Programming

A year or two ago I was returning to my office from lunch with some co-workers. I spotted an old, rusty, razor blade on the sidewalk. “You don’t see that every day,” I said. In retrospect I was probably wrong. Everyone likely sees dozens of rusty razor blades on sidewalks and in gutters every day. We just don’t notice them. That’s not the point. The point is that I told my friend, Jon, that it would make a good domain name. “You should register rustyrazorblade.com,” I said. And he did. Now, if you’re looking for an esoteric, complicated, intense Apache and / or MySQL resource, it’s the place to go. True story.

Found: One brilliant article about being a programmer
Source: MeFi

I was glad to see ColdFusion make it on this list of the top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills. It’s a ridiculous “language” that I never bothered to learn and used to tell people was craptastic and worthless when it was brand new and everybody and their mother was looking for people that knew it. I clearly remember being told that I just had to learn ColdFusion or I was going to miss the next web wave. I scoffed, learned ASP and PHP, and think I made the right call.

I was surprised to see C on the list, though. I guess I can understand that there aren’t many people actually programming in the original C, but I’d say that the basic principles of the language — including C++ and all of its children — are still pretty important.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to build a WordPress plugin to display a Gunning-Fog analysis on his blog. The math part was pretty easy stuff. I was having a borch of a time getting the plugin to count syllables, so I hunted through Google and found someone else had written a pretty good function to do that. I squished it all together and it seems to be working pretty good.

You can download the plugin here and see it in action here.

Today I decided that my life would not be complete if I didn’t learn how to use Yahoo! Pipes. So I gave it a shot. I couldn’t really think of anything I wanted in a pipe, so I decided to try building one that would let me search eBay for items on my Amazon wishlist. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?

I learned that it is possible to pull your Amazon Wishlist items as an RSS feed, which is cool. I found an example on the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection. You need to have an Amazon Web Services Access Key (AWSAccessKeyId), but they’ll give those away to anyone nowadays. You don’t need to read the full article; I’ll summarize.

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How to Hack MySQL Paging Functionality into Microsoft SQL Server

Web developers using PHP and MySQL have a crucial piece of functionality that classic ASP developers working with Microsoft SQL Server don’t. It’s pagination. Using MySQL’s LIMIT and OFFSET commands you can very easily add pagination to recordsets that you want to display on web pages. If you’ve spent any amount of time searching for a way to do this with ASP and SQL Server, you know that the code is pretty hard to find. You’re lucky if you find it at all. The few tutorials on the ‘net tend to be overly complicated and pretty bad hacks, usually involving convoluted and resource-intensive subqueries on top of subqueries. This solution is certainly not the best, and it, too, is a resource hog, but it’s the only one I’ve got, so I’m sharing.
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What system are people using to create web sites that have .do files? It seems that every site I visit that employs this coding is slow, slow, slow. Men’s Health and Capital One both have sites built with tons of .do files and redirects and both of them drive me nuts.

(Q) How do I calculate total number of working days between two dates?

(A) Use this function.

Lewies Blog

Update: Lewies used to have a good article on how to execute FTP processes via ASP. It is apparently no longer there.

Code 10x More Efficiently Using Data Access Objects and PHP …

Note to hep-cat Amazon employees: “Perl the programming language” <> “Pearl Jam the rock band”.

MagpieRSS: an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP!

Great tutorial for beginners: Rotating Banner Ads using a Database

After hours and hours of googling, I finally found the only javascript horizontal text scroller that doesn’t suck.
If anyone knows of a better one, please let me know. While we all wait I’ll be re-coding this to accept input from an external database and building an ASP front-end for editing it …