Dear lazyweb, Over the past year, I’ve spoken to a few clients about performing on-site training for their staff in things like Linux administration, SQL, PHP, etc. I’ve also gotten a few training contracts as a result, and those contracts have gone quite well, and I have some repeat business already! I really really enjoy…
Category: Database
What Ordinary Users Think About IE: Debunked
Point all of your chain-mail-forwarding family and friends at this post. It’s a collection of things people have said to me, or that I’ve overheard, that reveal little tidbits about what people are thinking when they use IE. I have to use IE – it’s my internet! IE is not your internet. IE is what’s…
Open Source Technology US Conference Calendar
One of the best ways to keep up with your field and network at the same time is to attend conferences. It’s one of the things I look forward to every year. After learning that O’Reilly has decided to commit blasphemy and *not* hold OSCON in Portland, Oregon the same week as the Oregon Brewers…
How Are You Staffing Your Startup?
I have, in the past, worked for startups of varying forms. I worked for a spinoff that ultimately failed but had the most awesome product I’ve ever seen (neural networks were involved, need I say more?), I helped a buddy very early on with his startup, which did great until angel investors crept in, destroyed…
Help me pick a new feed reader
I’ve been using Google Reader since it was created. I really love the *idea* of Google Reader. I like that scrolling through the posts marks them as read. I like that you can toggle between list and expanded views of the posts. I like that you can search within a feed or across all feeds…
MySQL Problem and Solution Posts: r0ck.
Taming MySQL is… challenging. Especially in very large, fast-growth, ‘always-on’ environments. It’s one of those things where you seemingly can never know all there is to know about it. That’s why I really like coming across posts like this one from FreshBooks that describes a very real problem that was affecting their users, how they…
I’m a Top 25 Geek Blogger… for some value of “Top”
I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or…
Stop Doing Things That Don’t Work (a.k.a: Excel and Virtual Private Servers are Evil)
Note that I’m talking about using these tools in some kind of professional way, and more specifically, I’m talking about using Excel as a database, and using VPS hosting to host “professional” web sites. By “professional”, I mean something other than your personal blog, picture gallery, or other relatively inconsequential site. Excel is not a…
Generating Reports with Charts Using Python: ReportLab
UPDATE (Mar. 26, 2010) Just realized I never posted the link to the PDF the code here generates: here it is. My bad. I’ve been doing a little reporting project, and I’ve been searching around for quite some time for a good graphing and charting solution for general-purpose use. I had come across ReportLab before,…
Clone a table in MySQL without killing your server
So, I recently ran into one of those situations where a customer complains that his MySQL database is slow, and “it worked great until about two weeks ago”. The first thing I look at in these situations is not the queries or any code, but the indexes. Once I determined that the indexes were almost…