Category: Metal (Technical)

A while back LinuxWorld interviewed me about the MySQL certification process I undertook at IOL. You can read it here.

Thanks to Walton’s mention, I’ve been spending quite a bit of the weekend looking at reddit, and comparing it to digg. Both sites are a step forward from the old classics, Slashdot and Kuro5shin, as well as the much newer de.licio.us (which as I’m sure everyone who follows it knows, has just been bought by… Continue reading reddit and digg – first impressions

With the recent launch of Jonga, and Funnel having been around a few months now, it’s been an interesting time for local search engines. I thought I’d do a quick comparison. My highly unscientific methodology involved choosing a site I know, entering a search term I think should find it, and seeing how closely the… Continue reading Jonga, Funnel, Ananzi and Google.co.za compared

Hopefully most of my gazillion readers have noticed the new look, but I’ve also been upgrading the blog’s backend. It now runs off b2evolution’s new(ish) Dawn release, which brings noticeably faster performance, and huge antispam improvements. With a couple of backend hacks as well, I’m down to deleting about one spam entry a day (I… Continue reading b2evolution upgrades and antispam

I’m having fun tightening up my holy-as-a-sieve server. Being a clueless systems administrator, and the fact that the server is shared with one or two others, makes this quite challenging, but I’m enjoying bumbling around. A post on FreeBSD Server Administration entitled Contact form abused through BCC field triggered something in my memory, and I… Continue reading Holes

I still have plans to start a hall of shame (I’ll think of a better name) of dysfunctional websites in South Africa, not to humiliate the perpetrators, but to encourage them to make their sites more usable. Reasons for being dysfunctional include the all-too-common only working in Internet Explorer, broken links and general poor navigation.… Continue reading Dysfunctional site of the day

As a change from my usual beginner level tutorials, I decided to explore the effects of Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB in this month’s Database Journal column, entitled Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB, their release of Oracle Express, and the effect on MySQL. My conclusion for those too lazy to read? Oracle has a number of strategies… Continue reading Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB and the effects on MySQL

Thanks to Victor Boctor, I discovered that Microsoft have released an Internet Explorer Developer toolbar. I got quite excited, as one of the projects I’m currently working on uses quite a lot of frontend JavaScript, and debugging it for non-standard IE is so much less fun than than getting it working on standards-compliant Firefox. I… Continue reading Developer toolbar for Internet Explorer

My HTML exploration probably peaked in the days of Netscape 4 and IE 4, so I’ve been left with many bad habits from those grim days when standards were little more than a twinkle in the eye (as opposed to now, where to most they’re still little more than a wailing infant). All programmers have… Continue reading The IE legacy of the day

I enjoy reading the weekly newsletter by my old IOL colleague Philip Devine, the editor of Business Report online. Today’s was entitled Computing the cost of doing business (the full text is available at getopenlab.com, not sure about the legalities of them posting the whole thing online, but that’s another story). Phil has some nice… Continue reading The installation challenge – Windows vs Open Source operating systems