upon a great idea. The concept is simple: instead of explaining things, you show things. In a nut shell, I can select any part of my monitor, take a screenshots and make notes on it, or make a video recording, and upload it to the web. I’ve been able to do this before, but Jing makes it 100% streamlined. It works for Windows and OS X. Here is how it works. After installing Jing, it places a little icon at the top of your screen. You can move this little “sun” anywhere along your monitor (or any monitor if you have more than one.) I keep mine at the top center where it never interferes with anything else.

Adeona - Open Source LoJack for Laptops

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:31:54 +0000

There is nothing worse than having your laptop or computer stolen. Recently, a close family member had his house robbed, losing his PC and Laptop. The biggest set back wasn’t the cost, but the hundreds of important files for work that were lost.

If you’re looking for a way to help recover a stolen PC or Laptop, I suggest using Adeona. Here is an except from their front page:

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

It's Time for Campaignin' - Elections Video

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:40:16 +0000

I couldn’t help resist posting this video I found over at John P’s blog. The thing I like best is that it equally hammers all people involved.

Exactly 9 Years Ago Today: Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:57:28 +0000

I read this article on John P.’s blog “One Mans Blog” today and I thought I would pass it along. Here is an except:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Carrington Theme & Hashcash Plug-in Solution

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:25:35 +0000

I’ve been a huge Hashcash fan since using WordPress. In a nutshell, it requires a browser to process some javascript to generate a number to verify that the browser in-fact read the page. This helps prevent bots from submitting spam comments. The idea is that if a spam bot was required to process the javascript to make a “hash”, it would slow down posting comments by 20 times, if not more. Spammers make money off volumn, so they would lose “cash” slowing down their spamming. Hence the name: Hashcash.

Adobe Creative Suite 4: I'm Excited!

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:06:05 +0000

All I can say is I’m excited. I was skeptical about Adobe acquiring Macromedia at first, wishing it was the other way around. The only real Adobe product I was using was Photoshop, where was Macromedia has Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. However, I have to say, I’ve been impressed with Adobe’s efforts to improving Macromedia’s products. I was worried they would cannibalize the different programs and just merge a few features into the Adobe products. However, they had done opposite with Creative Suite 3, they kept all the products and basically focused on making integration between all the products better.

I'm a PC - Take That Apple

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:27:38 +0000

It is about time that Microsoft answers back to Apple’s “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” commercials. The ironic thing is I am writing this from my MacBook Pro. Apple for so long started to take little jabs at Microsoft’s Windows. Their first commercials we’re pretty straight forward, but lately they’ve been getting more misleading. Here is an example:

Give me a break. Windows can come bundled with everything Mac does. The only real program I’ve been impressed with has been Apple’s Mail.app. Other then that, there isn’t anything super fantastic about their other programs. iTunes is terrible as it keeps crashing my iPhone and Laptop. Here is another one that it super misleading:

Crisis on Wall St & Web Technologies

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:39:04 +0000

I ran across this video from Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter account on the Crisis on Wall St & Web 2.0 companies. While I hate media madness about the stock market and the economy, I liked the insight that these interviewees gave into their perspective. While many people are calling this a “Crisis on Wall St” I like to call it a “Crunch on Wall St.” Times are getting tough and its time for more sound investments. Those who have been investing cavalierly might get shot in the foot when all the hype surrounding several markets start to come crashing down.

Dear Mr. Obama

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:54:43 +0000

I wonder how Obama would respond to this video:

PHP Article: 10 Principles of the PHP Masters

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:20:39 +0000

This article has some great overall advice. My only disappointment is that #10 isn’t higher on the list:

The single most important thing I tell people who use PHP is to turn error reporting to its maximum level. Why would I want to do this? Generally the error reporting is set at a level that will hide many little things like:

declaring a variable ahead of time,

referencing a variable that isn’t available in that segment of code, or

using a define that isn’t set.

These factors might not seem like that big a deal – until you develop structured or object oriented programs with functions and classes. Too often, writing code without error reporting turned up high would cost you hours as you scoured long functions that didn’t work because a variable was misspelled or not accessible.

Why Google Chrome is Good for FireFox

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:50:31 +0000

I’ve heard time after time people saying how FireFox might take a backseat to Google Chrome. However, I actually think Chrome and FireFox will benefit from each other. I think FireFox has nothing but to gain from Google Chrome. Let me give you an example why:

My brother Bryce works at Best Buy. They’ve been selling Apple Macs for the last few months and Bryce hates selling them to customers. The reason is people come in, say they want a Mac because they’ve heard so much about them, don’t listening to any suggestions or tips, and just buy it. That would be great, except usually within 1-2 weeks they come back wanting to return their Mac. Why Bryce asks why, one of the classic responses is “Well, I couldn’t find Internet Explorer.” These customers have been so accustomed to doing things their way that they don’t understand how to use anything else.

Bad PR, The Internet, and Censorship - Just Take It

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 03:44:57 +0000

Well, it looks like there is case of a large organization trying to cover up some bad press. Featured on slashdot: “YouTube Yanks Free Tibet Video After IOC (International Olympic Committee”:

The International Olympic Committee filed a copyright infringement claim yesterday against YouTube for hosting video of a Free Tibet protest at the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan Thursday night. The video depicts demonstrators conducting a candlelight vigil and projecting a protest video onto the consulate building; the projection features recent footage of Tibetan monks being arrested and riffs on the Olympic logo of the five interlocking rings, turning them into handcuffs. YouTube dutifully yanked the video, but it can still be seen on Vimeo. (Be advised; there is some brief footage of bloody, injured monks

WordPress - Easy Upgrades, I'm Impressed

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 01:22:15 +0000

I’ve been very happy with WordPress. I’ve experimented with textpattern, drupal, joomla, and dozens others. Each time I circle back to WordPress for it’s easy of use and great community. I just upgraded this blog from 2.3.2 to 2.6 without a single problem. 2.6’s new features are great, and all I can say is “wow.” I have to give Matt, Barry, and the rest of the team a huge round of applause. It is fantastic!

Funny iPhone Comic

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:48:34 +0000

I haven’t written in a few days, and I’ve been swamped with work, but I thought it’d make a quick post about Ctrl-Alt-Del’s ‘silly’ comic:

While you have failed entrepenuers saying how the obviously successful iPhone will fail, there is one truth to the iPhone: it can be very slippery without a case!

Web Development 10-Years Ago & Now

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:43:55 +0000

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 people did their websites back in the day. It hasn’t changed much over the years.
Adobe Photoshop v4 - The must have program for image editing:
Dreamweaver 1.0 - Thats right, I’ve been with dreamweaver since the beginning! (Sorry, I couldn’t find a screenshot)
ws_ftp95 - This old school FTP program was the bomb in my eyes since day 1. Boy have things come a long.

Technology wise I was serving up static HTML pages. When I had mastered Dreamweaver’s template system, I was able to run a website with 20+ pages not too bad. It was definitely interesting. Every time I made a change, it would go through and update every single page, and then I would upload every page to the server.

Collection of Useful Plesk Tricks

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:01:17 +0000

Found this blog post with a handful of Plesk tricks while searching for a different problem. Posting it here to remember it.

My Computer Setup

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:04:50 +0000

I’ve recently subscribed to Lorelle’s blog who I met at the LT Pact. She is by all means a professional blogger and really know a lot of stuff. She is also kinda crazy, but in a good, passionate way. Just never, EVER misspell WordPress (its WordPress, not Wordpress) or Plugins (not Plug-ins).

Every week she has a blog challenge, and to make sure I keep up my blogging I thought this week’s challenge was appropriate for my blog. She challenged to blog about your computer setup, now and then. First lets talk about my setup back in the day.

MySQL & PHP – SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS – An easy way to get the total number of rows regardless of LIMIT

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:30:48 +0000

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 by a query before appending the LIMIT statement at the end. This turned out to be very inefficient due to MySQL put together the 10000+ rows and sent it to PHP ready to be parsed, only to have the function mysql_num_rows() to be executed on it.

Lifehacker - Making your Mac sing!

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:39:18 +0000

It still amazes me the randomness people can find online. On LifeHacker they posted how you can make your OS X computer sing:

You already know that typing say something into the Mac’s Terminal will literally make your Mac say “something.” The UsingMac blog posts a few more nifty text-to-speech commands that will make your Mac sing. Literally. Copy and paste the following to the command line:

say -v Good oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo What will someone else come up with?

Blogging - Meeting up with Family

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:42:39 +0000

This weekend I was in Las Vegas for the LT Pact (you can read about that more below) and I was posting on my blog that I was in Las Vegas. A cousin I hadn’t seen for about 5-6 years stumbled upon my blog and let a comment asking how I could possibly come to LV without saying hi. I had totally forgot she lived in Las Vegas so I sent her an email, and that night my wife and I went to dinner with her and her husband. It was a lot of fun. It is just amazing how social networking tools, like blogs and twitter, work so well and can be very useful to keeping in touch with people you know.

LT PACT 2008 - Day 1

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:31:52 +0000

Whew, today was a good day. I took a lot of notes and over the next few days I’ll be blogging on the different topics. Hopefully you’ll enjoy.

In Vegas and ready for fun!

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:01:39 +0000

We’ve landed and are having a good time. Wrapping on some coding projects before I head off to the meet and greet cocktail party.

iPhone SDK DNA - A Frustrating Issue

Fri, 16 May 2008 21:16:06 +0000

I’ve been searching all over the internet for good resources on the iPhone SDK and tutorials. I know that many times that an SDK can sometimes be a little much to take in, and that it’s documentation usually is too comprehensive for simple tutorials. It also is very important to have 3rd party tutorials for places where documentation is thin.

The documentation on how to use the iPhone Interface Builder is non-existent on apple’s site, so I searched on the internet for some insight. I found links to several tutorials, but each tutorial listed something like the following:

A New Stage in Life: My MacBook Pro

Wed, 14 May 2008 06:14:01 +0000

Well, I’ve finally crossed the bridge I never thought I’d cross. My new laptop is a screaming new MacBook Pro. It is a 17" with the HD screen, 4 GB of ram, and a 7200 speed drive.

All I can say is that it has been an adventure. I’ve been going through the simple pains of learning how to use a Mac, but I think I’ve got it down for the most part. I can see why so many people like it, and in many ways it simplifies the way a user uses a computer. I think a lot of the different aspects of the Mac are well thought out, while others (like the one button mouse) are ridiculous. Fortunately I think I’ve got the most of it down.

Brother HL-2070N - Sharing an Vista Printer to a XP Machine

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 18:15:29 +0000

Steve Rowe had a solution to a problem I was having for my Brother Printer. My wife has an XP Pro machine, and I have Vista 64bit. When I tried to share my printer to her, it would say there wasn’t any valid drivers. So I downloaded the drivers manually and tried to connect the printer. It still threw an error. Turns out Vista came with the Brother Printer’s drivers, but named slightly different. All I had to do to fix it was change the name of the drivers in the INF file on my wife’s computer.

LINQ and NOT IN Queries

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:42:28 +0000

Found an excellent blog post on how to do NOT IN scenarios using .Contains().

Starting Book Reviews

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:15:15 +0000

Alright, to help me continue the learning process in my life, I’m going to start to do a book review once a week. The great thing is that this will require me to read a book once a week. Fortunately I have an account to Safari Online by O’Reilly so I won’t go broke buying $200+ worth of books a month. I’ll start off tonight with a book review for Web Designers.

WordPress Plugins - Documentation Please!

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:00:28 +0000

Alright, I know some might be thinking that I’m asking for a lot. However, when ever I get a new WordPress Plugin for my site or another’s I am running I find myself spending 10-15 mins figuring it out.

The worst is finding where to change the settings! Since there is no standard on where to place your plugin inside the admin panel’s navigation I find myself clicking over and over again through the navigation trying to find the bloody thing. Honest, if plugin writers would just put in the description of their plugin, right next to where people click “activate”, something along the lines of “Go to Manage ->Ban” to set setting, I’d be happy! That’d save me 10 minutes f trying to find the stupid thing.

To Blog or Not To Blog...

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:18:19 +0000

Alright, I’ve decided I like WordPress more than TextPattern. I won’t go into details to avoid any flames, though I doubt I will receive any.

The goal this time around is to make this blog more of a developer’s notes for myself. This way I can look back on my notes for useful information (like regular expressions, I used them once and awhile every few months, but I have to re-learn it every time!) and things I hope other people will find useful.