Justin Carmony

Snippit: Mature microservices and how to operate them

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:37:11 +0000

I’m cleaning house in my notes and to-dos, found this gem and wanting to save it for later. A great slidedeck on running a Microservice architecture.

https://speakerdeck.com/sarahjwells/qcon-london-2019-mature-microservices-and-how-to-operate-them

Snippit: Innovation Isn’t All Fun and Games — Creativity Needs Discipline

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:35:25 +0000

But despite the fact that innovative cultures are desirable and that most leaders claim to understand what they entail, they are hard to create and sustain. This is puzzling. How can practices apparently so universally loved—even fun—be so tricky to implement?

The reason, I believe, is that innovative cultures are misunderstood. The easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only one side of the coin. They must be counterbalanced by some tougher and frankly less fun behaviors. A tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for incompetence. A willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline. Psychological safety requires comfort with brutal candor. Collaboration must be balanced with individual accountability. And flatness requires strong leadership. Innovative cultures are paradoxical. Unless the tensions created by this paradox are carefully managed, attempts to create an innovative culture will fail.

Snippet: Big Launch Motto

Sat, 27 Jul 2019 23:20:12 +0000

Tweet from Michael Lopp, VP of Engineering at Slack:

https://twitter.com/rands/status/1150875557761966080

What’s cool is I’m pretty sure it is in relation to this blogpost which they posted a week later: https://slack.engineering/rebuilding-slack-on-the-desktop-308d6fe94ae4

Director's First Rule: My Desired Outcome is...

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 04:28:16 +0000

Last year I wrote about my first rule for managers: the phrase “My expectation is…” Feel free to read it, but in summary, it’s my rule where I can’t be upset with an employee about something unless the words “my expectation is [insert clear expectation]” have come out of my mouth. I found that clearly and directly communicating those expectations solved many, if not most, of problems I ran into managing a team.

New Meetup: Engineering Leadership Utah

Fri, 29 Mar 2019 04:31:11 +0000

I’ve had a few people reach out to me asking about my new Meetup, so the cat is out of the bag: I’m starting an engineering leadership meetup in Utah. (Pro-tip, when you create a meetup in Meetup.com, they will promote it soon after, so don’t create it unless you’re ready for people to notice. 😅)

User groups and meetups played a large part in accelerating my career and growth as a developer. Participating in the Utah PHP Usergroup, OpenWest, and several other groups have helped me grow immensely.

Engineering Managers: Don’t Forget the Individual Contributor’s High

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 19:09:11 +0000

I was having a conversation with one of my engineers, and they were pretty worked up. They felt frustrated about a hiccup in one of our processes resulting in a minor delay of finishing their feature.

I empathized with their plight and reassured the hiccup wouldn’t have any major effects. The team was still on schedule for their deliverables, their boss (me) understood why for the delay, and I knew it wasn’t the fault of the engineer. We also had a good plan in place to prevent the same issue in the future.

Talk: DDM's Journey into Big Data with BigQuery with KSL and Deseret News - Salt Lake City GCP Meetup

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 20:00:48 +0000

I gave this presentation at the Salt Lake City Google Cloud Platform Meetup we hosted at Deseret Digital Media.

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/ddms-journey-into-big-data-with-bigquery-with-ksl-and-deseret-news

We will hear from Justin Carmony, the Sr. Director of Engineering, Analytics at Deseret Digital Media.

This talk is part use-case and part intro into BigQuery.

Three years ago Deseret Digital Media had a serious problem: it had a lot of data in Google Analytics and Google Ad Manager (then called DFP), but couldn’t run the in-depth analysis needed because of limitations with their reporting tools. They had crucial questions they couldn’t answer, so they did what everyone else was doing: just guessing and hoping for the best.

Talk: Making the Switch to Engineering Management - Utah PHP Usergroup

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 20:00:35 +0000

I gave this talk at the Utah PHP Usergroup. It was a quick turn around to make the presentation, so not my best slides, but they got the job done.

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/making-the-switch-to-engineering-management

Video

Note: the quality isn’t the best, but it’s what they had.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyuAWOfR6Ek

Details

Making the Switch to Engineering Management by Justin Carmony

The first part of an engineer’s career is pretty straight-forward: learning the skills and technology to code. Then, one day after being a senior developer for a few years, you find you need to make a decision: do you want to become a manager? Are you ready to make the switch to management? Do you even want to? What would it be like? How do you know if you’re ready? How do you prepare? Ahhhhh!

Strategies for easier Google Analytics + BigQuery Analysis & Custom Dimensions

Tue, 22 May 2018 08:00:46 +0000

I’m a huge fan of BigQuery, and for Google Analytics 360 users you can automatically have your data go directly into BigQuery. It enabled advanced analysis not possible through the standard reporting tools, and you can join in other datasets you have in BigQuery with your Google Analytics data.

With BigQuery you can have nested structures, so each record in the Google Analytics dataset a visit. Nested inside each visit record is a hits nested record, which contains every pageview and event that occurred during that visit.

Manager’s First Rule: My Expectation Is…

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 08:00:53 +0000

Learning how to be a manager can be tricky. Many times I’ll talk with other managers and inevitably, at some point, the subject of a team member’s performance comes up. Let’s say we’re talking about a fictitious people of Mal the manager, and Don the developer.

“Don is a great guy, but sometimes he can get lost in the weeds and take way too long to solve a problem. What should take a few hours can take days, and it never seems like he is making any progress.”

Talk: Getting Started with Big Data using BigQuery & PHP - Utah PHP Usergroup

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 20:00:45 +0000

Slides

I don’t have a copy of the slides for this presentation. However, they were near identical to the presentation I gave at the Google Cloud Platform SLC meetup. My daughter was only a few weeks old, so my whole family was operating on very little sleep, and I forgot my power cord for my brand new MacBook Pro. Won’t make that mistake again.

Here was a tweet after the Meetup:

How I ate a salad, met Ed Catmull, and had an epiphany

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 17:00:23 +0000

Today while eating my sweet pork salad at Costa Vida my coworker leaned over and asked me “hey, is that Ed Catmull?”

I looked up, and sure enough, there chilling in the middle of the room was Ed Catmull, President of Pixar and Disney Animation. He was dressed in jeans and a faded Pixar sweatshirt, looking like a totally normal guy. He was watching one of the TVs where Costa Vida shows surfing clips, waiting for his family to get through the line for food. Everyone in the restaurant was unaware that one of the most successful studio presidents in history was just chilling there. Well, everyone except my co-workers and I.

Why You Should Check Out BigQuery for Big Data

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 09:50:14 +0000

If you have a conversation with me right now, you’ll likely end up hearing about BigQuery. For the last year and a half, we’ve been using BigQuery to answer Big Data(ish) questions at Deseret Digital Media and the Deseret News. We’ve gained insights that weren’t possible with our existing tools and have been big fans of it since.

So here is why I would recommend for you to check it out:

It’s Fast

Cross-Domain Cookies with Google Analytics

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 09:03:09 +0000

At work, we’ve been trying to determine how much audience overlap we have between two of our main websites. We’ve migrated to Google Analytics Premium this year and are creating a “roll-up” property where all analytics from all of our properties gets rolled into one.

After enabling the roll-up, we tried to run reports on how many users visited both sites, but came back with 0 users. After doing some research we discovered Google Analytics by default will use first-party cookies to identify users. However, first-party cookies are not accessible (without crazy work arounds) across domains.

Talk: Docker, PHP, and Live Demoing - What could go wrong? - Utah PHP Usergroup

Thu, 19 May 2016 20:00:18 +0000

This presentation was a ton of fun. In a room with a dozen or more engineers and did a live demo of using Docker. We made environments for local development and then showed how to use them in production. We talked about our experience at DDM running Docker in production, where it made sense, and tradeoffs to be aware of.

Talk: Scaling & Managing Asynchronous Workers (and staying sane!) - PHPNW15

Sun, 04 Oct 2015 20:00:18 +0000

I had the absolute privilege of flying out to Manchester, England to give this presentation. It was a total blast.

Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTcyuzJkxIg

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/scaling-and-managing-asynchronous-workers-and-staying-sane

Abstract

There comes a point in time with a website when eventually need to do something in the background. There are always cron jobs, but eventually those either don’t scale well, or are not responsive enough. Learn about how to help your website efficiently scale by using workers. We’ll touch briefly the fundamental theory behind workers and how to easily implement them. We’ll learn about several different technologies to help manage workers such as Beanstalkd, Supervisord, Redis, and others. We’ll show a live demo of PHP workers performing tasks and you’ll leave with sound understanding of how to implement workers in your own application.

Talk: Writing Interactive User Interfaces with PHP & React.js - PHPNW15

Sat, 03 Oct 2015 20:00:46 +0000

Wow, this talk. I had warned myself when I started speaking I would never, ever be one of those speakers who came ill-prepared and bombed a talk. It took being ~30 talks in my speaking career where I let my guard down, and at one of my very favorite conferences, I blew it. (Ok, maybe not bombed it, but I didn’t do well to my standards)

Ok, I didn’t totally blow it, but if you watch the video (I was almost tempted not to post it) feel free to skip the live demo. What happened is my first part of my talk went incredibly fast, and then I ran into technical difficulties with my live demo (which I didn’t prepare or harden very well in advance). What was the worst part is because I took so long trying to get my live demo to work, I had well-prepared content I had to rush.

Talk: Writing Interactive User Interfaces with PHP & React.js - Utah PHP Usergroup

Thu, 16 Jul 2015 20:00:24 +0000

This was my dry-run for my upcoming talk at PHP North West 2015. Check out that talk for the final copy of the slides.

Happy Birthday PHP

Mon, 08 Jun 2015 18:07:33 +0000

Whew, it has been a busy day.

Today I saw so many of my friends posting their thoughts on PHP and it’s 20th birthday. It is pretty incredible how far it has come, and how much of the web it powers. I wish I had more time to post my history with PHP, my first websites, my first security vulnerabilities, my first successes, and failures, etc.

But alas, it has been a very busy day. I woke up and went to work at a job I absolutely love. I then came home to my family in our wonderful home and made forts with our 2-year-old son. Then to wrap up the evening I worked on some PHP code for a project at work that we’re demoing tomorrow. It went by really quick.

Talk: Agile Doesn't Have to Stink - OpenWest 2015

Thu, 07 May 2015 20:00:52 +0000

This is one of my favorite talks to give. I forget how much great content is inside of them.

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/agile-doesnt-have-to-stink

Webpack, React, and Multiple Versions Issues

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 18:10:21 +0000

I’ve been using React successfully for several projects, and tonight I ran into a problem I hadn’t experienced before. I was trying both react-d3and react-d3-components when I would get an error on rendering:

Uncaught TypeError: Can't add property context, object is not extensible

This error had a very, very deep stack trace far into the depths of React, and I was worried I had encountered a nasty React bug. After some poking around & googling, I discovered that multiple versions of React do not play nicely with each other, at all. When I had installed both those react component libraries, each installed their own version of React, version 0.12. I was using React version 0.13.

Barebones Example of using React & Webpack

Thu, 19 Mar 2015 18:13:35 +0000

The biggest hurdle to starting with React is getting your JSX files to compile to plain JavaScript. My preference is to use webpack to accomplish this.

If you go and google “react webpack starter” you get some great, fully featured starters like react-starter. The problem is if you’re not starting from scratch, it can be very hard to see what files / settings / etc you need to bring into your project to make it work.

Thoughts on Learning React & Flux

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 18:15:25 +0000

I started to write a blog post detailing everything I’ve learned over the last few months building applications with React & Flux. After writing down about 10% of it, I realized it was becoming far too long. So, instead, I’ll be doing a series of posts over the next few weeks.

Over the last two months, interest in React has had a surge of interest. If you look at the search term reactjs over the last 12 months:

X-Requested-With, AJAX Requests, and Android WebViews

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 18:20:17 +0000

Today we ran into an interesting problem with certain pages of our website not loading for Android users inside their Facebook Apps. We dug down and ran into several red herrings, but ultimately found the problem.

The Problem

If you Google for “X-Requested-With”, or the $_SERVER variable name in PHP HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH you will likely find many posts stating that it is a method for detecting AJAX requests. Most major JavaScript libraries and/or frameworks like jQuery will set the X-Requested-With HTTP header for any AJAX requests. So if you Google X-Requested-With or HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH you will see blog posts & StackOverflow answers about detecting AJAX requests.

How often I've blogged in the last 8 years

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 18:31:12 +0000

I’ve been going through my old blog posts and updating their output from html to markdown. One interesting thing I never realized is just how much I blogged in 2008 (my first year) to other years. So I decided to count the number of blog posts published per year:

2008: 108
2009: 45
2010: 26
2011: 43
2012: 21
2013: 14
2014: 3

While I doubt I will ever get back to my 2008 days, I wouldn’t mind a goal of 52 blog posts in a year. Once a week seems like a good amount.

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.

Talk: Making the Most of your Agile Process - Dutch PHP Conf `14

Sat, 28 Jun 2014 20:00:23 +0000

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/making-the-most-of-your-agile-process-dpc-14

Talk: Blazing Data with Redis - Dutch PHP Conference 2014

Fri, 27 Jun 2014 20:00:12 +0000

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/redis-dutch-php-conf-14

Resources

Demo GitHub Repo: https://github.com/justincarmony/fun-with-redis-2

Talk: Mentoring Devs into DevOps - OpenWest 2014

Fri, 09 May 2014 06:17:54 +0000

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/mentoring-devs-into-devops-openwest

Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0jVSBqj-YY

Talk: Top to Bottom PHP Profiling - Lone Star PHP 2014

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 20:00:04 +0000

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/top-to-bottom-php-profiling

Talk: Scaling & Managing Asynchronous Workers (and staying sane!) - Lone Star PHP 2014

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 20:00:48 +0000

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/managing-and-scaling-asynchronous-workers-and-staying-sane

SSH Key Forwarding & Sudo

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 21:43:28 +0000

Lately I’ve been really liking using SSH Key Forwarding to let a server I’m SSH’d into authorize against my key. Most of the time it is so I can pull private git repositories on a server. The problem is when I use sudo I lose my current environment variables. Thanks to ServerFault, I found a great work-around where sudo can forward the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable. You can do this by using visudo to add the following line:

Tech Interviews & Softball Questions

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 04:16:19 +0000

While it seems every few months the topic of the interview process goes around the community, and I think the general consensus is most of the time it is ineffective. At DDM, there has been a lot of thought put into our interview process, and so over the next few weeks I hope to share some ideas we’ve had.

The Status-Quo: Grill the Candidate

Traditionally, when you think of interview questions, you think of hard questions to “weed out the weak” and then you’ll find the best. However, I think this only leads to finding people who interview really well, which isn’t their job as a developer. I know many excellent developers who are poor at interviewing but are great at their profession.

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:

Talk: Blazing Data with Redis - True North PHP 2013

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 20:00:32 +0000

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/blazing-data-with-redis-truenorthphp

Restarting VirtualBox on Mavericks

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 12:07:05 +0000

Occasionally when rebooting my machine, VirtualBox would fail to start up correctly. They changed the command to restart it once moving to OS X Mavericks, so I’m just recording here the new command:

sudo /Library/Application Support/VirtualBox/LaunchDaemons/VirtualBoxStartup.sh restart

I made a command in my local ~/bin/ directly called ~/bin/virtualbox_restart so I could easily restart if needed.

Workshop: Bringing Order to the Chaos of your Server Management with Salt

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 20:00:58 +0000

This was my first 3 hour workshop, and boy did I learn a lot doing it. I had a lot of great feedback and learned many ways to improve future workshops.

Slides

HTML5 Slides: https://justincarmony.github.io/slides/salt-tutorial

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

Ubuntu 12.04, PHP 5.4, Apache2, and ppa:ondrej/php5

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 02:06:49 +0000

Okay, wow, what a doozy. I guess this is a lesson in why you want to be careful of the PPAs you use on your Ubuntu servers.

Summary

The very popular ppa:ondrej/php5, a Personal Package Archive for Ubuntu 12.04, upgraded from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.5. This would require a newer version of Apache (v 2.4). If you upgraded Apache from 2.2 to 2.4, you would likely run into apache configuration issues.

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.

Talk: Automate Your Local Environment with Vagrant & Friends - php[architect] Web Summit Series: DevOps

Tue, 16 Jul 2013 20:00:19 +0000

Slides

HTML5 Slides: https://justincarmony.github.io/slides/vagrant-intro/

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.

Talk: Salt, The New Configuration Management System - Dutch PHP Conference 2013

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 20:00:03 +0000

Slides

HTML5 Slides: https://justincarmony.github.io/slides/salt-intro/

Resources

Demo GitHub Repo: https://github.com/JustinCarmony/salt-demo

Talk: High-Performance Websites with Scalable Workers - Dutch PHP Conference 2013

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 20:00:19 +0000

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/high-performance-websites-with-scalable-workers

Favorite IT Crowd Episode: The Internet

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:27:01 +0000

I posted this back in 2009, but that video on YouTube is no longer working. So I figure I’d repost it since it is such a funny episode. The IT Crowd was one of my favorite TV shows. It’s about two guys from IT Support, and their manager who doesn’t know anything about IT.

Then, later in the show, here are the results of their little prank:

Talk: Demystifying CSS For Developers - OpenWest 2013

Fri, 03 May 2013 20:00:05 +0000

Slides

Note: These slides were from WordCamp SLC, but it was the same presentation.

https://www.slideshare.net/JustinCarmony/demystifying-css-wordpress

Talk: High-Performance Websites with Scalable Workers - OpenWest 2013

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:00:10 +0000

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/high-performance-websites-with-scalable-workers

The Catalyst for Agile Development: Sprint Retrospective

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 23:24:58 +0000

By now, everyone in software has heard of agile software development, and for the most part about scrum. Almost everyone, at some point, has worked on a team who has done agile with varying degrees of success. About half the companies I know have, quite frankly, implemented agile completely wrong and it has made their process even worse. The other half have used it with some varying degrees of success, but rarely to the degree as the “mythical teams” whose productivity elevated to a whole new level.

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.

First Serious Attempts with PHPUnit, Composer, and the Omniture API

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 23:12:46 +0000

At work we use Omniture for our web analytics, and for a long time I’ve wanted query our Omniture Data to run some internal reports. I discovered that Omniture has a restful reporting api, and after using it for a little bit I decided it would be nice to write a wrapper library for it.

Since I had recently taken the PHP Testing Bootcamp from Chris Hartjes, I decided I wanted write it using Test Driven Development and really get my feet wet. I also decided I wanted to make the library compatible with Composer. After the weekend was over, I had an almost finished library that just requires some more work to be done, but I learned a great deal that I thought I’d share.

Mobile Devices: What A Difference 8 Years Made

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 20:32:10 +0000

I saw this picture and it really drove home the idea that mobile devices have become a major part of our lives. Here are two photos: one from 8 years ago when Pope Benedict XVI was introduced at St Peter’s Square, and one of just the other day when Pope Francis I was introduced. Its startling the one single contrast. Its amazing how technology can be a part of our lives.

PHP Live Regex

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 18:41:03 +0000

Here is a useful website for evaluating regular expressions for PHP and testing them out live.

http://www.phpliveregex.com/

IRC Bouncing with ZNC

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 03:33:08 +0000

Before when I worked from home, keeping a continuous connection to IRC wasn’t that big of a challenge. I was always on a great connection that I controlled. However, since I started my new job, I’ve been struggling for the last 10 months or so to stay as connected on IRC as I had in the past.

See, half the time my laptop is connected to our network through a wired connection when I’m working at my desk. It is extremely fast, and I have all of the access I need to our internal production networks. However, when I go to meetings (which can be a lot), I switch over to the wireless. For whatever reason, the ports to Freenode’s IRC channel are blocked, so I can’t access it. Then switching back and forth every day causes me to connect, drop, etc. Also, when I commute I don’t have my laptop open and connected to the internet.

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?

Personal Post - Infertility

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 06:32:41 +0000

Thursday morning at 12:36 AM, Joanna’s water broke. Eleven hours later, Marshall, our first son was born. It was an amazing experience. I’ll likely be posting in the future about the wonderful, and truly humbling, experience of becoming a father. However, I want to talk about something very different.

One year ago, Joanna and I were in a very different state. We were struggling with infertility. We were undergoing tests after tests, trying to diagnose why we were unable to get pregnant after trying for two years. While no diagnosis had been found for our infertility, Joanna was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. We struggled month after month of trying with no solution in sight. It was completely humbling as our life plans and hopes were slipping through our fingers and I could do absolutely nothing to “fix it.” We watched as dozens of friends, family, and neighbors got pregnant, gave birth to their babies, and lived a dream we thought we might never have. It was a very serious personal trial for my wife and I, one which can still bring tears when we look back, even though we’re “passed it” now.

A Different Kind of Tech Company: Families First

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:33:42 +0000

I’ve been lucky to work for several successful startups. Granted, they weren’t Facebook or Twitter, but almost all of them turned around good profits and/or were bought. I’ll admit, working at a startup is, well, a lot of work. There are articles written about long hours and hard work. Even articles about telling people to quit whining about the hours.

Now I really appreciate my opportunity to work with the companies I did. I remember working long hours, even 80+ hour weeks during crunch time. I remember sleeping 3-4 hours a night and working pretty much every waking moment. This culture is pretty pervasive in the tech industry, and working 40 hours a week for many companies just isn’t enough. Even outside of a company, there is a feeling of pressure for programmers to spend most of their free time working on their skills.

Vagrant & PHP: Our Success Story At The Deseret News

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 20:36:11 +0000

The simple world of LAMP is fading fast into the distance. When I first started developing websites, you’d just drop your PHP code in a document root, configure it to connect to a mysql database, and that was it.

Now-a-days, you have frameworks that need to be setup, include paths that need to be changed, modules that need to be installed, web servers that need to be configured for your routing, etc. Then you might not just have MySQL, but Redis, Mongo, Couch, Memcached, Postgres, or any other dozen other servers. Then in Production you might have load balancers, multiple web servers, clusters of databases, and the list goes on.

Refactoring or Rebuilding: Working with Legacy Code

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:08:43 +0000

Everyone has some form of Legacy code, and at my new job we have plenty of it. The Deseret News has been around in paper format since 1850, and has had a web presence since 1996. I can still find parts of our codebase for running with Sybase and Vignette. Fortunately, most of the code we work with is much more modern using the latest PHP with an in-house MVC framework. However, there is still one big piece written in a less than ideal system. Its still PHP, but much more hacked together. It is our backend CMS system for controlling the website. It is painful to use, and we get many complaints all the time about it. When I joined the company three months ago, I was told we were going to completely rewrite it. Three months later, the “rewrite” of the CMS is still ages away and we’re continuing to hack to support requested changes.

Questions about the LDS Church (aka Mormons)

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 05:34:04 +0000

This is one of my rare, non-technical posts where I talk a little bit more about personal stuff. A few months ago I was talking to a really good friend of mine. The subject was politics, and we were discussing the Republican primaries for the Presidency, and it was starting to look like Romney was most likely going to win the nomination. He made a comment that stuck out to me. I can’t remember the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of “If Romney wins the nomination, I hope you guys (referring to the LDS Church) are ready for the nation media to tear through every part of your faith.”

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.

Tracking Your Data with StatsD, Graphite, and Graphene

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 05:04:23 +0000

Update: So I spelt ~~Neil~~ Neal’s name wrong. Sorry Neal! I also added some other links to the bottom that he mentioned to me.

Its been a little over 48 hours, and StatsD, Graphite, and Graphene have already paid off major dividends. While speaking at Tek12, Neal Anders was giving a talk on Graphite which I wanted to attend, but I was speaking at the same time I was speaking on Redis so I couldn’t. Then, a week or so after the conference, someone posted a link about StatsD on twitter (I can’t remember who), so I started poking around, loved what I saw, and within an hour I had it running on a server for Dating DNA friday night (I still do some contract work for them to help keep their infrastructure running well). I quickly added about a dozen metrics to track, and went to bed.

PHP Tek 12 Recap

Tue, 29 May 2012 23:34:40 +0000

I started writing this on the plane on my three hour flight back to Salt Lake City. I have to say that php|tek 12 this year was very excellent. It was great to catch up with many people, and meet so many more. This was my first year as a speaker, which was a lot of work, but very worth it. I’m hoping to be able to speak again in the up coming years.

Talk: Demystifying CSS for Developers - PHP Tek 2012

Thu, 24 May 2012 20:00:24 +0000

Slides

https://www.slideshare.net/JustinCarmony/demystifying-css-wordpress

Talk: Blazing Data with Redis - PHP Tek 2012

Wed, 23 May 2012 20:00:23 +0000

This talk has a special place in my heart. It was the first talk I ever gave at a larger conference. The conference paid for my hotel and airfare, and I gave the presentation in front of over a hundred people. At the time, it was my personal goal to present at PHP Tek, and I had finally achieved it.

Slides

https://www.slideshare.net/JustinCarmony/blazing-data-with-redis-20

Video: Look At Your Data - John Rauser - Velocity 2011

Sun, 13 May 2012 20:36:25 +0000

Last year I saw some videos from Velocity 2011 that were really enlightening, and today I wanted to re-watch one of them. Of course, I hadn’t bookmarked them, or remembered which conference they were from. So after some searching and remembering, I found the video. “Look at Your Data” by John Rauser. It is an excellent video and understanding your performance data and how to get more from it. I’ve embedded it below, but I would encourage everyone to checkout all the videos they posted from Velocity 2011, its a bunch of great stuff.

Talk: Blazing Data with Redis - Utah Open Source Conference 2012

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:00 +0000

I gave this talk at the Utah Open Source Conference in May 2012, the same year I presented it at PHP Tek.

Blazing Data With Redis (and LEGOS!) from Justin Carmony

PHP-FPM, Nginx, PHP_VALUE, and Multiple Values

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 05:34:57 +0000

Quick little post on a problem I had while trying to use XHGui with my Nginx/PHP-FPM setup. I needed to be able to pass the auto_prepend_file and auto_append_file settings to PHP-FPM from Nginx. In apache you can declare multiple php_value settings. However, when I did the same in nginx, it would only reflect the second setting. Turns out you need to set all of your php_value’s in Nginx in a single string, and you separate them by new line characters. Here is how it should look:

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.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:43:06 +0000

A few weeks back I had the opportunity to be on the Voices of the Elephpant podcast to talk about Redis and the Utah Open Source Community with Cal Evans. You can listen to the episode on the VotE website.

Cal had sent me the questions before hand, and so I had jotted down a few things to mention during them. However, when we got to talking about the Utah Open Source Community, I forgot to mention one of the things I had written down to say, and that is this: I would not be where I am in my career, and would not have this great FOSS community in Utah, if it where not for the Shoulders of the Utah FOSS Giants that I stand on. (Standing on the Shoulders of Giants)

PHP, Sessions, __sleep, and Exceptions

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:48:43 +0000

Today I ran into a problem where my PHP Application would throw this fatal error:

Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0

Which is so much fun, because it doesn’t have a line number, so I had no direction as to what exactly was causing the problem. Some quick googling came up with this website stating the following error:

Most often, the error will appear if you use an exception handler combined with an error reporting to exception handler by converting it to an ErrorException, then there a suddenly a whole new magnitude of ways to throw errors within the exception handle, especially if E_NOTICE, E_STRICT and/or E_WARNING errors are converted. This form most often occurs when you use variables without first initializing them. This error may be preventable by wrapping the exception handler within a try/catch block.

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

Making a Distributed Workforce Work

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:30:16 +0000

I’ve been mulling over this blog post in my mind for quite awhile. I’ve been working exclusively for distributed companies since 2008. Also know as telecommuting and virtual workforce, it basically is when you have employees working for you regardless of location. Whether it is home, a co-working space, or another office space they prefer, its when an employee can work for a company other then the office.

I’ve met and talked with several companies that have had a great success with this approach. Toni Schneider, CEO at Automattic, has written about the 5 reasons why your company should be distributed.

SMS Nagios Notifications with PHP & Twilio

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:12:14 +0000

I’ve had a few requests to share my Nagios SMS notifications using Twilio. I’m almost embarrassed to share them, since they are so dead simple. There was another plugin out there to do the same, but it was a lot more advanced and more work to setup, so I wrote my own in PHP.

In the past I would just use my iPhone’s email-to-txt email address. However, when I received the txt message, it wasn’t formated very pretty, and it would have a different “From Number.” So if we had a crazy day, I would have 20-30 message threads in my iPhone all about Nagios. I’ve been lazy in the past, and didn’t clear them out until I had about 200 of them, and it was a lot of “swipe, delete, swipe, delete, swipe, delete” to get rid of them.

Debugging Nginx Configuration Trick

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:24:49 +0000

Today I had an issue where I was trying to debug a problem with an nginx configuration, I came up with a simple trick. One of the hardest parts of nginx configurations, especially with rewrites, is you might not know which “location” directive is not working as expected.

In PHP, sometimes you would just add something like this:

echo "I'm here!";
exit();

However, in Nginx configuration files, it isn’t as easy…

… or is it?

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.

PHP Workers with Redis & Solo

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:20:10 +0000

I’ve come across an awesome combination of tools for managing PHP Workers, and thought I’d share.

Why Workers?

Sometimes there are situations when you want to parallel process things. Other times you might have a list of tasks to accomplish, and you don’t want to make the user wait after pressing a button. This is where “Workers” can come in. They are independent scripts that run along side of your application, performing tasks, or “jobs.”

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:

Video - Demystifying CSS & WordPress

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 19:19:28 +0000

The great guys at Pole Vault Media and WordPress.tv have put up a video of my Demystifying CSS & WordPress talk.

On the Eve of Modern Warfare 3

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:39:12 +0000

While I do work some in the Video Game Industry, I don’t write about it very often. However, I thought I would write some thoughts on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3:

Ultimately, I’m approaching it with a great deal of hesitation. Here is why:

When you start up a Video Game, much like watching a Movie, you will see some credits. In Modern Warfare 2, you’ll see Activision’s name, which is the Publisher, and Infinity Ward, which is the Game Development Studio. While the publisher can be involved in making (or ruining) a game, ultimately its up to the studio to produce a high quality game.

Siege with User Authentication

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:33:02 +0000

If you want to stress test your application, the quickest and best way to do so is with siege. From the siege website:

Siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It lets its user hit a web server with a configurable number of simulated web browsers. Those browsers place the server “under siege.”

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.

Dark Patterns - Deceiving Your Users

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:25:55 +0000

I remember when I was first getting into making websites in 1999, there was a website that I loved: Web Pages That Suck. It was a website dedicated to showing bad examples of web design. It was kind of funny, and I remember learning a few things not to do. Though it isn’t as relevant today, it amazes me they still find websites that are doing the same terrible things that they were doing back in the 90’s.

Setting Up Nginx & PHP-FPM on Ubuntu 10.04

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:50:59 +0000

This is another wonderful setup that I’ve found myself using rather than the traditional Apache & mod_php setup.

What is Nginx?

Nginx (pronounced engine-x) is a fast, powerful, lightweight web server. I won’t go into the theory under-the-hood, but it’s focus is high concurrency with low memory usage. So while Apache is more robust in supporting many different features, nginx focuses on handling the important features very quickly. I still use Apache internally for our SVN & Trac web server. Heck, even at this time I’m using Apache to host this blog. However, Dating DNA, Clipish, CEVO, Alienware Arena, and some other high traffic sites/apis use nginx.

Setting Up Percona Server 5.5 on Ubuntu 10.04

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:43:25 +0000

I’m deploying some new servers today, and I realized I hadn’t documented my steps on my blog. So here are a few posts detailing my setup process.

What is Percona Server?

Percona Server is a fork of MySQL Server. So what does that mean? For the past few years, MySQL has had some “interesting” developments from the business stand point. Being bought by Sun, which was then sold to Oracle, and a lot of “drama” surrounding all of that. In turn, what seems to have happened is MySQL’s development stalled or slowed down as it took a back seat to the legal sides of things.

Preparing a VMWare Ubuntu Guest OS

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:11:09 +0000

I forget these steps all the time, so I figured I should record them here.

A lot of times VMWare will auto-install the VMWare tools for you when you first setup your VM. However, many times after setting it up I’ll do updates, and updates to the kernel will be applied, knocking out the VMWare Tools changes. These tools are used for things like file sharing between the guest and host.

My September 11th Rememberance

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 22:22:38 +0000

There are a lot of people will be talking today about September 11th, and the last decade that has gone by. I’m not very eloquent when it comes to this stuff, but I just wanted to share a little. I was in High School, and I remember getting off the bus and people at school were talking about some plane accident. We got to first period, and our teacher began to explain what they think happened, and the possible causes. It just seemed so unreal, like my mind couldn’t really believe it was really happening. The rest of the day, the classes tried to go on like normal, but each class had updates: the second tower was hit, the first tower had collapsed, the second tower had collapsed, etc. One class just had the TV on as we watched the news. It was an odd day. I had friends back east who were concerned for their loved ones, and it still remains a somber memory.

Why I Give Presentations

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 04:20:37 +0000

Today I gave a presentation at WordCamp SLC 2011. It was titled “Demystifying CSS & WordPress.” I’ve uploaded my slides, and hope you all will enjoy them.

I’ve now given several talks at several groups and conferences, and have learned a lot about giving presentations. Two of the biggest things I’ve learned are first: the quality of a talk is (almost) always directly relational to the amount of time spent preparing. The second is: great talks always require a great deal of preparation.

Speaking at WordCamp SLC

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:32:55 +0000

I have a few posts I need to write, but wanted to quickly mention I’ll be speaking at WordCamp SLC this saturday on Demystifying CSS & WordPress. They have a bunch of other great sessions lined up. Looks like there are only 8 tickets left, so if you want to go, hurry up and register!

Mac OS X Lion, /etc/hosts Bugs, and DNS Resolution

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 22:21:00 +0000

Final Update: I’m working on a follow-up post, but thanks to all the comments, it seems that somehow during the Snow Leopard to Lion upgrade, the /etc/hosts file was encoded incorrectly (likely the type of newlines used), and that Lion would fail to read it properly. Please try to copy the contents of the /etc/hosts file, recreate the file, and paste to fix your problem.

Update: I was still having problems with using .local for my development sites. After some extensive debugging and research I’ve found out some interesting things. It appears that Multicast DNS (mDNS), which is used in Apple’s Bonjuor for network discovery without a tradition DNS Server, has the Top Level Domain .local reserved for special mDNS functionality. Mac OS X will treat domains ending with .local differently! Use another TLD, like .dev, and it will work correctly.

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.

Talk: Profiling PHP Applications - Utah PHP Usergroup

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:49:11 +0000

I gave this talk at the Utah PHP Usergroup early in my speaking career.

Slides

https://www.slideshare.net/JustinCarmony/profiling-php-applications

Working with Middle-Scale Websites

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:02:40 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this idea for awhile, and I thought I would put a name to the thought. I brought up this idea while I was giving my “Real Life Scaling” presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference in 2009. Here is the problem I think most individuals in the web development face:

Hopefully at some point, your website gets a lot of traffic. Yay, you’ve reached your goal of getting good traffic, but it is soon followed by issues with performance and load. I like to call these the growing pains of a website. So as a web developer, I suddenly have the epiphany of “Hey, I need to scale my website!” What follows next is the biggest mistake a web developer can make:

Published: High Performance Data with Redis and PHP - php[architect]

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:00:00 +0000

An article for the July 2011 issue of php[architect].

There are times when MySQL, or another RDBMS, cannot perform under certain circumstances, such as high volumes of reads and writes. While there are many other data store options, there is an excellent candidate when raw speed is a must. This article will describe when Redis might be a great fit for your application.

Node.js, Evented I/O, and a Cup of Tea

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:30:42 +0000

All Arthur Dent really wanted was a cup of tea.

I was reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, and I found a humorous example of event driven programming. So I thought I would share.

The Story

Arthur Dent was one of the last surviving humans after Earth had been destroyed to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. He was living on a spaceship known as the “Heart of Gold,” which onboard had an amazing piece of equipment called the “Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer” which “claimed to produce the widest possible range of drinks personally matched to the tastes and metabolism of whoever cared to use it.”

Simple Trick: History Command

Tue, 31 May 2011 21:05:08 +0000

So today I quickly installed Redis on a server, and I wanted to keep a copy of all the commands I had used to do so. I knew there was a better way than hitting the up arrow each time to copy and paste each command in reverse order. So after some Googling, I found out about the history command. So I was able to type the command “history” and it showed me the last two thousand or so commands I had used. I was able to copy and paste that into a wiki, and was good to go. You could also search your history by piping the history command to grep. Cool stuff I don’t want to forget.

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.

Mac OS X & Wireshark - No Interfaces Found Fix

Thu, 12 May 2011 18:58:57 +0000

Alright, quick fix for a problem I always forget. When running Wireshark on OS X, when I go to select an interface to capture on, I get an error telling me there are no available interfaces to capture on. This is because Wireshark is running as a user that doesn’t have ownership on these interfaces.

Solution, open up the terminal and run the command:

sudo chown <username> /dev/bpf*

After a reboot, these permissions get reset, so you need to do it after each reset (and hence why I need this every now and then but can never remember the command).

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:

Node.JS, LAMP, and The Future

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 23:35:37 +0000

I just read an article about “Node.JS and the JavaScript Age.” It was from a very “enthusiastic” point of view. My guess is they had tinkered around with Node.JS and using with client-side JavaScript rebuilding their Dashboard. You can do some pretty cool stuff with it, and it has a lot of potential. It is very easy to install and get going, much like Redis. Here ia an excerpt from the article:

First PHP Project - Tournament Brackets

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:47:01 +0000

I mentioned on my twitter account that my very first project in PHP is used in production today, and I had a few people ask me what it was. So I thought I would show some examples of it in action. While I had done other things in PHP, this was the first time I had sat down and built someone by myself instead of just modifying someone else’s code. I built it for the very first time back in 2005, and since then have had to update it a few times. But it is still used regularly to host CEVO’s tournaments.

PHP Itch to Scratch: Object Notation

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 07:07:16 +0000

Marco Tabini, co-founder of php|architect and Blue Palabora, posed an interesting topic: Is PHP running out of itches to scratch?

I think it’s fair to say that the pace at which PHP core is being developed has slowed down considerably over the past couple of years, while the development of many projects based on it, like programming and application frameworks, has sped up and continues to grow at a fast pace.

He goes on to point out some of the reasons for the slow down of development for the PHP Core. But at the end, he states it ultimately boils down to find a better way to bring features build downstream back upstream.

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.

Restoring Large MySQL Dump - 900 Million Rows

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 03:05:12 +0000

This last weekend I had a fun opportunity of restoring roughly 912 Million Rows to a database. 902 Million belonged to one single table (902,966,645 rows, to be exact). To give an idea of growth, the last time I blogged about this database we had about 40 million rows. This giant table, the “Scores” table, is has a very small schema: two ints, a tiny int, and a DECIMAL(5,2).

Problem

Our current backup system uses mysqldump. It dumps a 25 GB sql dump file, which compresses to about 2.5GB using gzip. The last time we needed to restore a backup it was only about 9GB, and it took several hours.

Sending Email from non-email Ubuntu Server

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 19:22:11 +0000

I have a couple of scripts that use the linux “mail” command to send results of cron jobs, backups, and such. The problem is I don’t want to setup more overhead than I need, nor do I want to setup non-secure services. So after asking the guys on the #uphpu channel, they recommended postfix. So for a Ubuntu 10.04 server, just run the following commands:

aptitude install postfix #when prompted, select Internet Site aptitude install mailutils

Analogy for Moving From SVN to Git

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 23:12:44 +0000

Today as I was talking with a friend about Git and when or not we should switch a repository from SVN to Git, I thought up a pretty good analogy. So I thought I would share this to those who are looking to learn Git, and hopefully put them in the right mindset.

The Goal

Ultimately, when people talk about Source Control, they have the same concepts in mind. I want to be able to easily update my source control, collaborate with others, and have a history of changes that I can review and use to make other changes. So for our Analogy, these basic concepts, we’re going to call Getting from point A to point B.

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).

Using GIT with SVN

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:50:10 +0000

Over the last two and a half years, since the day I presented on Streamlined Web Development with SVN, I’ve been hearing about the Source Control Management tool called “git.” I kept reading about it online, seeing it on the schedules for conferences, and hearing it about it in the different Open Source groups here in Utah. I have been a big time Subversion (SVN) user for several years now, and it has solved my problems

PHP, SoapClient, SoapServer, and Timeouts

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:50:58 +0000

I ran into an extremely frustrating problems while trying to add a test script for some PHP web services. I won’t go into detail on all the different things I went through to debug this problem. But here is what it all boiled down to:

Problem

I have a SOAP Web Service that extends PHP’s internal SoapServer class that serves hundreds of thousands of remote devices. Every now and then, our server will have a hiccup and our Web Service won’t return valid responses. However, nginx will return requests just fine. So, to monitor the Web Service, I wrote a PHP script using SoapClient to read the WSDL, make several SOAP calls, and make sure the responses are valid.

MySQL Stored Procedure, NAME_CONST, and Character Sets

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 07:12:35 +0000

For a Project I had helped work on, they recently needed to move servers and in the process upgraded from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1.41. They ran into some quirks with 5.1 and I thought I would document our work-a-rounds for them.

We were having serious performance problems with a Stored Procedure that would be called by a Windows Client on thousands of machines. Before on 5.0 it would take under 0.02 seconds, and now it was taking 25-35 seconds. In this stored procedure we would call a query something like this:

RESTful Web Services & Nirvana

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 22:21:10 +0000

I’ve been hearing, reading, and talking a lot REST, RESTful Web Services, how to implement them, and even how to explain to your wife about it. Then I see or read presentations about what is and what is not RESTful Web Services. I’ve created and consumed quite a few web services, so while I’m not a leading expert in the field, I have a lot of experience with them. So instead of explaining over and over again to different people my thoughts on the subject, I’m writing about them. For those who have a short attention span, I’ll sum up my feelings of the subject in one sentence for you, and then explain in detail for those interested.

PHP, Nginx, and Output Flushing

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:01:00 +0000

Alright, so one of the few hangups I’ve ran into with moving from Apache to Nginx was output buffering. Now, we have a few administrative tools we use to perform large operations on our library and data. These scripts can take normally 3-5 minutes to run, and they output their progress and what step they are on as they run. The way they do this is after ever step in PHP I issue the same two commands:

Debuging with PHP, Stack Traces, and Redis

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:22:56 +0000

A cool new trick I found with debugging pieces of code and how often they get executed. We were running into a problem where an expensive query was being called more frequently than I thought it should. This query was only found inside of a single member of a class. However, this class, which retrieves a user’s photo album, is used all over the place. So it was really hard to determine exactly where the unneeded queries being executed from.

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:

Creating Chatroom / Walls with Redis & PHP

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:15:16 +0000

Preface: This is not a step-by-step tutorial, but more of an outline on what I did. Also, I wrote this really quickly before heading off to dinner, so if there are parts that are unclear, or you have questions about, please leave a comment!

This last week has been a roller coaster for us at Dating DNA. We had an excellent holiday season, but with mass volume of new sign ups our servers started to slow down. Severely. Something you never want to have happen. So over this last week I’ve worked about 80 hours (though I’m a salary employee, woohoo… :P) and implemented a lot of new performance boots, and I have about four or five blog posts worth of discoveries I need to write. So before I forget them, I’m going to write them.

Using Cloud Files w/ CDN for Clipish Library

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 22:19:40 +0000

Over the last two days we’ve moved our Clipish Library from serving the files locally on our web server to Rackspace’s Cloud Files service. It is similar to Amazon S3, however since we were already using Rackspace Cloud Servers, we thought it would be easier to just keep it all under the same roof. The actual changes in code for using Cloud Files only took about 2 hours, but I had to write a script to loop through our entire library and populate Cloud Files with our current library. What is great is in the future when we add items, our code will automatically add files to Cloud Files via their API. Here is our network graph after switching (Item #3):

Goal for 2011: Learn C

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 02:09:53 +0000

I feel this is one area of my computer science education that is rather weak. The years I spent in schooling learning C, C++, or another derivative, either my teachers / professors really didn’t teach it well, or were only around of half a semester. Truly, computer science teachers when I was in school were the “professor of defense against the dark arts,” as they were always changing, even mid semester.

Server Monitoring with Wormly

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:06:57 +0000

I know I’ve been behind in my posts, so I quickly wanted to catch up with a few I’ve been meaning to post. The first is my recommendation for a service called Wormly. Now, I’ve tried to run my own Nagios servers and such, and they work, but here is why I like Wormly.

First, is simple and easy to use. The interface is great, and covers all the basics.
Second, downtime and server health monitoring in one package. I’ve always thought these two should go together, but it wasn’t that easy to do on my own with the tools I had. With Wormly, its super easy to set up. You just install a small one-file PHP script.
Third, its cost effective. If you are monitoring hundreds of servers, you would probably want to roll your own to integrate it with your own deployment systems. However, if you have just a handful, or even just a few dozen, it is very cost effective.

The bottom line is there is no reason not to have a server monitoring tool in place, and Wormly has been a great tool. We’ve used it to monitor Dating DNA’s and Clipish’s servers for several months, and it is worth every penny. I highly recommend it.

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.

Large MySQL Conversion & InnoDB

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 03:01:32 +0000

Over the last week at Dating DNA, we’ve re-engineered our internal mail system that users use to send messages to each other. It took a few days longer to convert and re-engineer everything, but we finally made the change. With the exception of two small bugs, it all went off without a hitch. But before all the different things I learned doing it fade, I wanted to document them here.

First off, converting from one large set of InnoDB tables to a new structure. I’ve done something similar in the past, and I think I’ve honed in a little bit more the technique. So here are some thoughts regarding doing this process.

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.

Videos & Slides on Usibility & Persuasive Design by Andy Budd

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:00:12 +0000

For a long time I’ve been a fan of Andy Budd because of his book CSS Mastery. It basically was one of the core reasons I was able to switch to to 100% CSS standards and compliance. I talk a lot more about his book and CSS in general in a previous post. He is one of the key people over at the company Clearleft in London, and is a popular speaker any many conferences. He specializes in usability and persuasive web designs, helping companies making their websites and user experiences better.

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.

SVN Switch - Key to Success In Web Development

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:13:05 +0000

So lately I have been given some thought to how we use Subversion (SVN) in our web development, and features we don’t use nearly as often.

In web development, one big area where I don’t see us using a lot is branching, tagging, and merging. However, with our iPhone Apps, we use tagging and branching a lot. As I started to think why, one of the biggest things was the environment. Client development, especially with the iPhone, is double clicking on a project file for Xcode, and I’m ready to go. There is almost no hassle running trunk versus running a tag or branch. It is all the same.

jQuery UI - Disable Title On Dialog

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 05:56:35 +0000

For some reason, this was turning out to be kind of hard to accomplish, and everyone on the internet wanted to do it with JavaScript hacks. My issue was if the JavaScript hack didn’t execute fast enough, causing the title to flash for just a second, so I’d much rather do it with CSS. Unfortunately, there are no built in ways to hide it in jQuery. However, there is an option you can pass in the .dialog() method: dialogClass. This places a custom class in the main div element, allowing you to do something like this:

Sharing Sessions Across Multiple Servers With Memcache

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:52:15 +0000

These last few days have been full of quickly implementing things I’ve only read about, but hadn’t done for myself.

One situation was looking at splitting web traffic across multiple servers. In our case, we had only 2% of our website that would spike and increase our load by %1000 percent (I’m not joking) for a short period of time. So instead of doing traditional load balancing, we opted for routing specific functions to a custom subdomain that would run on another server. That way if the thousands of crazy video game players (you know who you are), slam the servers trying to get a cool skin for their online avatar, it would only take down that one section.

Ignoring Files In SVN

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 07:01:09 +0000

There is a method for ignoring files in an svn via their svn:ingore tool. For those who use windows w/ TortoiseSVN, it has a really slick interface for handling it all. However, for those of us (like me) who are on a Mac and just use the command line, I always forget the commands. So here is my note to myself on how to do it:

First, navigate to the folder I want to edit it’s ignore settings.

Setting up SSH Key Authentication Between Servers

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:52:05 +0000

I always forget how to do this, so I have to look it up each time. This will make it easier the next time. It is so simple, just I always forget.

First, I need to generate my ssh pub and private keys on the host server: ssh-keygen

Second, I need to copy the pub key to the remote server: ssh-copy-id -i id_rsa.pub user@server.local

Then, that it! Now that I wrote it down, I won’t forget it… I hope.

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.

Setting up Nagios for Servers

Tue, 04 May 2010 21:17:20 +0000

Ok, so I need to confess, I haven’t been a good blogger. I’ve gone two months without writing a post, which is broke a 2 year streak. But, I’m going to post date these posts, since I can.

How I’ve gone this long without setting up Nagios to monitor servers is beyond me. However, I was tired of my clients and so finding out a server was offline before me. So I threw up a 256MB virtual server on Slicehost, since I don’t have any servers with them at the moment, in case a data center went offline.

#hackUTOS - April 24, 2010

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:02:30 +0000

I’ve been busy with several blog post floating around in my head, its just a matter of sitting down and writing them out. In the meantime, next Saturday, April 24th, will be #hackUTOS. Here is the news announcement:

If you have ever been interested in creating, improving or just participating in an open source project, here’s your chance! Do you already have an free and open source software project you are working on?

VirtualBox Networking Setup

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:32:43 +0000

Every time I go to set up VirtualBox and several VMs I always forget how I setup the networking for them. Once again, I went through the pain of trying to figure it all out, so I might as well document it for future use.

The Problem

When creating virtual machines, especially virtual linux servers, I want them to be able to do the following things:

Connect to the Internet
Connect over SSH from my Host Machine to the Guest Machine
Have the servers connect to each other on a private internal network

Out of the box, a VM is configured for #1, however it cannot do #2 and #3. There are some solutions that do some archaic port forwarding by issuing special commands from the Terminal. This is just painful, and if you just want one port to work, that’s manageable, but what if you want ssh, ftp, myql, http, https, etc? Any on multiple VMs? What a nightmare! What is painful is when googling for a solution, almost every “answer” is this crazy port forwarding method. There is a much cleaner, better way!

The Cloud to Bare Metal

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:02:22 +0000

A Little Background

It was the summer of 2008 when I attended the LT Pact conference that I first drank the “Cloud Kool-Aid.” As you can see from my notes, I was pretty excited about this whole concept. Excited enough, one client of mine signed up for Layered Tech’s grid layer (which is what they were demoing at the conference).

One interesting thing I heard at the LT Pact conference was one of their keynotes was as IT Researcher for Gartner. He outlined what phases the current industry would go through with “cloud computing”:

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.

PHP HipHop – What It Means

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:32:04 +0000

There has been a lot of speculation about PHP, Facebook, and a big announcement. Over the last few weeks, several predominate PHP community members were invited to the Facebook offices to check something out. Facebook asked the PHP members, as Ben Ramsey put it, to “make a gentleman’s agreement that I wouldn’t talk until FB is ready.”

Well, Facebook has made their announcement, and it is called HipHop. Here is an excerpt:

Google Apps Dropping IE 6

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:16:59 +0000

This morning I found this email in my inbox. I use Google Apps to host my email and calendars, which works really slick and is fabulous. Here is the email:

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

Joining a Startup - The Advantages

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:50:36 +0000

While going through my backlog of my RSS feeds. I stumbled on Keith Casey’s post on Joining a Startup. He wrote it as a “reality check” for people who are considering joining a startup as a developer. Here is a snip-it:

First, everyone does everything. Check your ego at the door. In the first startup I was with, I was in charge of adding reporting to the eCommerce application and taking the garbage out. Was it an effective use of my time? Not at all. Did it have to be done? Yes. Did we have the money to hire someone else? Nope. If your startup is renting office space, you probably won’t have to worry about this… but who signs for packages? Who re-orders coffee? On the flip side, you could be the one taking technical questions at the next investor pitch or invited to the big customer Christmas party.

Teaching PHP This Year

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:34:41 +0000

I will be giving short presentations on PHP for beginners at the monthly Utah PHP Usergroup. Here is the annoucement:

Greets all,

Being in my seat, I’ve heard from many people over the course of this past year who have lost / changed employment. I know there is concern by many who are employed as to what will happen long term. The reality of the matter is this, though. Recession or no, change happens and the best way to be ready for it is to have a great skill set. To that end, we are restructuring the way our meetings will be.

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:

Presentation: Real Life Scaling

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:39:44 +0000

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 http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=reallifescaling-ataleoftwowebsites-small-091010143045-phpapp02&stripped_title=real-life-scaling-a-tale-of-two-websites

View more presentations from Justin Carmony.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below.

Talk: Real Life Scaling - A Tale of Two Websites - Utah Open Source Conference 2009

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:01:04 +0000

This was my first talk at any conference. Utah Open Source Conference, now known as OpenWest, was and still is a great place to get your start as a technology speaker.

Slides

https://www.slideshare.net/JustinCarmony/real-life-scaling-a-tale-of-two-websites

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.

My New External Hard Drive: Blacx + 1TB Drive

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:03:10 +0000

These last few weeks I’ve been dealing with larger and larger sets of data that I would need to download to my PC to work on. When working with multiple copies of data that are 10-20 GBs each, it started to fill up my two HDDs very quickly. I decided I need to go buy a new hard drive to give me plenty of room. The question was “internal” or “external” and how big.

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!

Article: Why Developers Get Fired

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:43:04 +0000

Here is an article that showed up on my RSS feed: Why Developers Get Fired. While I never have been fired from a job, I have been put in a situtaion where I needed to prove my worth to the company. The advice this article gives is pretty good, and in my opinion are the most overlooked issues. A developer could easily overlook these issues, and get side blinded by a pink slip. Here is an exceprt:

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.

Article: 5 Things Your Clients Should Know

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:45:13 +0000

I read an interesting article on teaching your clients about web design. It brings up some great points on helping your client understanding their role in their website’s development. While its not in inclusive list, it brings up some good points. I’ll share a few quotes:

This is not a criticism of clients, however. There is so little information that clearly defines their role. Sure, there is no shortage of material on usability, accessibility, online marketing and copywriting, but who has the time to read all of it?

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.

"Nerfing" a PHP Object

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:26:35 +0000

I was trying to think of something with PHP I could blog about that would be short and sweet. Then I thought of something that a good friend of my taught me: nerfing objects.

The Problem

Many times while working with PHP and bigger frameworks, you’ll have classes that extend classes that extand classes. We have an ORM system that interfaces our Database with PHP classes. This makes accessing and updating information easy for us. So lets say we have a class called “Post” that stores a blog post. Our ORM class just takes a few lines of code to hook up our “Post” class to the “posts” database tables. We just extend our base DataObject, which contains all sorts of references to other class isntances. Long story short, this PHP code is awesome, but there is one issue.

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.

jQuery Tip: Better Toggle

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:28:05 +0000

For many web developers, jQuery is the most awesome JavaScript library out there. For me, it has turned JavaScript from being a nightmare into a power tool. I love JavaScript now, where as before I truely hated it. Takes all the hassel out of most compatibility issues across browsers. I spend less time debuging it and more time writing it. While I’m on my goal to write more blog posts, I’m going to share a few jQuery tricks.

So You Want To Be A Web Developer?

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:54:35 +0000

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 on who, what, and where to hire new help. Since he is a “wiz” at solving problems, computers, and making this more efficient, he has streamlined his work process with several nifty Excel spreadsheets and Java programs. He can now take a weeks worth of work and do it in one morning.

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?”

Talk: Effective Caching with PHP & Memcached - Utah PHP Usergroup

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:00:20 +0000

Slides

https://www.slideshare.net/JustinCarmony/effectice-caching-w-php-caching

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)

Steamlined Web Development Presentation Video

Wed, 27 May 2009 14:41:26 +0000

Alright, it looks like the Victor at UPHPU has gotten my presentation up on Steamlining your web development. Since it was the first night Victor had tried to capture video & audio to mesh them together, the video on the presentation is a little bit further ahead than the audio. However, I think the presentation went quite well. You can view all the UPHPU meeting videos here. Here is the presentation I gave:

Memcached: Simple, Effective, and Powerful

Wed, 20 May 2009 16:12:01 +0000

Realizing once again I haven’t written a blog post for quite some time, I thought I would just write a few smaller posts on things I’ve learned these last few months. Hopefully I can get back into the habit of blogging regularly again.

This last month I finally broke down and learned how to use memcached. While I have known about memcached for a very long time, I just never got around to using it. While I heard it was beyond easy to implement, I still assumed it would take a few days to get the hang of it and figure out its quirks. However, when the forces of high load on a webserver and the file-based caching system that I have previously used were found to be too I/O intensive, I had no choice but to take the plunge.

Obama $100 Million Budget Cuts

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:10:38 +0000

Ok, I don’t want to do into depth on my opinion of how Obama is running the country, however being a programmer and I enjoy math, here is some food for thought.

People can have a really hard time visualizing really big numbers: Million, Billion, Trillion. One of my favorite comics, xkcd, touches this concept:

Just to put into perspective Obama’s annoucement a friend sent me this YouTube video:

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.

Recursively Add New Files to SVN

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:51:33 +0000

One great thing about running Windows is TortoiseSVN. I makes managing my SVN so easy. One of the problems I’ve ran into on other systems was I had been working for several hours. I would have dozens of new files and with TortoiseSVN it would show me a list of all the new files and I could hit “select all” and commit. However, on Mac I haven’t found an SVN client that I like, so I just use the terminal commands. There are also times, like when managing a WordPress installation, that WordPress and its plug-ins could auto update. I wanted to be able to add all the new files on the linux server back into the svn.

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.

Aptana Studio – PHP IDE Alternative to PDT, Zend Studio

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:09:53 +0000

The other day I ran into another option as an IDE for PHP. If you’ve been following my blog, I’ve been a big user of Eclipse PDT (http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/) and Zend Studio (http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/). There is a third one to add to the list, Aptana Studio. It is built on-top of the Eclipse framework, like PDT and Zend Studio. It has several extensions: Python, Rails, PHP, and others. If you’ve read my post on Consumer Linux, I talk a lot about “Power & Polish.” Here is my definition:

Software Development With Clients In Mind

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:05:56 +0000

Why does it seem so hard to deliver quality products to clients? Sometimes it feels like clientseither don’t appreciate quality, or they have their priorities all mixed up. To help us understand, here is a wonderful sketch from Monty Python called “The Architect’s Sketch.”

I’ve been searching for awhile for a good example for this subject, and when I saw this sketch, I knew this would be perfect. It outlines two large problems with developing solutions for clients: quality & suitability.

WhiteHouse.gov YouTube Channel Hacked?

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:08:05 +0000

I’m not sure exactly what this is, but its strange. I wanted to add the whitehouse YouTube channel’s RSS feed to my Google Reader. I might not have voted for Obama, but I think he is using new technologies to communicate with people in a very good way. I’m excited for the precedence that he is setting in the government, and for future leaders, on how to leverage the Internet, video streaming, etc.

Great PHP Article: Leadership in Software Development

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:24:48 +0000

I just read a good article on PHP Development by Cal Evans, an active member in the PHP community. Its about managers, developers, and the problems they face in the IT industry. Here is an excerpt:

There are very few professions that combine the creativity involved in good software development and the rigorous deadlines, often imposed from the outside. Hurry up and create! The ideas have to keep flowing, they have to be scheduled, and they have to be completed on time. If you have to go figure something out, go. But make sure you are back after lunch and make sure your schedule doesn’t slip. Developers, especially now as we work in Web years, are under increasing pressure to “Get it out the door fast!”.

Interesting Poll on PHP Hiring

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

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

List of 50 PHP Tools

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:08:58 +0000

Found a great article listing popular tools that every PHP developer should be away of. Here is an excerpt:

PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages that exist today. With over 20 million indexed domains using PHP, including major websites like Facebook, Digg and WordPress, there are good reasons why many Web developers prefer it to other server-side scripting languages, such as Python and Ruby.

PHP is faster (updated), and it is the most used scripting language in practice; it has detailed documentation, a huge community, numerous ready-to-use scripts and well-supported frameworks; and most importantly, it’s much easier to get started with PHP than with other scripting languages (Python, for example). That’s why it makes perfect sense to provide the huge community of PHP developers with an overview of useful tools and resources that can make their development process easier and more effective.

My Honest Attempt With Linux Desktop

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:07:00 +0000

After the last uphpu meeting a few of us went to Applebees like always. We were talking about a lot of stuff and one of the big subjects was Linux Desktop. Kevin Carter, the presenter, was sporting off Kubuntu with the new KDE 4.2. This year I’ve made a goal to improve my Linux skills and I thought if I switched to using Linux as my main work enviroment. So Sunday night I started to try to install Kubuntu 8.10. I’m sorry to say, but after 24 hours, I wasn’t able to stick with it.

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:

Consumer Linux - When & How

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:15:28 +0000

I’ve been reading several responses about the news story of a girl who “dropped out of school” because of Ubuntu. I’ve read several responses, including Aaron Toponce’s response, and it got me thinking about a topic that has been on my mind for awhile.

You can read the story yourself and the follow-up backlash from the Ubuntu Community. I was extremely sad, but not at all surprised, of the backlash that this woman got. I’m sure the negative response is from a relatively small percent of the community that is just extremely loud. I also think the title of the story is a little misleading and that it can be taken as bias. However, the root of the problem lies in this: a woman thought she was buying a consumer product, when in fact, it wasn’t.

MySQL, 40 Million Rows, MyISAM to InnoDB, 45 Minutes

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:13:08 +0000

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 with 40 millions from MyISAM to InnoDB. The reason for the conversion was this table had a high amount of queries, and a high amount of writes. With this table growing and updating daily, the table locks were killing us. Because MyISAM needs to peform a lock on the entire table, we would have dozens of queries backlog as locks and writes were taking place. It was causing the site to screech to a halt, waiting for the locks the be released. It was a total nightmare.

Characteristics of Good PHP Code

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:20:02 +0000

At the time I am sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for a very delayed layover flight to San Diego. Wonderful weather causing all sorts of headaches. So I’ve decided to make the best of my time by writing the introductory article to a series of PHP articles. I’ve had this idea for a while, and now I’m going to finally sit down and write it.

A Different Type of Article

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.

CSS – I’m 100% Converted

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:01:35 +0000

It has been a hard, long road. But these last few days, I’ve finally have reached a realization of a great step in my life as a web design: I’m 100% converted to CSS layouts, and have forsaken tables. 5 years ago I would have believed that would be impossible, and that I would love and use tables for my layouts until the day I die. I remember hearing the lectures and heated discussions on using CSS instead, but I couldn’t bring myself to using CSS for layouts. Don’t get me wrong, using CSS was amazing for formatting and styling, such a color, size, bolding, etc. I love it every second and my conversion to CSS for those scenarios was very quick. However, the positioning of content, headers, footers, side menus and navigation was a nightmare for me at first. I just didn’t get it.

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.

New Dating DNA Front Page

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 07:04:16 +0000

Since we’re still pending in the Apple iPhone App Store for review, we wanted a new fresh image for the Dating DNA website front page. Kevin, the CEO, threw together a simplified new front page. He is pretty good with Photoshop, and knows how to slice up a layout for image and put it into HTML. I know he did it using tables (I know, every serious web developer alive is chringing right now), which works for now. I like the general idea and execution. I think we can polish and refine it a great deal more, but I thought I would get people’s opinions.

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.

HTML Education in Universities

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:24:46 +0000

Why, oh why, are website classes so extremely out of date in universities, colleges, and schools? I just spent the last few hours helping my wife with her Information Systems class. I’ve had to do similar assignments for technology classes, yet the things they are teaching are extremely out of date and a waste of time. Why? After taking these classes, to actually use HTML, I would have to unlearn 80% of what they taught, and re-learn from scratch.

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.

Ghostbusters - The Video Game

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:38:47 +0000

I actually think this game has potential. The details look great, and it looks like the developers are taking a lot of care to make a good game. Usually games that get licensed out are pretty bad, with developers relying on wal-mart moms who don’t know better to buy games with popular names. We’ll see how this game develops.

http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=43329

PHP Singletons, Sub-Classing, and HAS-A Relationships

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:37:53 +0000

I’ve been very busy these last fews weeks and have neglected making any posts. While there are a variety of subjects I’d love to post about, they’ll most likely have to wait until the next year. However, I thought I might be able to throw up a quick example of how to use PHP Singletons and extending public classes.

The Singleton Pattern “is a design pattern that is used to restrict instantiation of a class to one object.” (Wikipedia) In PHP, a singleton is created by making the constructor protected or private. “How do you create an object then?” Its done in two parts. First, you make a static class variable that is private, to hold the instance. Second, create a static function to return the instance. Here is an example:

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.

Speaking: Utah PHP Usergroup – Streamlined Web Development

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:41:51 +0000

Next Thursday, November 20th, at 7 PM Mountain Time (9PM EST, 6PM PST) I will be speaking at the Utah PHP Usergroup meeting on “Streamlined Web Development.” I will be speaking with Kevin Carter from Code Greene. Here is the annoucement on the UPHPU website:

I’m very pleased to announce the topic for November’s UPHPU Meeting : Streamlined Web Development using a VCS (Version Control System) and Trac.

Starting the meeting off will be Code Greene’s Kevin Carter. Kevin, who has used Git in a production environment for several months now, will be presenting a primer on how to get started with Git. Additionally, he’ll cover the advantages of distributed source code control and possibly some topics on using git in an svn eniroment. His blog can be found at http://dexterthedragon.com.

Digital Conversion Video

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

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

MySQL - Does Table Exist w/o Throwing Errors

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:34:33 +0000

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:

/* example with table name: table_name */
SHOW TABLES LIKE 'table_name';

This solution will return 1 row if it exists, and 0 rows if it doesn’t. Here is a PHP example using this:

I'm Boycotting Electronic Arts (EA) Games

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 04:52:05 +0000

As of today, I’m not going to buy another Electronic Arts (aka EA) video game. I’m tired of their “quantity over quality” point of view, and their poor decisions. I’ve blogged about my problems with EA Games before, but today I read that they are implementing a new system for their forum moderation. Basically, if you get banned on their forums, or any other part of their website, all relating account & games will be banned as well. So for the dozens of EA games that I own that I play online, some volunteer moderator at the EA forums can think my post is out of line, and ban me from all my purchases with EA? Some games aren’t played online, but almost all games now have some form of online participation.

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.

PHP Design - Biggest Database Oversights

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:56:44 +0000

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 developers are self-taught, like I was, and are learning PHP to be able to create dynamic websites. Many haven’t had studied or learned best practices for Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). They are web designers first, and programming in PHP is just a way to do things simple HTML can’t do.

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.

Is Apple Blinded by Style?

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:58:39 +0000

I have to add my voice to Jason D. O’Grady from ZDNet’s “The Apple Core” about the new MacBook & MacBook Pro. Jason complains:

The thing that bums me out the most about yesterday’s MacBook announcements is Apple’s move to all-glossy displays. I’ll make no bones about it – I loathe glossy displays – especially on a notebook computer.

Apple will spin it that blacks look darker and colors are more saturated, blah, blah, blah. It’s a load of garbage. How are we expected to read the screen when the glare is practically blinding? (Don’t even get me started on fingerprints).

EA - Lack of Quality & Out of Touch

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:04:30 +0000

An article posted on Slashdot just set me off today. Custom PC reports a quote from EA’s CEO, John Riccitiello, about DRM & their recent games:

‘We implemented a form of DRM and it’s something that 99.8 per cent of users wouldn’t notice,’ claimed Riccitiello, ‘but for the other 0.2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it.’ The use of SecuROM in EA’s recent PC games, including Spore, Mass Effect and Crysis Warhead, has caused a lot of controversy on the Internet, resulting in hundreds of one-star reviews on Amazon.

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.

Local LAMP Developement & User Content

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:37:26 +0000

I’ve come up with a simple solution for handling user uploaded content when trying to work in a local development environment. I’ve installed XAMPP on my windows machine and at the beginning of every week I take a database snapshot and update my local database. I had a pretty smooth system going with one problem: user uploaded content.

When working with social networking sites, many times they allow for users to upload their own videos, pictures, etc. My current project wasn’t different, but I didn’t want to download 80GB of user content every week to store on my PC. I wanted a way to point my browser to the live server to get recent images, etc.

Ubuntu Desktop Terminal - Su

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:30:08 +0000

This is just a quick reference for myself. When I want to “su to root” in Ubuntu’s terminal I need to do the follow:

sudo su [enter password]

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.

CSS – ID vs Class

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:22:20 +0000

After hacking apart & cleaning up code for the better part of the day, I’ve decided to set the record straight about CSS, IDs, and Classes. The question is “when should I use an ID, and when should I use a class?” Is it that big of a deal?

The big issue is that people who just write Cascading Style Sheets usually won’t run into problems if they are more lax with their use of IDs. Its the people after who coming in trying to add advanced JavaScript features that will end up becoming very, very frustrated.

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.

WordPress Carrington Theme - I'm Impessed

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:43:04 +0000

I just read over at Matt Mullenweg’s blog about the annoucement of the Carrington Theme for WordPress. For those who don’t know, WordPress is a PHP/MySQL based blogging system and is the one I use for my blog. I’ve installed the Carrigton Theme and I really like it. Over the next few weeks I’ll be checking it out and playing around with it. I’ll keep everyone posted!

Update: I guess some people are having an issue downloading the Carrington theme, so I’ve uploaded it to download from my site. Hopefully it won’t kill my bandwidth, but I should be good.

Zend Studio vs PHP Development Tools

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:41:44 +0000

I’ve been using Zend Studio (ZS) for the last two years. It is developed by Zend, the company behind PHP. The very first time I used it and it was able to auto-complete my custom PHP classes I was sold. With version 6 of Zend Studio, they integrated Zend Studio with Eclipse, a popular IDE framework. I’ve been mostly happy with the new version, where as in some areas I felt that things were took a step back.

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.

PHP 6 Books - Did I Miss Something?

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:46:30 +0000

Update 01-21-12: since I was contacted by the Author of one of these books, and a few years have gone by and I’m more familiar with the publishing industry, I was unfair to place blame on the author for the decision to market these books as PHP6. Authors have almost no say in how their books are marketed. Thus, the blame for these types of tactics, rest solely on the publisher.

WordPress & OOP

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 02:55:21 +0000

I’ve been hacking around with WordPress these last few weeks, and I’ve loved using it so far. My only concern has been that WP seems to be coded with the desire to be compatible with PHP 4.3. I just wonder when WordPress will take a OOP approach to it’s design. It would make things more simple for new developers.

I would love for WordPress 3.0 to have an OOP approach. I would love for one of the goals of WP 3.0 would be for it’s OOP core would be taken and used in another other website. A great example would be with a Dating Website I’m working on. It would be great to be able to have members have their own blogs and we could have it 100% integrated with our system. Right now I feel like it would take a lot “hacking” methods to get it to work, and when upgrades to WordPress would come it would be hard to upgrade. I really think WP needs to bite the bullet and make the change to OOP.

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.

Palin's Yahoo Account Gets Hacked

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:26:22 +0000

Today I opened my email and found a story about how Sarah Palin, the Republican VP Nominee, had her email account hacked. Here are some quotes:

On the heels of media reports that Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was using a private Yahoo e-mail account (gov.palin@yahoo.com) to conduct Alaska state business, hackers have broken into the account and posted evidence of the hijack on Wikileaks.

An activist group calling itself ‘anonymous’ claimed responsibility for the compromise and released screenshots, photographs and the e-mail addresses of several people close to Palin, including her husband Todd and assistant Ivy Frye.

Web Design & The Cookie Jar: When Dealing with Clients

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:34:57 +0000

I saw this YouTube video and I couldn’t help but post about it. Here is the video, and I’ll add my thoughts at the end:

I’ve seen this happen so many times it isn’t even funny. You have a company with dozens of individuals giving their input on how something should be designed. As in the video, the end result is usually the same: a product that doesn’t accomplish it’s goal. This is what I call the “Cookie Jar” effect, when you have too many “hands” in the cookie jar.

Blog WordPress Theme Experiment - Grunge Style

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:42:39 +0000

So I if you looked at my website within the last few hours or so you might have seen a very different theme. It was a grunge like style. My goal was to try and use PNGs for different layering and styles. Evenually I wanted the background to dynamically change depending on a post’s categories and tags. However, I ran into some obvious drawbacks.

Here is a screenshot of the design:

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.

Is Google following Microsoft's footsteps?

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:32:01 +0000

With the announcement of their new web browser Google Chrome, is Google starting down the path of Microsoft? I thought I would jot down a few of my thoughts on the subject.

Google is the King of Search, hands down. While it is only #2 ranked website on Alexa, #1 being held by Yahoo, it is the #1 for searching the web and on-line advertising. Yahoo offers a much larger bredth and variety of products, such as games, music, etc. #3 is Google’s billion dollar purchase YouTube.com. Next comes in Microsoft’s Windows Live at the #4 spot.

Comcast Limit to 250GB a month for Residential

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:52:19 +0000

According to Slashdot:

Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. ‘This is the same system we have in place today,’ Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. ‘The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.’ The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is “an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. … As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,’ Comcast said Thursday. ‘If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,’ according to the AUP.

Two-Way Sync between Google Calendar, Windows, OS X, and iPhone

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 21:43:36 +0000

Since my wife and I got our new iPhones, I’ve been playing around with a way unify our calendars. When we first got married we started to use Google Calendar. We have three calendars: mine, hers, and ours. Its great for staying organized, especially when we’re trying to organize two lives. It worked well for several weeks, except one thing…

We had to be on-line and on the browser to view our Google Calendars. Lot of the time when we needed to see our calendar we were with family or friends without computer access. Also, when I work I have twenty or so browser windows open, and it can be difficult to find my calendar in the mix. I also am biased towards desktop client applications when I’m using them every hour of the day. So I set out on my quest to find a way to sync across all the different mediums I use. Now that I think I’ve found my solution, I thought I would share my findings with the rest of the world.

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!

Test post from iphone.

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:20:24 +0000

I am testing my new iPhone app for wordpress. While I wouldn’t want to write an essay from this, it is pretty cool. What they really need is for a way to respond to comments on here. I’m sure it is currently in the works.

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!

iPhone SDK 2.1 - Another NDA

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 06:24:20 +0000

Until Apple change’s their attitude and policies, they will never be a Microsoft, Sun, or other monolithic technology company. Why? Their NDA on the new iPhone SDK 2.1 hinders developers seriously. They are so tight lipped about everything and are such control freaks that they will never replace Microsoft. If someone asked me today if I could magically snap my fingers and have Apple replace Microsoft, I would say “hell no.” Using their Laptops and Phones is one thing. Developing blindly with nothing but half-baked documentation and a NDA shoved down my throat is another beast.

DRM vs. Users - The Good and The Bad

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 05:46:54 +0000

The other day I posted on my thoughts of Rhapsody and Yahoo Music. It seems like there has been a lot of talk about how Yahoo Music users are going to lose their music they purchased through Yahoo. I want clarify a few things:

First, Yahoo Music users can transfer their account to Rhapsody. I believe this also transfers their purchased music. Now, if your account has lapsed, I don’t know exactly how it works. I still think there are lots of Yahoo Music users will get the short end of the deal, and some lose all their purchased music. I know there are worse things in the world, but here are my thought on DRM.They

Yahoo vs. Rhapsody - Why Yahoo Lost

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:10:06 +0000

I’ve been a subscriber to Yahoo Music, first with their Radio, and then their Unlimited service since 2005. I’ve loved the ability to listen to a huge collection of music at my fingertips. Since 90% of my music listening takes place on my computer while working, I never really had to worry about taking my music on the road on being portable. I also love being able to listen to music legally without having to feel guilty about downloading music off the internet. I’m a very big supporter of keeping music legit.

Why Are Some Open Source Advocates Hypocrites?

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:49:58 +0000

Edit: This article was intended to specifically address certain types of of open source advocates, as stated in the title. This article is not intended to label all open source advocates as hypocrites. See comments by the author below.

Today, and almost every day, I’ll read an article about a proprietary computer company (Microsoft, Apple, etc) and “open source” technologies and communities. Every time I read them I see a large percentage of “user participants” in comments, responses, etc. that make me cringe.

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.

Alright, an iPhone App that is definitly going te cause horror stories: Friend Book

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:22:40 +0000

… Is it me or is this idea just bad:

http://lifehacker.com/398228/friend-book-to-beam-your-iphones-contact-data-with-a-shake

Here is an except about what Friend Book does:

The coolest feature without a doubt is the new “Handshake”: put two iPhones running Friend Book together, shake them up and down, and the personal contact information of the phones’ owners will be beamed through the net to the paired phones. Handshake doesn’t work through a device-to-device connection, but instead passes location data back to Tapulous’ servers - two shaking phones in the same location means it’s time to swap information.

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.

AVG - The New Popular Anti-Virus

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:38:44 +0000

AVG, a popular anti-virus that I use, has a good free version. I guess it has become popular enough that I found a avgsafe.dll on a computer using HijackThis. The reason it suck out is that they didn’t have AVG installed. Was easy to remove and the computer was good to go.

_CGRectZero Error with UITableViewCell

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:06:11 +0000

Preface

If you haven’t agreed to the iPhone SDK License Agreement and NDA, please ignore this post, or Apple might hunt you down with their lawyers… and what a horrible death that would be.

Problem

I keep getting a build error when trying to subclass the UITableViewCell

Solution

Add the CoreGraphics.framework to your project

Resource

Found my answer at the MacRumors forums.

Mac Keyboard Quirks - Making Mac more like Windows

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:16:00 +0000

Alright, the sound of dying Apple fanboys are crying through out the internet at the posting of this entry, but there are two things I can’t stand about the Mac:

Command & Control are switched - this is a major pain, especially when using a KVM to switch between a Windows, Mac, and Linux machine. It is just crazy!

Home & End - They don’t work like they should on every other OS. I’ve never really figured out exactly what they do on Mac, but on Windows they go to the beginning or end of a line.

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.

Apple Needs to Stop Being Misleading - Viruses & Malware

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:09:00 +0000

The other day I was talking with my cousin and she asked how I liked my MacBook Pro. She told me all the cool things she had heard. A friend of hers said that with a Mac you don’t ever need to buy anything like “Norton” cause Macs don’t get viruses. She asked me if that was true and in reality it is a two part answer.

Here is the classic ad on Apple & viruses:

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.

SoapUI - a simple and raw Java SOAP Client

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:47:20 +0000

There are times when you need a “raw” SOAP client to see the exact messages being sent to and from a Soap Sever. This is especially important for developers who are hosting a soap server for an API. In my example, PHP was throwing an error, but I couldn’t see exactly what it was. The Soap for Ecplise uses XSLT to parse a soap message into a readable format, but because the PHP error was breaking the XML formatting, Eclipse just told me that it couldn’t parse, but wouldn’t show me the raw message.

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?

Why Palm Lost the Lead

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:00:38 +0000

I read an article today about Palm on Slashdot. Here is the summary:

Palm’s fourth quarter results came out a few days ago, and they were not pretty: Palm reported losses of 40 cents per share, for a quarterly loss of $43.4 million. It’s the fourth straight quarter of losses, and it’s clear that the company is not faring well in the rapidly evolving smartphone market. The Treo line is lagging after seven years, and while the Centro has done well, it’s not well enough to compete with the likes of the iPhone 3G and RIM’s surging BlackBerry line. New competition is on the horizon, with developers and manufacturers working on the Google Android platform and the recent news that Symbian is being open-sourced. What happened to Palm? What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?

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.

WhySecurity.org - A New Mini-Project

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:19:09 +0000

Yesterday while listening to the security panel’s discussion for LT Pact there seemed to be a common theme: end-users want security, but they don’t want to be inconvenienced or do anything to do something about it. It seemed like the only way a person learned about security was when it was too late, they had a serious problem, and serious losses were occurred. So I had an idea: why not have a visitor to a website take a quick questionnaire, just some simple questions to find out what type of user they are and at what risk they are at. After a few questions it would show stories of real experiences of people with similar situations and the devastating affects they had when being compromised.

LT Pact '08 - Overview of Experience

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:52:45 +0000

I just left the last session of the LT Pact ‘08 conference and it has been fun. I’ve learned a lot and there were a lot of common themes among the conference. I’ll briefly touch on the themes and over the next week or so I’ll be writing more in-depth on each one. Besides, I need to enjoy Las Vegas while I’m here and not just blog.

Virtualization & Cloud Computing

Virtualization is the future of server hosting. It won’t be optimal for all scenarios of course, but there are so many advantages to virtualization that they can’t be passed up:

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.

How to tell what Linux OS you're running

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:01:23 +0000

I deal with many different servers and it is hard to keep track of which is running which Distro of linux. Here is the quick way to tell:

uname -a

uname –help

You can’t believe how hard it was to find that out.

Getting ready for LTPact 2008

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:35:01 +0000

Well, I’m doing my laundry and getting ready to leave tomorrow for LTPact 2008. I’m looking forward to hearing about new technologies in server hosting. They also have coming several speakers on blogging, including Matt Mullengweg, founder and creator of WordPress. Layered Technologies has been a fantastic sponsor for CEVO.

PHP Practices: Buffering your autoload

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:44:56 +0000

I spent 2 hours working on a problem with PHP, Doc-Types, and a website. We started to see symptoms across our website where we would get a 12px space on the top of the page on IE7 (Internet Explorer 7) and FF3 (FireFox 3). We started combing through the HTML markup our website was returning, and parsing it via FireBug I could tell that something was causing our page to parse in correctly.

Why I like Twitter

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:33:09 +0000

Alright, I’m going to have to join the ranks of twitter users and say that I like twitter. I’m actually pretty shocked because I didn’t think I would enjoy keeping it up to date. However, its nice to use to keep tabs on my friends, co-workers, and even respected programmers in fields I study/work in.

The secret to twitter, I believe, is that it is very opt-in. You choose how much you want to do it. I was worried I would feel forced to keep it up-to-date, but it isn’t that hard. I only “tweet” semi-big things that I do, things that are interesting and someone might be interested in, but doesn’t warrant a blog post. This way I can help people find what I find on the net easily and without any hassle.

Why I love ecto

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:49:22 +0000

Ecto is a blogging program that I’ve come to love and use almost daily. It has taken the hassle out of using a web interface for writing to my blog. Here are several reason why I love to use it:

1. Images

I can quickly and easily take a screenshot, or drag and drop images into by blog posts without a single worry. Using Control-Command-Shift-3 I can take screenshots and paste them directly to my blog. Below is an image I took a screenshot of and pasted directly into ecto, completely removing any hassle.

OS X and Tabs - Skipping Drop Down Controls

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:33:15 +0000

This was driving me crazy for this last week. Since moving to my new house I’ve been without internet for a week. Comcast is supposed to come tomorrow to hook up my house, but until then I’ve been mooching of relatives’ WI-FI on my Mac Book Pro. This has forced me to use it for all of my work, including web development and graphics design. However, while tabbing through forms on websites, the tab would skip over drop down boxes. Why this is the default is beyond me. It is not user friendly at all. Fortunately I found through a website how to change it. Of course the OS X elite call this change simple and easy, but I’d think it’d be easy to just have it work in the first place.

iPhone 3G - My Personal Perspective

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:35:46 +0000

Well, after reading Kevin’s opinion about the new “iPhone 3G” I thought that I’d throw my two cents in:

The iPhone is getting a nice upgrade. 3G and GPS will be a great addition, as well as large price drop. However, I believe that the iPhone is not for everyone. Why? Just like laptops, people have different priorities than others. Kevin loves his MacBook Air for travel, but I prefer my MacBook Pro over the Air for traveling any day. Why? Two perspectives and goals. Both Kevin and I usually have to some work when we travel, but our work is greatly different. Kevin mainly needs his laptop for exchanging information, so using Email, Skype, etc. My work is heavily dependent on graphical work and programming. So I need the extra horse power.

Redesigning blog....

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:06:33 +0000

Alright, I figure it is about time I design my own WordPress theme. Most likely in the next few months I’m going to need to design some WordPress themes. Hopefully I’ll get able to do a good job…. ;)

Use Different Editor for Crontab

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:29:09 +0000

I really dislike vim and most servers I work on use vim for editing the crontab. So here is a quick little note for myself on how to change it after logging into the SSH on the server:

env EDITOR=nano crontab -e

iPhone SDK - Learning the Basics by Removing the Touch

Wed, 21 May 2008 03:12:28 +0000

After looking around for tutorials on the iPhone SDK, I’ve come to a revolutionary idea on learning the iPhone SDK: Learn it by programming in something else.

The iPhone SDK, which is basically Cocoa Touch, is based of the Cocoa framework, which is used to make programs for the Mac OSX. While the documentation for the iPhone SDK is limited, and outside resources are non-existent, information for the regular Cocoa framework is very large. There are tons of books, tutorials, videos, etc.

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.

Zend Studio – Basic Intellisense Tutorial

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:51:13 +0000

I thought I would throw together a little video on how make the most out of Zend Studio’s intellisense using PHP Doc Blocks.

[A Flash demo stood here. It is no longer viewable.]

Full Resolution Download: http://www.mediafire.com/?wmzqmyelmox

iPhone Web Development: Controlling the viewport via Javascript

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:58:07 +0000

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of iPhone web applications. A client wanted to create a portion of their site for the iPhone, and they wanted it to look a very specific way. In order to do this we had to set the view port’s maximum-scale and minimum-scale to 1. This gave them the functionality they desired.

However, one aspect of the web application allowed users to view photos. This caused a problem due to the fact that we had disabled the scale so they were not able to zoom in on photos via pinching.

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.

Deepest Sender - Best FireFox Blog Extension... Worst Name Ever

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:08:34 +0000

Alright, I’m trying out Deepest Sender, an extension for FireFox that allows me to send blog posts to my WordPress blog. It’s pretty amazing, except for one thing….

What the heck is up with the name? How is Deepest Sender suppose to reflect it’s name? I tried browsing on the Add-ons website for FireFox, and I couldn’t find anything. I even started looking at the FireFox Extension Documentation on how I could make one, because I was beyond belief I couldn’t believe one didn’t already exist.

Five common PHP design patterns that aren't used enough

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:09:34 +0000

“This article explains five widely used design patterns in PHP with sample code to demonstrate each pattern. Intermediate level.”

I can’t say how many PHP programmers that could benefit from using these “design patterns.” So many times PHP, and PHP coders, make me feel like we’re just writing hacks all day. A solid understanding of these patterns and when to use the can make large projects better and more sound. It is so easy to write a complex website. It is a total pain trying to maintain it. These patterns are all about maintaining code, not just writing it.

iPhone SDK release on March 6th?

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:01:37 +0000

According to Information Week the iPhone SDK will be released March 6th. It seems a full blown event is happening, so I doubt we’ll have to worry about it being pushed back. However from their news post it seems applications have to be approved. Will there be a way to get apps without having Apple’s consent? I hope so. I’m tired off my applications, PCs, and devices treating me like I’m a 4 year-old. Yes, I understand the general populous will download, install, infect, and destroy any of their devices while the whole time saying “what? what happened?”

ASP .NET, LINQ, GridViews, and GUID Errors

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:17:22 +0000

I found a simple problem today. Here is the deal, there were several times where I had to base a LinqDataSource off a Guid that I would set in the Page_Load(). I created an<asp:HiddenField /> to hold the value so all my DataSources could pull it from the control. The HiddenField control’s value is stored as a string, so I would have to convert the guid to a string. After doing this, I was getting the following error:

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().

Thunderbird Email Client: A Guide for Outlook Lovers (Part 1)

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:04:31 +0000

Overview

I’ve been using Thunderbird over the last year or so, and especially with version 2.0 I think it is a great client. In my opinion, it is the only decent email client that can compete with the easy of use of Outlook, yet totally dominate Outlook when coming to not being a bloated pig. I’m sorry, but when I run 4 IMAP accounts, and I have a PC with 4 gigs of RAM and a quad core processor, and Outlook is so slow and takes minutes to become responsive, it is just bad.

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.

MS SQL 2005 (T-SQL) Row Count for Each Table

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:08:38 +0000

At work I needed a solution to give me a count of how many rows each table contained. I’ve always liked phpMyAdmin’s ability to list all the tables and show their size and row count. I’ve found it immensely helpful. However, I couldn’t find anything similar for SQL Server Manager Studio 2005. I found a blog post that pointed me in the right direction on how to get the row counts, but I couldn’t get their script to run on the SQL Server 2005. Since I figured this would be a useful script to have I would re-write it and comment it for others. Here it is:

Page.FindControl() Returning Null Issues and Solutions Within Another Control

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:41:51 +0000

Alright, I’m going to have a lot of blog posts over the next few days going over my wonderful expereinces learning how to create advanced server controls, and just how hard it is to find good information on the subject. But the problem I ran into today was having Page.FindControl() not work as expected.

Problem

Page.FindControl() can be misleading. A developer without understanding the situation could assume FindControl() will return a control found within that page. This is completely wrong. The reason this does not work is because Page does not have its own FindControl() function. It actually inherits this from Control, because Page inherits control. So FindControl() is really more like a FindChildrenControls(), and it is not recursive.

ASP .NET Ajax - Straight forward and simple, the way it should be.

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:34:41 +0000

I have to say, I’m very impressed with the implementation of ASP .NET AJAX. After creating several projects in .NET, converting several of my pages to implement AJAX was beyond easy. It was incredible. It takes all the “thinking” out of AJAX and just makes it work. Now, I’m not familiar with the security and stability of it, but for simple AJAX to make your interface just “nicer”, its amazing. I’ll be posting a few tricks and tips that I discover as I play around with the AJAX capabilities of .NET.

ASP .NET, GridViews, SqlDataSource, and Guid Parameters

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:40:27 +0000

Another thing I ran into today. I actually ran into it awhile back but since I ran into it again today I’d thought I’d post on it to help anyone who happens to find it.

Problem

You have a GridView and a SqlDataSource that takes 1 or more Guids as a Parameter. You use the built in DataSource configuration and it doesn’t give any errors. However, when you actually run it and pass the Guid, you get this error:

ASP .NET & System.Threading.ThreadAbortException Error

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:02:15 +0000

While doing some work today I started to run into a ThreadAbortException error. While debugging it spit back this error:

Unable to evaluate expression because the code is optimized or a native frame is on top of the call stack.

I was really confused because everything seemed to be working just fine, then I found this forum thread. Turns out there are several causes for this error, but mine was caused by doing a Response.Redirect(); from within a Try-Catch statement. Apparently ASP .NET does not like that.

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.

ASP .NET GridView Access to Data In Code

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:52:38 +0000

There are situations where you want to gain access to the GridView’s DataSet to display extra information outside of the GridView. I found the following code to work the best for me. You can get the information from the DataSource of a GridView by doing the following:

DataView dv = (DataView)sdsDataSource.Select(DataSourceSelectArguments.Empty); if (dv != null) { try { strName = (String)dv.Table.Rows[0][“Name”]; } catch { strName = “N/A”; } }

You should be able to access whatever information you need from the DataView.

ASP .NET Accessing Session, Request, Response, etc from within a Class

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:30:38 +0000

I remember it took me forever to figure this out and the headache before learning this that it caused. Because .NET is strongly typed you are unable to access the Session, Request, or Response (and many other Http/Web object) from within a class library like you can writing in a code-behind file or on the page itself. I battled for weeks (I almost think months) trying to find ways of passing information between my pages and class library, when I finally found the answer:

iPhone & Vista 64-Bit.... Finally!

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:50:41 +0000

Here is the good news finally: iPhone Supports Vista 64-Bit. It’s about time, its only taken 6+ months to get a version of iTunes that works with Vista 64-Bit. I will say that Apple seemed to be the slowest people to adapt to 64-Bit for Windows. And for every apple fan boy who said downgrade to 32-Bit…..

I have 4 Gig Ram, which 32-Bit only works with 3.5 GB, and I’m probably going to drop in another 2 Gig in the very near future. (And, more and more computer vendors are moving to make 2 GB standard and 4 GB upper end, instead of the previous 1GB standard 2GB upper end)
Within 1-2 months all my latest software was updated and compatible with Vista 64-Bit. Most aren’t compiled 64-Bit, but they work perfectly like they would on a 32-bit machine.

To everyone who said get a Apple computer for 64-Bit machine….

iPhone and WordPress

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:40:05 +0000

I am now testing my new plugins for my iPhone for wordpress. So far they seem pretty good. I got two plugins: one for visitors and another for an admin panel.

I’ll write the rest from my computer…

There we go. Don’t get me wrong, I love the iPhone keyboard, but I’m pretty sure that a full size keyboard is much faster to type on. Now, how I did it. The two plugins are called iPhone Mobile Admin and iWPhone.

ASP .NET 2.0, GridViews, HyperLinkField, and JavaScript

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:34:00 +0000

I’ve found some interesting notes on ASP .NET’s GridView, it’s limitations and work arounds. For work I was looking for a way to execute JavaScript from clicking a link on a GridView Cell. An example would be to having a list of transactions and wanting to click a link to update it’s details. I noticed that many functions of GridView used tags to execute JavaScript. An example would be:

<a href="javascript:myFunction('variable');">Link</a>

Since I had experience with the HyperLinkField before, I thought I would add a HyperLinkField to my GridView and set the DataNavigateUrlFields to the needed fields and the DataNavigateUrlFormatString to use the fields properly. I was hoping to accomplish it by using the following code, which in turn I found out this solution does not work:

PHP5.x or PHP6 - Argument for Type-Hinting: Better IDEs

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:59:38 +0000

I’ve read some posting lately about PHP6, the Meeting Notes by the Developers, etc. that deal with type-hinting, especially scalar type hinting. Here is my reasoning why PHP should allow for more type-hinting scenarios: it allows IDEs to be more powerful. An example would be auto completion. Many times an IDE can’t possibly know what is being returned by a function or what is stored a variable because PHP is not strongly typed.

WoWscape Totem Vendors

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 22:26:31 +0000

If you’re a Shaman Alliance and you’ve glitched one of your totem quests, there are totem vendors on WoWscape. However, after looking on their forums and search the web, no one could tell me where they were. So I’ve found them, took the coordinates, and make a screenshot.

For Alliance in Stormwind Keep you can find them at (Stormwind City) [77,24]. I’ve included a picture of exactly where. Hopefully you won’t wander around aimlessly like I had to for ages.

Retrieve Current Module/Controller/Action inside View Script / Layout Script

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 21:19:04 +0000

Before I forget to do this again I’m going to make a post on how to get the current Module, Controller, and Action while inside a View Script or Layout Script.

Here is the most correct way to do it:

$front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$request = $front->getRequest();

$module = $request->getModuleName();
$controller = $request->getControllerName();
$action = $request->getActionName();

Now, here is the incorrect way I attempted to do this the first time:

$front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$request = $front->getRequest();

$module = $request->getParam('module');
$controller = $request->getParam('controller');
$action = $request->getParam('action');

I found some odd behavior because sometimes while in the default module it would return default, but other times it would return a null. I’m not sure if this is a bug or not, but the most sure way to retrieve the desired result is using the appropriate methods of getModuleName(), etc.

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.