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Archive for the 'Software' Category

Gentoo Install Scripts

Yazan: dp | 11 May 2011 | No Comments
Categories: Computers, Internet, Software

Recently, I’ve been installing a lot of Gentoo boxes at work. Because of the tedium of following the Gentoo Handbook every time, and clicking through the steps, I’ve started working on some install scripts. Currently, there’s just one, that downloads the stage and portage files from the closest mirror. And I’ve got other scripts in [...]

PHP and nl2br

Yazan: dp | 17 March 2011 | No Comments
Categories: Computers, Software

PHP has a nifty function callednl2br, which will convert newlines within text to tags (optionally enabling the XHTML syntax). I’m curious though, why a br2nl function was never written? Instead, now I have to hack one together. BLARGH!

Reasons to use a cartesian join

Yazan: dp | 01 February 2011 | No Comments
Categories: Computers, Software

All over the Internet you’ll find people telling you that cartesian joins are a bad idea. And for the 99% of the time you’d run in to them, they are. But I found a legitimate use for them. I needed to get a count of records from table A for all the records in table [...]

How to Correct Grainy Images in Flash

Yazan: griffigr | 28 January 2011 | No Comments
Categories: Computers, Software

When building a new Flash project (from a PSD, for example), you’ll notice Flash likes to compress the absolute HELL out of all images within the asset library upon import. This causes your project to look like absolute shit, but ALAS! There’s an easy solution. After you’ve imported your images to the asset library, right-click [...]

Speeding up your perl scripts with Parallel::Iterator

Yazan: dp | 28 January 2011 | No Comments
Categories: Computers, Software

Image by hongiiv via Flickr Parallel::Iterator is a Perl module that can make your scripts much faster if you perform long-running tasks within a loop. It does this by managing a forking system in the background, allowing your long-running tasks to execute in parallel, instead of one at a time. Your existing code probably looks [...]

Nested JOINs in MySQL

Yazan: dp | 27 January 2011 | No Comments
Categories: Computers, Software

Image via Wikipedia Sometimes, I have a need to SELECT data from a table, LEFT JOINed with another table (because the data in the second table is optional), but then INNER JOINed with a third table. Unfortunately, the resulting query runs (essentially) as two INNER JOINs, removing data that I want. That’s where nested joins [...]

Buckeye Trailer Center

Yazan: dp | 16 December 2010 | No Comments
Categories: Computers, Internet, Software

Image via Wikipedia A few weeks ago, I wrapped up (mostly) a project that I’ve been working on for a while, BuckeyeTrailerCenter.com. It was largely a learning experience for me, as I wrote it from scratch, ground up, using Zend Framework. I’ve never used a “proper” MVC system before, so this was an interesting project. [...]

Wikileaks Mirrors

Yazan: dp | 07 December 2010 | No Comments
Categories: Computers, Internet, Politics, Software

I’ve been following the latest WikiLeaks release a bit, and had noticed that they’d set up a way to mirror the content automagically. I thought it was cool, and even considered doing it myself. Then I thought about the fact that my IP could be tied to me, and what kind of consequences there could [...]

Backwards searching in your browser

Yazan: dp | 02 September 2010 | No Comments
Categories: Computers, Software

Did you know that you can search backwards in your browser (at least Firefox and Chrome anyway)? You can! In this page, hit Control+F to search for “in”. If you hit enter a few times, you should be pulled down the page as you find new search entries. What happens if you miss one? While [...]

The Quick and Dirty Guide to a Successful Website Deployment – Part 1: Research

Yazan: griffigr | 05 June 2010 | 1 Comment
Categories: Software

So, you’ve been charged with the responsibility of giving your company website a facelift. Your logo looks as though it was designed by a six year-old, the overall design screams, “1998,” and the blinking text effects are starting to cause problems with your epileptic readers. Let’s be honest. You’ve got a lot of work ahead [...]