March 22, 2012

Lightweight ORM for PHP

My family hosts an event called the Chili Bowl once a year.  All our friends bring over chili, we play football, then eat the chili.…and most importantly vote to see who brought the best chili and who brought the most original…
March 21, 2012

How to Choose a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Device

So, you want to get a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for your home office or small business. I think that is a great idea and have one myself.  There are a lot of possible options though. You can get a dedicated network appliance that…
March 20, 2012

Upgrading to MySQL 5.5 on Ubuntu 10.10

I was recently asked to upgrade the MySQL install on a Ubuntu 10.10 system.  Normally these kinds of upgrades are simple affairs using built in tools like apt or yum, but in this case I was trying to go from MySQL 5.1…
March 16, 2012

Every Project Needs a Cat … or Why CMMI Works For Me

When the cat is away, the mice will play. Earlier this month, TCG was re-confirmed as a CMMI Level 2 organization. Many people look at the CMMI documentation and think that it is a lot of overhead, but that’s not the way I see…
March 15, 2012

Web Accessibility Pays Off in Spades … or Why You Shouldn’t Count on JavaScript

Every web designer tries to make their sites as usable, understandable, and beautiful as possible.  Web accessibility is the practice of ensuring that you site is equally usable and understandable for all people, including the disabled.  It may not be obvious,…
March 14, 2012

Protect Yourself Against Surprise Cloud Hosting Fees

There are lots of great things about hosting a web site or service in the cloud, but price stability is not one of them.  There are numerous ways a small project can get hit with a bill that is many times more than…
March 8, 2012

Debuging Dynamic JavaScript

I have always been a fan of integrated debuggers.  They really help me think about tricky bits of code and verify that my solution is correct.  While testing my code I like to use a debugger to watch all my variables and boolean…
March 4, 2012

Are you having problems with VirtualBox giving out of memory errors?

In a previous post I described how I use Virtual Machines while doing software development.   A few weeks ago I started getting memory errors when I launched a VM without closing down any other VM I had running.  Specifically, I would get a VERR_EM_NO_MEMORY error with a result code of 0x80004005. …
February 28, 2012

Virtual Development Paradigm

I use virtual machines (VM) for nearly all my development.  When I am doing any serious work, the first step is to fire up VirtualBox on my desktop and launch the VM that I am using for that project.  If you don’t…
December 30, 2011

Faster Random Numbers in JavaScript

There is a non-deterministic cellular automaton simulation that I have coded in a few in different languages on everything from a Commodore Vic-20 to an Android phone.  It’s basically a grid populated by various colors that change states based on some random probabilities.  Ok, that…