June 15th, 2009 8:15am
Posted in Personal |
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I was not much of a coffee drinker before college. In senior year, after only having coffee when I needed to be up late studying, I purchased this coffee maker for my room. Well, it was actually a Christmas present for my parents, but as it turns out, neither of them are regular drinkers.
One of the features I like is its ability to brew at a preset time. For example, during the week, I wake up to the smell of coffee, brewed automatically at 8:00am. After a shower, I find the coffee’s temperature to be just right and it’s perfect to sip while having breakfast. And who can forget the boost of concentration and focus that caffeine gives you?
My improved performance throughout the morning is well worth the 10-minutes it takes each day to set the machine.
I guess this is a plug for coffee — Mr. Coffee in particular. And while I’m advertising, may I recommend Eight O’Clock Coffee 100% Columbian blend? They have Columbian available in both regular and decaf. After this bag, I have Eight O’Clock’s Hazelnut waiting for me.
Mmmmm…
Delicious!
June 14th, 2009 12:57pm
Posted in Programming |
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Many of Microsoft’s development products, when given an SQL query, will try to perform all sorts of analysis and breakdowns on the query — usually in an attempt to visualize what’s going on. When the queries become too complex (as the tend to be), they just can’t be parsed and visualized. Furthermore, when the successful parsing of a query is critical to one of their “wizards”, your report creation process can be brought to a standstill.
Queries that have a few levels of subquery nesting, or that have UNIONs, for example, will sometimes break parsing.
So, if you don’t want your development tools (such as Visual Studio) to get in the way of completing a report wizard, put your SQL query in a stored procedure. This way, your tools won’t be concerned with the nitty gritty details of your query. You can still pass @variables to the query, and you can make changes to the query without stepping into your designer’s .rdlc files.
January 17th, 2009 1:59pm
Posted in Programming |
1 Comment »
It’s been almost three weeks now since I’ve started learning the Magento ecommerce platform. With an impressive array of features, like product comparisons and a web services API, the platform sounds promising. I had hoped that by the time I’d revisit this topic, I’d be able to say I’ve successfully implemented the software. Instead I’m having trouble setting up my product catalog (it involves importing). And how can I forget to mention the overall issue of speed?
Let’s start at the beginning, at installation. Your web server likely has capable hardware, so you need to be sure that your software configuration meets requirements. Luckily the host I’m on was set up just fine the way it was. Obviously you need to download the software - I chose to download the Full Release (version 1.1.8 at the time). Read more »
January 4th, 2009 3:39pm
Posted in Programming |
2 Comments »
This afternoon, over disco fries and chicken tenders, I was discussing front-end development with my freshman year roommate. We started talking about random CSS techniques like browser compatibility and what the next version of CSS might be like. The conversation eventually landed on the topic of organizing really long and unmanageable CSS files.
We’ve all seen hideous CSS files, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of lines long. Finding the exact declaration you’re looking for can be a royal pain in the arse. It’s worse when style declarations for a particular element can be found more than once in a file (such as when the coder wants to separate structural styling from say typography styling).
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January 3rd, 2009 11:05am
Posted in Programming |
1 Comment »
I had known for a while that there was an iPhone application for Wordpress but for the longest time I couldn’t get it to work properly. Thankfully, we have Google as a resource, and a little querying quickly led me to a solution.
This is a problem that is likely to affect shared hosting. You have to add the following lines to your .htaccess file (or create an .htaccess file with these lines):
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I was not much of a coffee drinker before college. In senior year, after only having coffee when I needed to be up late studying, I purchased this coffee maker for my room. Well, it was actually a Christmas present for my parents, but as it turns out, neither of them are regular drinkers.
My improved performance throughout the morning is well worth the 10-minutes it takes each day to set the machine.
