Archive for 'work'

Can you turn this excel spreadsheet into a web application?

The phrase above basically sums up my existence at my job. There’s all sorts of important information that people have been storing in an Excel Spreadsheet and now, they have no easy way of extracting that data and/or connecting that data to other data sources. In my continuing quest to figure out a better way [...]

Smiley faces

I put smiley faces in my SVN repository commits in hopes that someone will find them in the future and be reminded to “have a nice day”.

Nested Left Joins?!

I didn’t know you could write MySQL queries like this, but I just did: SELECT it.*,a.name parent_primary_attribute,d.value primary_value FROM itemtype it LEFT JOIN (primaryattribute pa LEFT JOIN (itemtypeattribute_default d, itemtypeattribute a) ON (pa.attribute_id=d.attribute_id AND pa.attribute_id=a.id) ) ON (it.parent_id=pa.type_id AND d.type_id=it.id) WHERE it.id=’$id’”;

MySQL Workbench 5.2

For those of you who like to see things visually, the newest release of MySQL workbench enables you to connect to your existing MySQL database and reverse engineer it so that you can see the full ERR (Entity Relationship R_____) Diagram in all its glory. For me this is helpful to see when I’m taking [...]

PHP Makes You a Lazy Programmer

The fact that you don’t have to initialize your variables in PHP makes me a very lazy programmer.  With a large scale project that I’ve been working on for the past 6 months, I’ve really paid the penalty for dumb mistakes like not initializing and resetting my variables.  So just because PHP doesn’t make you [...]

PHP String Concatentation Performance

I’m not sure if this is totally correct and I have no fixed way of measuring this (other than that I don’t get any timeout errors anymore) but I’ve noticed a significant difference when choosing between two different methods of string concatenation: Slow way: foreach($oranges as $orange){ $orange_str = $orange_str . $orange; } Better way: [...]

Embarrassing, lol

I’m handing over an application with zero documentation.

If I wanted to take the bus home from work…

Google Transit is saying that it will take me 53 minutes to get home if I ride the bus. It will cost me $1.50 to take the bus. It’s less than 10 miles between home and work. My car gets about 34 miles per gallon. Gas was like $3.79. I think it will be cheaper [...]