McDonald’s has a checklist for making a Big Mac, but surgeons also use checklists so they don’t cut off the wrong limb of a patient. Checklists sound mundane, but they ensure quality. In the case of a Big Mac, the … Continue reading
I met Aaron Williamson at OSCON this year. Aaron works as a legal counselor at the Software Freedom Law Center in New York. He is an expert on software law and open source licensing. After one of his talks I approached him … Continue reading
There are four-year-olds with better drawing skills than me. Thankfully, there is the Open Icon Library project to take care of all my icon needs. It is full of useful icons, indicators, alerts, flags, etc… The images are professional and polished … Continue reading
The Software Association of Oregon (SAO) held its first ever Tech Ignite event last Thursday, September 15th, 2011. My presentation “Building an ePortfolio system for NASA” was accepted! The event was taped and you can watch me in action here: … Continue reading
This post covers a few fun and useful browser based ‘CSS builder’ tools. They generate CCS3 effects on the fly and take the headache out of making them work across modern browsers. Check out http://caniuse.com/ for a complete source of … Continue reading
The strategy pattern can be a nice way to improve flexibility when accessing external resources. For example an application might have images referenced in Flickr and a relational database. You want to be able to search both places, but you … Continue reading
From time to time, MySQL 5.1 databases need a little house keeping. We found our production DB had a hard time running a simple join query between two tables with about 400k rows. It was taking between 30 and 100 … Continue reading
As a follow on to my last post about PHP memory consumption, I wanted to get some ideas out there about memory utilization. This post explores: An equation for the maximum number of users an application can support on a … Continue reading
I ran some tests across different PHP frameworks to see how much memory a single page request uses (FatFree, Symfony 1.0x, WordPress, and Drupal). I also asked some colleagues to share what they got. This is based on PHP 5.2 … Continue reading
Made my first ever open source release tonight! Android Float Picker Widget Float Picker Widget is an open source Android based widget for picking a number using plus and minus buttons, no typing required. Could be used for picking specific … Continue reading
