someGreatTechName

Symfony Dependency Injection - a really cool PHP tool

2011-06-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

Hi! Today I want to talk a little about a great design pattern called Dependency Injection and it's implementation by SensioLabs called simply Dependency Injection Component. Now dependency injection is basically the inversion of control in you classes. It can help you to create decoupled structures that can be configured at run time which gives you a lot of flexibility. Let's take a look at an

SilverStripe CMS for PHP programmers, not for dummies

2011-05-19T13:21:00.000-07:00

Hi there! Recently I've came across a pretty standard problem: 1. I had a simple php website with little php really, some routing, contact form handling, teamplating, nothing fancy 2. I hate doing boring stuff like CRUD's and CMS's 3. I make a lot of changes to the website 4. The website comes in 2 languages If you think "just user some cms" - well I had the same idea. I started from the best

Flash sites beware - UseItBetter is finally out!

2011-03-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone, just a quick note that the (super) cool tool for flash sites usability testing, recording and playing visits, making sophisticated site analysis is out! Almost two years of hard work and the collective work of great minds made it all possible. Check out more at www.UseItBetter.com Thanks, Peter

Importance of versioning software

2011-03-04T07:03:00.000-08:00

Why is versioning important? What's the difference of naming 1.0 or 0.1 or whatever. In my experience product versioning is a crucial aspect not only providing law and order but also invoking the paradigm of modern programming techniques. You can compare a good versioning strategy to the Code of Law of a community, however big or small. A good CoL will make your community prosper and evolve even

Why self-made frameworks are too expensive?

2011-02-07T06:17:00.000-08:00

As I progress in my PHP programming endeavours I tend to argue a lot about the same topics with different developers. Sometimes there is some reason in madness I hear, but very often there is much overheard information that somehow doesn't make any sense and causes real confusion with some people. As in my opinion many web developers/programmers are very narcissistic, and even if they wont admit

My favorite Christmas songs

2010-12-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

Hi! So this is Christmas... the time of the year when we basically forget about our computers and focus on the important things in life... eating yourself sick with your whole family. No Christmas would be complete without a good selection of seasonal music that accompanies us every year, here is my favourites on the subject: 1. John Lennon - so this is Christmas This song brings back old

Control authentication with KeePass and Dropbox

2010-12-18T05:21:00.000-08:00

Hi! A few weeks ago it's been brought to my attention that may people have problem with dealing with password sharing and access control of may resources at the same time. Imagine you have a team consisting of: - system admins - programmers - marketers Every position requires a different set of passwords, usually there is a lot of passwords (20+) that for security reasons should not be the

Multiple repositories in one with svn:externals

2010-12-17T15:29:00.000-08:00

Hi there! Recently I had a problem with my services: - I had 2 separate websites that use a kind of token authorization system - I had a lot of code that was used in both web services Of course the only smart thing to do when you have a sender and receiver on both ends is that its performed by the exactly same code as follows: Sender service: $token = new Token(); echo $token->generateToken();

Starting your own IT business? A few lessons to be learned.

2010-12-08T01:49:00.000-08:00

Hi! The thing is I decided to start My own business (http://fasttrack.pl but it isn't much to look at, still working on it), producing software and websites of course. After some three weeks of muddling through the polish law system I finally managed to start it officially :) After a few months I have some things I want to talk about that may help you in your endeavor. Aside from all problems

New exciting work to be done

2010-11-25T00:34:00.000-08:00

Hi ppl, long time no see. Fortunately my new business (creating www software) is growing fast, so I didn't have much time to write but a lot of stuff happened. I got a new job, a new car and and moved to a quieter city :) The car: (not the actual photo, but damn close) Black Jeep ZJ '96 - sounds pretty old - yep but the advantage is that its a V8 engine with over 200HP, makes a lot of fun:)

Some feedback on Google Closure Templates

2010-04-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

We've been using GCT at myvimu.com (My Virtual Museum). After the introduction of the new technology, we had some problems that needed solving: 1) The GCT compiler is a pretty unhandy tool, after some php modifications, we managed to get results faster. 2) No predefined directory/file handling structure was a big problem. I personally hate the directory maze of some developers, we had to keep

Organize your spaghetti javascript/java with Google Closure Templates

2010-01-23T04:15:00.000-08:00

pre *,pre { color:blue; font-family:Courier; * { font-family:Verdana; } If you ever developer something in javascript that has to have some html, its a real chore, for me anyway. Plain dom manipulation is pretty easy, but what do you do when you need to insert some dom nodes that weren't there before? I think it's pretty common to write something like this: //jQuery javascript: javascript:

Get a load of your database - paginated caching

2010-01-14T13:35:00.000-08:00

Your site is getting awfully slow? There's just to much reads to your database and you have already tweaked the performance of every query? In most cases data caching is the solution to your problem! The idea is to cache all processed data you heave retrieved from the database. Let us look on a example. It uses a mockup class that basically can handle any caching system like memcached or xcache

Sphinx and big integers

2010-01-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

I encountered a problem that can give headaches even to the toughest programmers. I think that the solution will be quite a relief to some people. The problem is when indexing in sphinx, the indexer sometimes prints out a warning/error message: WARNING: DOCID_MAX document_id, skipping which by the way is very annoying because it stops your indexing :) I've searched the web for some solution,

What motivates IT professionals?

2010-01-06T13:00:00.000-08:00

In my practice as a programmer I've come across some interesting people. A lot of my friends and co-workers of course are programmers, designers, network administrators. I is quite fascinating to look from a objective position on everyone and watch what motivates them the most. I've seen a few separate types of things that motivate people around. Here are a few person types I could distinguish:

How to build a fast, good scaling user notification system pt. 2

2010-01-03T05:55:00.000-08:00

This post is the second part of my earlier post on How to build a fast, good scaling user notification system where we discussed the problem areas of the said system. This post will be mostly about a strategy on the infrastructure to store all those notifications and retrieve them as fast as possible. The most common approach to store data like user notifications would be to create a table

Get data without reading it - the power of covering indexes in MySQL

2010-01-01T14:31:00.000-08:00

It's no real breakthrough, but it can have a very significant performance meaning to use covering indexes. Now you are sure to ask what a covering index really is? The answer is quite simple. If a index can provide all the data a query needs it becomes a covering index for it thus covering all the data the query needs. Still sounds too complicated? Let's have a look at a simple example. Let us

How to avoid InnoDB counter row level locking?

2009-12-28T10:28:00.000-08:00

Let's think about a situation where a counter gets updated very often, for example the view counter on a very popular New York Times post. Every time a user refreshes the page, a SQL query updates the counter. It would look something like this: UPDATE `posts` SET view_counter = view_counter + 1 WHERE id = 123 Now on a very busy site there can be problems with frequent counter row locks. If

How to build a fast, good scaling user notification system pt. 1

2009-12-26T00:06:00.001-08:00

Problem definition:Most social media sites have something called user notifications. Systems specially designed to generate user actions. Every notification, now matter how insignificant can generate a lot of click traffic. But how about the inside of the system? In school, or some book on SQL you would find something like this:Make a table with users; Make a table with notifications;Make a table

Sphinx, search and spamming

2009-12-25T10:42:00.001-08:00

Ever tried searching for something on a fulltext search based website? Each time You write a sentence in the "search" field, the web server most probably communicates with a search engine that priorly indexed some data in which you can search. Some of those sites are social media sites, some are sites in which being higher up the search ladder, can be of some benefit. My experience is mostly