Data inside a database should always be post-processed and ready-to-use-as-is. If you can rely on the data provided by the database to be usable as is, then you’ll save yourself a lot of string processing work. Think about it this way, if you have a string, let say “orange” and it’s stored in the database, …
Category Archives: Programming
Feature Gathering
There is an important lesson to be learned from the jQuery versus PrototypeJS battle. While there isn’t really anything wrong with Prototype, jQuery is simply better. Yes, there are some pros and cons to either one, but to me, jQuery was simply better designed. It’s as if, one day, some guy decided to come up …
Zend MVC plus Smarty
I’ve been playing with both Smarty and MVC. I can’t help but feel that having both Smarty and MVC is a bit redundant. Smarty was developed so that people with little to no programming experience can be involved in the designing process through the use of templates. MVC is known as Model, View, and Controller. …
Get Your Hot Swapping On
There are many ways in which code is rolled out. I’ve noticed in the new environment I’m in, code roll outs are performed more in a “hot swap” fashion than an install / overwrite fashion. In an overwrite manner, code has been throughly tested in a dev and staging environment before being rolled out to …
Finding Problematic Code with Top and Mod Status
The first step to fixing a problem is figuring out that there is one. Top is great command to examine what’s going on your system. It can tell you how resource intensive a process is, how long it’s been running, who executed it, and etc. Through Top, you can see if a process like httpd …
Continue reading “Finding Problematic Code with Top and Mod Status”
Unwritten Rules of Professional Web Applications
While there are many unwritten rules, here are few which I find most significant. To me, these are qualities of any professional web application. There should be no single point of failure The site should never be sluggish The site should never show any errors If the site is not available there needs to be …
Continue reading “Unwritten Rules of Professional Web Applications”
Back on Top
If you searched for my full name in Google for the past 3 weeks or so, you might have noticed that my site completely disappeared from the famous search engine. The reason it disappeared was probably due to my domain expiring and parked, but after 3 weeks of checking and waiting, it appears my site …
People I Admire
There really is no particular order in this list: Randy Pausch Albert Einstein Stephen Hawking Sun Tzu Bruce Lee Jet Li Stephen Chow Today, I after watching Stephen Hawking lecture on “The Big Question”, I found a new appreciation for this man. He can only communicate through twitching his cheek, the other parts of his …
Invisible Tracking Pixel
There already tons and tons of articles on this topic, but I think this knowledge is definitely nifty, so I decided to repeat this information in my blog. A tracking pixel is a script that is disguised as an image. Each time the image loads, the script does whatever it was coded to do, but …
Myspace and Flash
I know flash objects could be listed on MySpace pages for quite some time, but I didn’t really understand what this meant for MySpace pages until I went to a friend’s site. I’ve noticed that my friend’s MySpace on, well, MySpace looked and behaved absolutely different than any other MySpace I’ve seen so far. Being …