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Another great tidbit from the blog High Scalability: Brian Aker, the Director of Architecture at MySQL AB, gave a humorous and enlightening talk on NoSQL at this month’s OpenSqlCamp. It should also be noted that Aker has one of the best wikipedia pictures ever. Ever. Here are the Slides and the Notes from the presentation. [...]

I remember a little while ago I wrote a post about hosts files, which are handy things for every web developer. Modifying your hosts files allows you to redirect requests to a given domain to a specific IP address. For example, you can have 16bit.orderinchaos.org redirect to your localhost (127.0.0.1) or another testing server, allowing [...]

This post isn’t going to get too deep into the theory behind hash tables. I just thought I’d refresh my own memory by writing a post. Hashing and hash tables actually came up in a meeting yesterday. I was excited to actually use those memories again, but I was ashamed at how corrupted my memory [...]

Many Java developers use JAR files (Java ARchives) to distribute their applications.  It is a nice form of distribution, because it is easy for the developer to make, and the end user can run it by simply double clicking on the JAR file. I want to point out a simple fact that I’ve noticed many [...]

Whenever you start a new project, one of your big tasks is to decide what programming language to use.  This usually turns into a fairly involved discussion about the needs of the project, and the various attributes of the possible languages.  I’m not going to start a flame war by telling you that one particular [...]

see more Epic Fails Okay, normally I try to steer away from echoing the mindlessness of the internet here, but this seemed appropriate. It also made me think – yeah, developers are definitely vulnerable to this. I suppose the upside is that usually our copy-paste mistakes rarely get seen by the real world, as they [...]

I was once working on a project with a small group of people.  We had a need to sort some data, a common task in software development.  (So common, in fact, that many languages include a collection of sorting algorithms with their core distribution.)  A co-worker has the assignment to get the data sorted, among [...]

Over time, computer security has become more and more important.  Many developers have gotten through their entire schooling, and even years on the job without having a good fundamental understanding of basic security principles that will help them keep their software secure.  Because of this, you should expect to see a small collection of posts [...]

OK, here’s a problem I’ve been running into a lot lately, and I want to share my solution with you guys, since I think others have had this problem in the past as well. I use Visual C# Express 2008 for my personal development at home.  I don’t have the money for the full version [...]

Many of you have probably heard of Google’s Innovation Time Off, or their 20% time.  For those of you who haven’t, Google allows their software guys to take 20% of their time, the equivalent of one day a week, and put it towards any sort of pet projects they want to. Now, I’m sure there [...]

Okay, yes, I’ve recently developed a love affair with SQL. But I think it goes beyond that – I think it’s about the data, and the databases. For several months now, I’ve been getting trickles of information regarding the NoSql Movement – but most of what I find is vague at best. Even the Wikipedia [...]

Wikipedia’s Erlang Summary I was reading the  high scalability blog this morning, and stumbled upon a presentation regarding erlang at facebook. Erlang – it’s one of those lesser known languages. The only reason that it had caught my eye was because (thank to RB) I’m a big fan of Wings3D, a a cross-platform 3D modeling [...]

Blogs are often thought about as “internet magazines”, which is somewhat applicable. However, one of the nice things about blogs is that you can be less formal and more personal. Here are a few personal musings, in a sloppily written and poorly structured fashion, on  programming languages. The idea for this post came to me [...]

One of the nicest things about programming is that there is an absolutely endless supply of examples and tutorials on the web to help you when you get stuck. Unfortunately, all too often, I’ve seen programmers find a piece of code that does what they’re looking for, and they simply copy and paste it into [...]

Okay, so maybe puns on the ‘all your base are belong to us’ is a bit old and overdone…. eh.. I still like it. So, Databases, huh? In college, I was a little terrified of them. I’m slightly ashamed to say that I never touched them as part of my curriculum. There was one class [...]

I have long been a fan of StatCounter for keeping track of who is visiting my sites.  Now, I’m not going to say that StatCounter is the only good choice for monitoring web traffic.  I am aware of several others that do a nice job as well.  Instead, I want to let you all know about an [...]

While I don’t have any statistics to back me up, I’d guess that the number one killer of software is the Moving Target.  Usually, a software project starts with a person or group of people deciding on what the program should do.  Then there is a period of designing the software, which is sometimes long, [...]

Rounded corners on the web are all the rage these days. I recently updated my personal site to keep up with the times and look snazzy. One of the features that I like about my site is that the header image is randomly 1 of about 70 photos. After I used some styling to get [...]

Perhaps you have heard the phrase “Release Early, Release Often” before.  This phrase is one of the key components of Linux, and a whole slew of open source projects.  The idea is that instead of getting a fully functional version of your software, and thoroughly testing it before releasing it to your users, you make [...]

This might be our first language specific post that we’ve had on here, but this one is worth it for all of you Java developers out there. Many of you are probably familiar with Java’s look and feels.  The default Metal L&F is pretty boring.  It was created in about 1995, and was great for [...]