Suppose you’re working on a web application to support users in multiple time zones. How do you handle dates and times? If your users all live in one time zone, it’s easy. Simply store important date and time data in DATETIME or TIMESTAMP columns, and be done with it. But, what application has users in just one time zone? Maybe a municipal… Read more →
Category: Reference
University students: beware the people who lend you money!
Bloomberg News published an article today putting the lie to Navient’s claim to helping manage student debt. In a court filing, the company (which used to be part of the Sallie Mae US federal student lending agency) said it was a conflict of interest to help students. Their primary role is collecting on loans. Dear students: Companies and governments who… Read more →
Test data for FULLTEXT searching
MySQL’s FULLTEXT search feature works best when it’s used on a large corpus of text. That is, for best results you need many rows. When the text corpus is too small, full text searching often returns strange results: the indexing process tries to work out common words. If the amount of text being indexed is too small, some words that… Read more →
Wondering about keeping yourself secure online?
Internet security guy Troy Hunt has put out a good video to teach you about keeping yourself secure online. This is free. It’s on youTube. Troy is very reliable. This is worth an hour of your time. https://www.troyhunt.com/get-to-grips-with-internet-security-basics-courtesy-of-varonis/ Read more →
Set up gmail to use a new email account
You can set up your gmail account to send and receive mail using other email accounts. This is convenient, because you don’t have to remember to log in to your other accounts to get that email. You can, of course, still receive and send email with your original gmail account. This video tutorial explains how to set up gmail to… Read more →
Insults
I thought William Shakespeare was the master of insults. “In civility thou seem’st so empty,” for example, from As you like it. But now Randall Munroe, the author of XKCD, is catching up with his insults about code quality. Read more →
DataTables.net — a nice way to display lots of data in a web page.
Lately I’ve been doing some work with Allan Jardine’s DataTables jQuery plugin. You know the SNL line saying, “if it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” This software does nothing to disprove that saying. It’s excellent. Datatables does a great, and simple, job of transforming plain old html data tables into sortable and searchable marvels. It also supports Ajax callbacks, allowing it to handle very… Read more →
Secure Random Text Strings in SQL Server
There are a lot of uses for hard-to-guess random text strings in the world of web applications. They’re good for session keys, nonces, and other such things to slow down cybercriminals. I had the occasion to figure out how to generate them in SQL Server. That DBMS includes a source of random numbers. Here’s what I came up. View the… Read more →
PDF?
Here’s a pdf. PDF Read more →
W3Schools? Expert Sex Change?
If you do any software development, you probably use the Google search engine to look up lots of details. Have you ever had to pick through your search results to avoid websites whose search engine optimization is better than their information? I’m looking at you, W3 Schools and Experts – Exchange! There’s a free Chrome plugin called W3SchoolsHider. Spetnik Solutions in St.… Read more →