When I first heard of Zen Coding on Sitepoint, I figured it was some other gimmick that might save me about 0.01% of my time each year after I spend five or six hours learning the syntax. Zen Coding works by expanding some abbreviations into properly closed html. The syntax is very simple, and can…
Computers have interested me virtually my entire life. I don’t remember when I got my 1st computer, I remember my dad and mom taking about how my dad would play computer games or use a bbs and have me sitting in his lap. Around the time I was six my dad was given a computer…
When I was looking at a site with the Chrome Developer Tools, it had a little error icon that said “Resource interpreted as other but transferred with MIME type text/javascript” when I clicked it. I couldn’t figure out my error at first, but eventually realized I had for some reason had a script tag with…
On LinkedIn, I noticed a question that didn’t really have any answers or additional comments. “If I write clean code, do I need comments?” was asked by the user on the discussion board.
In an ideal world, you wouldn’t need to write comments, but we don’t live in an ideal world.I think that you still do need some comments, but that the number and frequency of comments should significantly decrease.
I spend a significant amount of my timing deal with ecommerce and different shopping systems. One of my all time favourite solutions is using PayPal and Magento together because they have been designed from the ground up to interact well together. International Acceptance PayPal is accepted in many countries and is capable of doing automatic…
Very often, I need the date of some data and do not like to convert the date to a varchar and then proceed to format it or convert it back to a date. One of the official Microsoft sanctioned ways is: SELECT DATEADD(dd,0,DATEDIFF(dd,0,GETDATE()))
Windows 95/98/Me c:windowshosts Windows NT/2000/XP Pro c:winntsystem32driversetchosts Windows XP Home c:windowssystem32driversetchosts Windows Vista,7 c:windowssystem32driversetchosts It doesn’t have an extension. Modifying requires admin access on NT/2000/XP and greater. Notepad must be started with full admin privileges by Right Clicking and saying “Run as Admin.”
WAMP Server generally runs fine without any problems, although sometimes we have to make some configuration changes because of other software monitoring ports. Skype, for example, is commonly using port 80 to communicate and stopping apache from responding. If you’re using WAMP and apache at the same time, you need to left click the WAMP…
Getting WAMP to run properly on Windows 7 isn’t very difficult as long as the permissions are properly set. Also, keep in mind that you may need to modify your windows firewall settings, and bit defender if you have it running. WAMP needs full administrator privileges which as you may be aware needs to be…
I had a very strange issue with a client’s installation of magento a few nights ago. The checkout page was completely blank and the apache error logs were completely empty. I tried all the usual fixes of looking at file permissions, updating the magento installation, checking for new modules, etc but none of these solutions…
Every few months, especially after a windows update, I find that SQL Server Reporting Services’ ReportManager just won’t load. There’s no errors, there’s nothing in the System Event Log or any reason that I can see for the reportmanager never loading. I usually end up out of frustration stopping the reporting services, stopping IIS, and…
Dates and DateTimes are difficult to deal with in most languages. The Date object is a datatype that’s built in the JavaScript language. In JavaScript, the biggest problem is that the browsers aren’t overly consistent in the way they have implemented the Date object and its APIs. …
As a freelance developer / consultant, I am regularly hired by clients that outsource software development and don’t have somebody that looks at the sourcecode for quality. Unfortunately, I am also stuck dealing with this legacy spaghetti monster code that is in serious need of refactoring.…
Getting information from the SQL Server system tables is relatively easy and can be a great way of checking whether you completed some task or whatever. I use the following query or some variant to see when I’ve done something or what I named it or whatever. SELECT name, create_date FROM sys.tables order by create_date
For some of my work, I work on data importers and other different tasks which require dealing with CSV and tab delimited files which can often be very challenging to parse. I was sick of rolling my own csv/tab delimted parser, so I went ahead and found one that worked very well on CodeProject simply…
It’s no secret that I work as a freelance software/web developer and often jump around between languages. I, continually, run into projects where the developers are ignoring warnings produced by the compiler which can lead to some very sloppy code along with some very interesting situations that occur as the code runs in production. In…
I first heard of “Uncle” Bob Martin on twitter, a few of the people I was following were discussing how amazing the book Clean Code was and how they would love if some of the other developers they worked with used some of the techniques. “Uncle” Bob Martin wrote Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile…
It’s no secret that many of us that use javascript regularly love jQuery because it handles a lot of the cross browser issues and makes our lives so much easier. The .ajax function makes use of caching by default, but we can override this by creating a function called .ajaxSetup and adding cache: false in…
PEAR Mail & mail_mime is absolutely fantastic for sending multi-part mime emails and requires absolutely no effort. Probably, the best part of PEAR Mail & mail_mime is not having to deal with mime boundaries. I often see incorrect code for handling whether the message successfully sent or not. To check if the message is sent…
