IDs are often numbers. Unfortunately there are only 10 digits to work with, so if you have a lot of records, IDs tend to get very lengthy. For computers that's OK. But human beings like their IDs as short as possible. So how can we make IDs shorter? Well, we could borrow characters from the alphabet as have them pose as additional numbers.... Alphabet to the rescue!

If you are in IT professionally (coding or sysadmin) you will be staring at monospaced fonts for many many hours a day. So it's probably justified to spend 2 minutes picking a very good one. It can make your work (typing ; ) just a little bit more pleasing.

I had some difficulties playing Flash videos lately. Problems ranged from lagging sound, to ugliness, to idling black screens, to strange gray Play buttons that didn't do anything. The following solved my Flash issues on Ubuntu.

Pictures say more than a thousand words. This is true for your data as well. With Google Chart you can now easily generate charts of your data. No expertise required. Just make sure you format your data correctly, add it to the Google Chart URL, and it will return a nice graph.

Sometimes MySQL needs to work hard. I've been working on an import script that fires a lot of INSERTs. Normally our database server handles 1,000 inserts / sec. That wasn't enough. So I went looking for methods to improve the speed of MySQL inserts and was finally able to increase this number to 28,000 inserts per second. Checkout my late night benchmarking adventures.

With all the abstraction layers between code & database, and now with my recent CakePHP adventures: The need for writing SQL statements deminishes. But over the years I've developed my own way of formatting them. And before I'll have to wave queries goodbye forever ;) I just want to put it out there.

If you've written a PEAR package, it's probably a good idea to submit some end user documentation. Here's how to do it.

Hello everyone. Two days ago Feedburner offered me to merge my account with Google. I thought: why not. But apparently now the URL of my feeds changed. This messed up my stats, and your RSS reader has marked all of my posts as unread. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience.

So I've been learning CakePHP the last few days. Bit by bit I've been trying to port a lecagy admininistration app to Cake. 'Secretly' linking menuitems to finished Cake parts as we go. And I must say: I'm pretty excited. I did run into a disturbing conclusion though. I estimated the legacy app will have over 300 Models & Controllers once finished. That could easily add up to (300 x 4 =) 1200 views. And here I am, creating a maintenance hell while trying to solve one!