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Posted on in Programming
Before a programmer can sit down and create a new application, she must understand the nature of the problem the application is designed to solve. Programming projects often begin with a relatively simple problem. These simply stated problems often mask a much more complicated issue. Rarely do programmers create applications …
Posted on in Programming
This is a six-part introduction to database systems with a collected list of references at the end. These posts were derived from a set of papers I had to write for a business class.
Posted on in Programming
As Company X begins to move toward a new information system, it must decide on how it will implement a new software strategy. They can choose to use pre-developed, off-the-shelf software or develop their own. Although off-the-shelf software has the benefit of being readily available, few systems are ready to …
Posted on in Programming
Chance asked me to post the Perl script I've been using to collect and graph protocol specific usage information in MRTG. Below, you will find a link to the zip file containing the Perl script.
You can put this script where you like, but you will need to reference it …
Posted on in Programming
Whenever I start a new software project, I spend way too much time trying to
figure out what I'm going to call it. I try to think of something clever, but I'm
never really satisfied with what I come up with. (I suppose this means I'm not
clever.) Starting with …
Posted on in Programming
I stumbled across this interesting image evolution project on AlteredQualia yesterday. This project takes Roger Alsing's example of image evolution using polygon rendering and re-implements it in JavaScript. I decided to run my own test against my avatar images. Both results use 50 polygons with 6 vertices.
Originally, I started …
Posted on in Programming
In previous coding examples, I've used Assembla to
demonstrate some Subversion interactions. At the
time, Assembla offered a free Subversion repository bundled with some really nice
development tools. In fairness to all Slaptijack readers, I need to point out
that Assembla's Andy Singleton announced the
end of free plans
(except …
Posted on in Programming
I recently began working on a project based on Pinax. The Pinax project's goal is to develop a set of re-usable applications for the Django Web Framework that are common in website development. Generally, these applications provide the functions and features common in social media sites. For reference, Bob Haugen …
Posted on in Programming
Database transactions are really no mystery. For the uninitiated, the idea is that we want to make changes to the database inside of a transaction that can be committed or thrown away. Why is this a good thing? Without transactions, changes to the database have to be manually undone if …
Posted on in Programming
ProBlogger Darren Rowse recently posted a question about putting dates on blog posts. A lot of folks were interested in the idea of removing dates from older blog posts, but don't know where to start. This is a useful PHP excercise, so I decided to implement it on my personal …
Posted on in Programming
Choosing a language in which to develop your custom Nagios plugins is pretty easy. You have two roads you can go down: compiled or scripting.
If you decide to build plugins using a compiled language, just about any will do. Generally speaking, C is the usual choice for something like …
Posted on in Programming
If you are using Apache and <acronym title="Secure Sockets Layer">SSL</acronym> as a proxy front-end for your Ruby on Rails application, you might have a problem with redirects if the backend server (Mongrel, for example) does not use SSL.
In a nutshell, you'll discover that redirects are sent …
Posted on in Programming
I'm writing this post for two reasons:
SELECT DISTINCT().Recently, I was working on a project written in Ruby with ActiveRecord that …
Posted on in Programming
Quick note.
I recently needed to install a few RubyGems on my Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) development system. I use MacPorts to keep my system consistent, but MacPorts was causing the problem. Here's a look at the output I was getting while trying to install Active Support.
$ sudo …Posted on in Programming
I was recently helping a developer with some SQL optimizations in Ruby. The developer was using Active Record, and (until now) my Active Record experience has been pretty minimal.
One thing that was really driving me bonkers was how to get Active Record to print out the queries it was …
