For the last 5-10 minutes I've been wondering why a check on a variable which should be valid has been returning false.

The check is ctype_digit, which returns true if all characters in a string are digits.

So if $var = 1;, you might expect it to return true, but it doesn't.

Why not? Well, as the PHP manual states, this function acts on strings not integers.

Therefore checking something that has been specifically set as an integer (as in the example above) or typecast to be an integer at some point (as is my case) ctype_digit will fail as the data it is checking is not a string in the first place!

So there you go. Although 99% of data handled in PHP is in string form at some point, and therefore a ctype_digit check is generally completely valid, in some special cases it might be worth combining a ctype_digit() check with a preceding is_string() check depending on your application.

Rant over...

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Recently I saw a symbol on the side of the pepsi can that looked something like this and all it said with it was want to know more... visit us, with some url back to pepsi's website.

I thought that was all a bit odd, but unusually for me I disregarded it as some kind of new marketing game I wasn't interested in.

Today however I was starting to catch back up with months of missed Google reader posts, saw a similar thing on Matt Cutt's blog where he was talking about the chart types that the google charting API can produce and found out these things are called QR codes.

And apparently "QR codes can be read by any device that has the appropriate software installed. Such devices range from dedicated QR code readers to mobile phones."

When I received my Nokia E71 a year or so ago I noticed it had bar-code reader software pre-installed on it, but had no idea what that was really for, until now, it's for reading codes like this!

So why not try it yourself. If you have a phone with bar code reader software built in and want to give it a try, point it at the screen and find out what this says:

If you have an interest in having these codes produced please get in touch!

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Olark is a very neat new service from as US company called Habla, Inc. that lets you integrate a live chat box on your website directly with one of a number of common Instant Messaging clients.

Very easy to setup and relatively cheap (free for the most basic service), it provides an excellent way of getting direct interaction with site visitors, which can be incredibly important for anyone attempting to engage customers immediately in a sales process.

To date, services that I know of like this require you to actually be logged in to the website or some other server somewhere for them to actually work. This is all well and good, but who wants to keep a live web page open just in case they get any direct enquiries whilst they’re doing other things? Certainly not me!

I’d rather just have my usual IM client popup with a new message/chat request alert as soon as someone wants to get in touch from the website, just as it would if a friend or a known client wanted to talk to me, and that’s exactly what this offers.

So far, though they support a number of IM solutions, they do not currently support MSN (well, Windows Live Messenger), which is my chat client of choice (probably along with 99% of everyone else) BUT after chatting to a member of their support team I am told it’s something being worked on and could even be in place by the end of the month (Oct – 2009)!

For now though I’m quite happy to switch to something like pidgin for a few weeks.

As you’ll see to the bottom right of the screen, I have integrated their service on this blog already, meaning that I can now chat directly to potential clients who visit my website and have questions or comments about the services I have to offer. Fantastic!

If it says I’m online, why not try it out for yourself and send me a message

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When you type keywords into your Firefox address bar and hit enter it usually goes off and searches a particular search engine for you. e.g. Google (as the default) but sometimes other applications you install override this behaviour and replace a Google search with their own search.

In my case I accidently chose to install the Ask toolbar along with another piece of software I actually wanted on my machine. Ok I thought, that was a mistake so I’ll just go and uninstall the Ask toolbar and everything will be fine, right? Wrong! Removing the Ask toolbar alone will not reset the default options in Firefox that were overwritten when the toolbar initially installed.

Thankfully though this is something that’s pretty easy to fix, even if it might look complicated. Here’s how you do it:

1. Type about:config into the firefox address bar (the place where you’d normally type a web address) to open up the firefox config options
2. In the filter box enter: keyword.URL
3. Double click the value column to change the the default url used for keyword searches
4. Enter the search url you actually want to use e.g: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=partner-pub-6458081723116676:1i1tbs-63yw&ie=ISO-8859-1&sa=Search&q=

It’s that easy!

Also you’ll probably find other search options have been overwritten. The others I found that needed changing back were anything in the browser.search group. i.e. if you filter the config options by browser.search as above, you’ll see various options that have the value Ask (in my case) All of these need to be changed back to say Google or Google.co.uk or whatever is appropriate.

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On every other version of windows I've used over the last 12 years or so, you've always been able to double click a .zip archive, open it up like a folder and drag and drop any files you like out of it to anywhere else on your hard drive. A very easy procedure, and I use it all the time.

I don't know if it's just me, but on the 64 bit version of Windows 7 this process seems to screw up somewhere and takes FOREVER to complete...

It's fine if you just extract the whole archive to another location but if you want to drag and drop selected contents it simply doesn't seem to like it... it just hangs there....

If anyone else has experienced this and knows how to solve it, please leave me a comment below

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Of all the websites out there that I visit on a daily basis, I wonder which actively analyse my user agent and do something with it, or at least end up exposing it somewhere else on the web.

As a result I've decided to make the url of this post the value of my user agent string, and we'll see how many hits come into it over the next few months.

I'll update this post as time goes on with what I find out...

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I’ve been using the released version of Windows 7 for about 4 days on and off now and have to say it seems to be a massive improvement over Vista.

In my opinion it’s what Vista should have been (the whole release of Vista vs. XP being akin to the release of Windows ME vs. windows 98 i.e. a bit of a joke, with the real improvements come in the next version again – in that case XP in this case 7).

Anyway, things to note so far are:

• Battery life seems to be improved – Win 7 seems to require a lot less juice to run well
• Stacked taskbar icons make the management of multiple applications easier
• Icon themes are nicer than Vista
• Network management is much improved over Vista for those who change networks a lot
• Start up screen is fairly funky
• User Account Control and other Security options are less intrusive
• Windows Media Centre is included in the Pro Version (Vista Business excluded it…)
• So far ALL of the applications that I used to run on XP and Vista seem to run without issue, even small 3rdparty standalone tools (programs that don't require an installer to run)

That’s a fairly short list so far but just for those improvements (minimal though some of them may seem) I’d say it’s worth it.

I’d recommend upgrading for anyone who’s currently using Vista, especially on a laptop and for those of you still running Windows XP, though in your case you might also need a hardware upgrade too.

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My gumtree ads (mygumtreeads.com) is a new project of mine, filling in what I see as one of the major gaps in Gumtree's current service. The gap that I and I'm sure many other people have experienced is the inability to setup a user page containing all of your ads for easy reference, a bit like an eBay store.

The real issue with Gumtree is that each ad is regarded as unique and has no obvious relationship to other ads on the site, even if they've been posted by the same person. So, once you post an ad it can get lost forever in their system and though they send you emails telling you what your ad id is, etc. it's very easy to lose track of the ads that you've setup, especially if you have a lot of items to sell, swap or give away.

The service itself is a mash up between wordpress, twitter and gumtree itself, and though released to a wider audience, is still in beta testing, meaning that from time to time there will be issues with system while I iron out bugs and more importantly I'm very open to suggestions on new features and functionality.

Technically, the site is built on wordpress and uses my own rapid plugin development code framework, to extend the base functionality (which I hope to release sometime soon). It uses twitter as a way of collating a list of ads that you post and then processes these entries to form a catalgouge/store like interface.

Anyway I hope if you are also a regular Gumtree user you'll try out the site and see if it works for you.

If not, let me know why and I'll do something about it!

No related posts.

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Not much for me to say here that isn’t covered in the following tutorial: http://www.howtoforge.com/mysql_master_master_replication

Aside from the comments I made there, which I hope they include, if not I’ll update this post with those comments in due course

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I’m looking to setup some replication between two servers and server B has none of the databases server A has, so obviously I have to populate B with A’s data.

Easy you might think, simply start the slave and issue some like:

mysql> load data from master;

But actually, in my case, this fails because of the following bug when loading master data and the fact that views exist on server A

As it says here http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=20596

[30 Aug 2006 20:36] Trudy Pelzer

Since the current implementation of LOAD DATA FROM MASTER and LOAD TABLE FROM MASTER is very limited, these statements are deprecated in versions 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1 of MySQL. We will introduce a more advanced technique (online backup) in a future (>5.1) version, that will have the added advantage of working with more storage engines.

Due to the deprecated status of the statements, this bug will not be fixed. For 5.1 and earlier, the recommended alternative solution to using LOAD DATA|TABLE FROM MASTER is mysqldump on the master piped (or output copied) to the mysql client on the slave. This also has the advantage of working for all storage engines.

A deprecation warning will be added for these statements in 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1 shortly.

Now there’s a number of ways around this e.g. exporting the views table, dropping them, doing load data from master then re-importing them or just copying the mysql data dir’s from A to B, or using mysql dump as suggested above, but this shouldn’t be necessary!

This is a bug that’s been known about by MySQL for almost 3 years, should be a fairly simple thing to fix really and hasn’t been. I don’t remember seeing any  deprecation warning in the latest version of MySQL and have wasted more time as a result.

Hopefully now SUN seem to be taking a proper hold of MySQL some of these more minor but pain in the ass issues will start to be fixed!!!

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So, I needed to upgrade MySQL on our development boxes today and I was met by a little surprise from the RPM program…

Basically it won’t do an upgrade as the vendor has changed from being MySQL AB to Sun Microsystems, and as a result I have to do a complete uninstall and re-install manually…

Ho hum, I know it’s a small issue and for the best, but it’s still a pain in the ass when something silly such as  vendor name change wastes time in what would otherwise be a quick and simple upgrade.

So anyway as I’m going through it the following might be useful to you if you have to do the same any time soon.

First download all the current MySQL packages you need:

$hell> mkdir mysql-5.1.34

$hell> cd mysql-5.1.34

$hell> wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/MySQL-server-community-5.1.34-0.rhel4.i386.rpm/from/http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/ftp.mysql.com/

$hell> wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/MySQL-client-community-5.1.34-0.rhel4.i386.rpm/from/http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/ftp.mysql.com/

$hell> wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/MySQL-shared-community-5.1.34-0.rhel4.i386.rpm/from/http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/ftp.mysql.com/

$hell> wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/MySQL-shared-compat-5.1.34-0.rhel4.i386.rpm/from/http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/ftp.mysql.com/

$hell> wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/MySQL-devel-community-5.1.34-0.rhel4.i386.rpm/from/http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/ftp.mysql.com/

$hell> wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/MySQL-test-community-5.1.34-0.rhel4.i386.rpm/from/http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/ftp.mysql.com/

$hell> wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/MySQL-community-debuginfo-5.1.34-0.rhel4.i386.rpm/from/http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/ftp.mysql.com/

Then  stop all running MySQL Process:

$hell> /etc/init.d/myst stop

Then find all the MySQL packages you need to remove by running:

$hell> rpm -qa | grep -i '^mysql-'

Then uninstall each e.g.:

$hell> rpm -e MySQL-client-community-5.1.29-0.rhel4

Then re-install all the new ones you just downloaded e.g.:

$hell> rpm -i MySQL-shared-community-5.1.34-0.rhel4.i386.rpm

Then run the MySQL upgrade program to do the final checks and upgrade the MySQL system database if necessary:

$hell> /usr/bin/mysql_upgrade -uroot -p

And that’s it, all should work nicely again

Remember though, you shouldn’t upgrade between major versions that aren’t in sequence. i.e. Don’t upgrade from MySQL from 4.0 to 5.1 as the additions to the software made in 4.1, 5.0, etc. can be lost by skipping these intermediate upgrades.

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I subscribe to the Security Focus web application security mailing list and as a result I get all kinds of mail through on various topics from across the field.

Recently (last 6-9 months or so) a few have caught my eye that I thought would be useful to forward to friends and colleagues also in the business, and similarly I thought I’d summarise those items here too:

Anti-fraud Image Solutions from Gunter Ollmann

Checklist for testing web apps from Paul Johnston

OWASP TESTING GUIDE v3 from OWASP

The Extended HTML Form attack revisited from Sandro Gauci

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So, not thinking about it, I tried to remotely SSH into Ubuntu on my PS3 today only to get a connection refused message. Turns out SSH isn’t installed by default on this distro (or poss with the settings I chose) so I had to use good old apt to install it:

$hell> sudo apt-get install ssh

It all installed fine, no config options required, and I can now connect from anywhere on the network - Woo

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Recently I wanted a new development box/streaming media server for use around the house and for work.

After looking at the prices of all the main small form factor PC's or NAS boxes that would let me do this I could see that I was easily looking at £200-£250 minimum for the kind of setup I wanted to put together.

At the same time, I happened to notice that Sony actually support the use of Ubuntu as an alternative OS on the playstation 3 (or possibly Ubuntu Support the PS3 as an installation platform - whichever, it doesn't matter, the point is that some one does and it works!).

Now, an 80Gb PS3 is about £290 at the time of writing and has oodles of inbuilt support as a streaming media client, media storage and playback and a blue-ray player, as well as giving me the option to install a fully functional version of linux that will allow me to do whatever the hell I liked (RAM permitting).
So last weekend I bought one and, aside from playing games, I have just finished setting up Ubuntu 9.04 on it and I'm actually blogging this via firefox on the PS3 - woohoo

So what did I have to do to get this working?

Well the first thing to remember, if you've had a PS3 for a while and want to keep all your game saves, downloads, etc. is to back them up! There's an easy tool to do this in the system settings menu and I found having an external  USB HDD rather than a memory stick to hand was quite useful for this. Also you might want to sync your trophy collection with the Playstation Network Servers if you're interested in keeping that kinda stuff.

Once you've done your backups, you'll need to set aside a partition for the new OS to use.

To do this, oddly enough you have to use the format disk utility from system menu, as this where the partition management is also done. Basically you select the option and you'll get the choice of either giving the Guest OS 10 GB, and the PS3 the rest of the space, or the PS3 10GB and the Guest OS the rest of the space.

I chose to give the guest OS 10Gb and keep the PS3 holding the bulk of the space as I can see myself downloading a fair few games from the playstation network over the next couple of years. Also though this 10GB default setting isn't massive,  for my needs, as a system partition it's fine since I intend to run a 1TB data tank off the back of the PS3 to hold any other media.

Anyway, what seems to happen when you do this is that the PS3 re-formats the part of the disk allocated for all non-essential user data i.e. downloads and game saves and frees up a 10Gb chunk for the new OS.

At this point I'm pretty sure you get a prompt to insert the installation media for the new OS (if you don't just click through the options relating to guest OS's and it will pop up somewhere), so you then need to get (in my case as I'm using Ubuntu) the Ubuntu installation image for powerPC and PS3 and burn it to a CD. You can get Jaunty (9.04) here

Once you have the CD in hand, simply insert it into the PS3 and the install process will start as normal with any linux distro, allowing you to partition your allocated space and setup any basic system options - note however that the install may take quite a while due to the processing speed and allocated RAM of the PS3 - that said once installed Ubuntu seems to run pretty smoothly.

To get the linux side working you need to chose the default OS to use from the system settings menu i.e. PS3 or 'Guest OS' choosing the latter will fire up Ubuntu as normal on any standard PC. The PS3 will then always boot into Ubuntu unless you type 'game' at the boot prompt, which will reset the default OS to being the PS3's own OS.

Once Ubuntu has loaded all you need to do to install Apache, PHP and MySQL, is open up a terminal and type the following (Note: I'd install MySQL first as components of Apache and PHP seem to need the libs anyway):

$shell> sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.1

$shell> sudo apt-get install apache2

$shell> sudo apt-get install php5

Note: for some reason the MySQL setup also requires you to setup postfix, I'm not sure why but I did this anyway as it prompted me to and having postfix active on this box is no bad thing really.

The last thing to do was to boot back into the PS3 and restore the backup up game files and resync the trophies and all is done...

So that's it. I now have a fancy pants gaming system, blue ray player, media server (when I setup twonky media) and a development box all for under £300

In all, if you've installed linux before and are not afraid to click around the system settings of your PS3 the whole process is pretty straightforwards and self explanatory. That said, before I actually went the whole hog I did do a little bit of research and found the following sites which was quite handy to start with. The comments on some of the articles aren't great, and some are dated now, as doing what I've outlined above has seemed to work fine for me:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PlayStation_3

http://psubuntu.com/wiki/UbuntuVersions?show_comments=1#comments

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I can across a few other funky things in MySQL 5.1 today that I thought it might be worth telling you about in case you ever come across them too.

This time I was partitioning a number of large tables in and initially started to get the same weird errors as I did before when stupid queries were running away with themselves due to lack of temp space.

When you partition a table, MySQL seems to build a partitioned copy of it on the file system before swapping to that table for general use – which seems like a fair way to go, but if you don’t have enough temp space for the new table to be built in you get issues similar to those I discussed here, and you can get round them in the same way.

In my case, when doing this kind of maintenance I now add an ‘overflow’ path to the tmpdir variable which is basically a dir on part of the local filesystem with a large chunk of free space on it, but that isn’t on the same partition as the MySQL tables themselves.

This allows these operations to spill over when they need to without causing a lot of hassle – be warned though, it’s not generally a good idea to use a fileshare on a NAS for this procedure! I don’t know how well it’d work with a SAN as I don’t have one to play with, but doing it on a NAS will be REALLY slow in most cases and may cause other issues as a result.

But anyway that’s not the main thing I wanted to talk about.

What I wanted to talk about here is all your databases suddenly apparently vanishing altogether from MySQL after you’ve implemented some a partitioning scheme. I guess the same would apply if you suddenly added a load of new databases/database tables to your MySQL setup too.

At the same time as vanishing databases I’ve also seen errors where MySQL reports that it cannot open the directory on the file system that a particular database resides in, and other similar filesystem related error messages.

What causes this to happen? Well it appears to be the a combination of the max number of connections, the max files mysql  can open and the table cache, which dictates the number of files MySQL can have open at any one time.

Basically what seems to happen is that when table cache gets full, MySQL essentially dies not being able to open any more database files, and therefore cannot access any more information either. BUT because the main operation on the server is not interrupted it seems that the MySQL process doesn’t die - it just continues to run but without access to any information, as if none of it ever existed!

This tends to happen after partitioning has been done because a partitioning scheme can result in a large number of new database data files being produced – after all, that’s all it’s doing, breaking one massive single myISAM file down into more manageable chunks.

Also another reason it tends to happen after partitioning is because partitioning came in in MySQL 5.1 and in MySQL 5.1 the name of the table cache server variable (at least) changed from table_cache to table_open_cache. So, if your my.cnf or my.ini still references table_cache and your running 5.1.3 upwards you’ll not actually be setting this value any more and as a result the server will revert to its default value – namely 64 – a tiny amount.

I have seen recommendations that you should set this value to around to 2048 for a lot of systems (which seems a bit arbitrary really), but the way to determine what kind of numbers you should be using here comes from analysing the results of the opened_files server status variable traded off against the max connections, and whatever the table cache is currently set to - see the resources links below for more info on this – you can access this status variable and a few other useful related parameters by running: 

SHOW STATUS LIKE '%open%';

Issues can also ensue when the number of files opened by the server exceeds/hits the limit of the total number of files the operating system allows any one user to open, and if this actually appears to be the case you need to check the docs for your OS in order to up this limit.

To get an idea of the maximum number of tables mysql might look to open at any one time you can count the number of files in the mysql data dir  - this dir might also contain other junk like bin logs, error logs, etc. but for a rough upper limit this will do it:

ls -1R | wc -l

If your data dir is polluted with logs then you can filter this kind of a count through grep and add up the results:

ls -1R | grep *.MYI | wc -l

ls -1R | grep *.MYD | wc -l

To find out the number of files mysql has open currently you can also do this:

$shell> lsof | grep mysql | wc –l

You can find out the number of max open files your OS supports by running this:

$shell> cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max

Some resources on these issues:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/table-cache.html

http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?35,168304,168304

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/server-options.html#option_mysqld_open-files-limit

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/server-system-variables.html#sysvar_table_open_cache

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/not-enough-file-handles.html

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Fix+%27Too+many+open+files%27+error+on+Linux+by+increasing+filehandles

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/number-of-files-in-directory-274630/

http://www.techiesabode.com/article/read_article_w.php?article_id=2

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Well I found out a few new things today...

Firstly if you see an error similar to this:

Incorrect key file for table '/tmp/#sql_913_4.MYI'; try to repair it

It's likely you've got a dodgy query that is creating a temp table so big it's maxing out all your available temp filesystem space.

Secondly if you try to get round this by throwing disk space at the issue then you'll come unstuck.

Queries that create a self-join cartesian product, and contain ORDER BY clauses, cause the server to materialize the entire result set into a temporary table before applying any limits. If you try to get round this by giving the server a larger tmp dir to expand into, then you'll probably watch your disk fill up very quickly, as these can chew up literally tens of gigs of space or worse.

(by the way for reference, i'm paraphrasing Mark Matthews comment at the end of this: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=10075 and using experience from my own issue, similar results my be found with other queries that don't manage the data they're pulling back well)

Thirdly if you're trying to use mysql 5.1's new multiple tmpdir's option in the my.cnf file to provide that extra disk space you need to do it like this:

tmpdir = /tmp:/tmp2:/tmp3

Not like this:

tmpdir = /tmp/:/tmp2/:/tmp3/

As for some reason the mysql server doesn't like the trailing slash on the dir name and ignores the lot if you do it the latter way.

So there you go - I learned something new today, and hopefully, so have you!

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This is an interesting article from the Google operating system blog about plugin support in the Google Chrome Browser:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-google-chromes-future-support-for.html

With this approach however I have to ask myself, will Chrome ever exceed the abilities of Firefox?

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I love last.fm

It's basically made my mp3 collection redundant over the last few months (no mean feat, believe me) but until today I hadn't junked it completely because I didn't have a way of listening to last.fm on the move.

Yesterday I however I received my shiny new Nokia E71 on a slightly different contract from 3 which gives me full power to use the internet as I like (well subject to their fair usage policy anyway).

At the same time I noticed the new INQ phone from 3 also supported last.fm and went hunting for a last.fm mobile app, and that's when I found mobbler a free, open source version of the last.fm scrobbler for Symbian based mobile phones i.e. those made by Nokia

I'm glad to say it works really well and as a result I'm going to archive the mp3's and free up a good 100 gig of disk space - woo for social radio!

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At home I have Linksys WRT54GL router which I've had for 4/5 years now.

It's always been a dependable box with all the basic functionality I've needed onboard, but recently (mainly as a result of networking discussions at work) I've thought about doing more things which require more control over my internet connection.

When talking to a friend about this recently, he suggested I try Tomato out, as it's designed to work on boxes like mine and offers a lot of extra functionality over the standard supplied firmware.

So today I bit the bullet and gave it a whirl, and I couldn't be happier.

I now have a neat little accessible linux based router with all the extra useful features you'd expect - VPN, bandwith monitoring, signal monitoring, decent routing, cron jobs, custom scripting, etc.

Given that my router cost £35 when I bought it and other models that offer this level of extra functionality can cost a LOT more - I'm happy to say the least

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As anyone who actually reads this blog probably already knows, I work for an internet marketing company called Netbasic as projects manager and web developer.

We entered the Tech Track 100 this year and as you can see from their website we're No. 3, which makes us the 3rd fastest growing private technology company in the UK!

Not bad at all for just 7 people!

Since then we've doubled in size, grabbed some extra office space and completely revamped one of our bigger brands, accepted.co.uk - a mammoth task but something necessary to keep us on top of the game!

So what's next?

Well there'll be a number of exciting developments coming over the next couple of years (which I'm not going to talk about here), but keep your eyes peeled, cus credit crunch or not we're here to stay!

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Just found this which is quite cool: http://highslide.com/

Wordpress version here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/highslide4wp/

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Google chrome is a new lightweight browser released by Google, which is meant to be faster, safer, etc. and optimised for web apps such as Google provides (and I use).

I judge a browser by it's speed when I'm using it on the train (into and out of work), via my mobile broadband and what I can actually do with it in terms of functionality, and unfortunately I'm not impressed.

I don't like bloated software, but I don't like software that's so minimal I can't really use it.

So, though seemingly very fast on a standard internet connection, google chrome has been very slow on my mobile broadband, noticeably slower than firefox but not as slow as internet explorer. Gmail is comparativly slow as are other google apps such as igoogle.

Features wise it's not much better -  so far, it's so minimalistic it's almost unusable. Don't get me wrong, it has a few nice things in it but it's missing all the things I need and use every day.

So what's the answer?

Well I may be able to spped up the browser by turning off the usage statistics reporting (though this is on in firefox without issue), so I'll give that a try soon.

And if google produce a plugin API for chrome and developers actually code for it that'd be great. But saying that, what would be better (for me at least) is an interface that allows you to use native chrome plugins if they exist but, also import firefox plugins where possible.

As it stands, unfortunately, I'm quite underwhelmed with the usefulness of chrome and kinda wish it'd been released with a bit more usefulness than it currently has, at the very least it could have google toolbar options built in...

Lets hope they build on it quickly or else it'll just become another niche product for die hard googlephiles.

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HR managers in various companies can have a very difficult job when it comes to topics such as CEO Succession. They really need to be informed about new ideas and practices in the corporate industries on an ongoing basis. That said, it is always important to be aware of the changing trends in recruitment and management strategies in any field of work relating to Human Resources.

That is why books about CEO Succession by Dennis Carey are so useful. I often read around management and recruitment strategies in my spare time and his books prove to be really helpful guides time and again. Dennis Carey is an author who is particularly insightful and his co-authors as well.

Writing about topics such as CEO Succession, How To Run A Company, The Human Side of M & A, and Music Publishing in Renaissance England can't be easy and he achieves it with gusto!

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Bit of an odd one this but earlier today I was watching a great TV show about Sculpture, the first part of a 6 part series on it's history, cultural implications and so on.

It's a fantastic documentary and the guy presenting it went all around the world looking at sculpture and rounded today's show (about sculpture of women) on plastic surgery - modern biological sculpture. He discussed beauty and various facial work, including rhinoplasty i.e "nose-job's".

This inspired me to go off onto the internet have a look at more information on rhinoplasty and other plastic surgry. As I did so I came accross this interesting article on perforated septum repair

It sounds a nasty business so I won't be taking part any time soon, but it is interesting the complications people experience in these operations and you've got to feel sorry for guys like Michael Jackson who underwent this surgery when they were new and fashionable without quite realising the implications further on in life.

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Here's a funny thing: I was browsing the web the yesterday and came across this post about a really inspirational Guy,  Dan Neumeister, California's Top healthcare executive which just seemed to stick with me.

First let me explain who Dan Neumeister actually is. He was the Senior Vice President, as well as Chief Operating Officer for Enloe Health System who also had the responsibility of  being the as Senior Executive responsible for the Medical Center there. He joined the Health System in 1997.

He was instrumental in helping Enloe emerge as a leading tertiary hospital for the north valley, and developed the nationally-recognized Enloe Heart Program, as well as assisting the design and construction of the new Enloe Cancer Center. He led the $80 million dollar expansion effort at the Enloe Esplanade facility, which nearly doubled the size of the Esplanade campus, including a new maternity center, expanded emergency room and all-new surgical suites.

What fantastic guy!

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I was flicking across the Wiley Interscience Journals website earlier today and kept seeing EcoQuest Intl analysis mentioned in almost every article I read about bacteria neutralisation. It seems that they produce a lot of high end sterilization equipment for the food production industry and healthcare.

This is important as it's surprisingly easy for bacteria to make it into pre-packaged, ready-cooked food. Not only that but when considering the quantity of superbugs reported in the news recently I'm sure we'd all be thankful that equipment like this is in use in our hospitals.

The last article I read (the one I've linked to above) was particularly interesting as it showed how effective the the EcoQuest Radiant Catalytic Ionization (RCI) cell was for the inactivation of bacteria such as E-coli, Listeria, Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, and other particularly harmful bacteria on stainless steel surfaces - the overwhelming result ALL micro-organisms tested were reduced by at least 90% after 24 hours of  exposure.

Cool eh?

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After finding this in a random search on Google for CSV to SQL converters a couple of days ago and dismissing it, I have just done some other queries for MySQL scripts and seen results like this:

What the hell is going on? Surely these don't give better SEO do they Google....?

They certainly don't help my search!

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How to filter user submitted data easily in PHP?

Posted using ShareThis

Firstly, as you can see this is my first post made as a direct result of using the ShareThis bookmarklet, which is pretty neat as it actually worked

Secondly and more importantly, I wanted to flag this up on my blog as it's something that quite often gets missed in PHP which is actually a very powerful tool.

As the author of the post above mentions, array_map() can be a useful function when sanitizing user data, but it has so many more uses too when dealing with the transformation of a data-set.

Basically a call such as $new_data = array_map('process_data', $old_data); will allow you to transform each element in the $old_data array to a new element in the $new_data array via the function called process_data.

What's more you can manipulate multiple data-sets in this way too by specifying multiple arrays, so long as process_data() can take in the arguments.

For example lets say we have process_data($item1, $item2, $item3) which manipulates $item1, $item2, $item3 to produce a single result.

If we need to perform this calculation on a bulk set of data we can do

$new_data = array_map('process_data', $array_of_item1, $array_of_item2, $array_of_item3);

Easy huh?

I still see people performing these transformations, calculations, whatever, using for, foreach and while loops which can be prone to failure under certain conditions, and are probably less efficient code than simply making this call.

So why don't more people use it?  I don't know, but maybe this post will help raise awareness!

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refactormycode.com is a fledgling website setup as a project by French Canadian  Ruby Developer Marc-André Cournoyer and basically it's like a coding forum without the usual forum junk, style and obfuscation of content (forums for me are always a pain to use because of the tiers of information you have to go through).

It's a great looking website covering all the current major programming languages (at least when thinking of the web) and the idea behind it, though simple, seems to work really well.

Basically, you have some code that works, but you want to make it better, more efficient, or just tidier. So, you post your code sample and other people suggest changes. It's kind of like yahoo answers for developers or the comments foot of the PHP manual.

The code to be refactored, so far in the PHP section at least, has been of a reasonable standard i.e. that of at least intermediate developers, which is great as these services can tend to get flooded by newbies who don't know their $i++ from their ++$i :p and rapidly lose interest for me.

So far there are only a few PHP samples on there to comment on but I think, as the site begins to grow, there will be a wealth of well developed and critiqued code that serves as good examples or directly useable functionality.

So far I can't really fault it, other than making the "Best" link clearer by calling it "Best Refactorors"  or something similar, and providing some closed, or accepted answer(s) type functionality to stop a thread getting out of hand (it could be that this exists already but I just haven't seen it yet). Maybe even an option to download each refactoring as a plain text file could be useful.

So, to round up, as you can probably tell, I love this site and you can see my standing in the community in the foot of this page! Keep up the great work Marc and I hope your site develops in the way it deserves and gets the recognition it should!

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