Category Archives: Development

I got about half way through this article before I realised I’m really not interested in it. If I was coding a demo or something that was performance critical then I’d use C/C++ possibly with a dash of ASM but otherwise, give me the garbage collecting, lots of data types, memory checking, higher level languages any day. 🙂

Introduction to the Firebird Database – A brief introduction, but good reading if you haven’t used it (like me!)
Custom Underlines – oh cute! CSS underlining of links using graphics!

A long thread on Computer Science was started by Niall O Broin earlier today. It went through the usual arguments about what constituted CS and what was important. Some argued that low lever languages were a waste of time as most developers won’t ever touch that aspect of programming, but I tend to agree with Kenn Humborg and say that ASM is important, and anyway, it’s fun and logical and more interesting in many ways than high level coding!

Simon Sillison posted a great article on making forms more usable. I use a few of the techniques already but I didn’t know others. A comment left on his site indicates problems with browsers other than Mozilla, so maybe it’s about time you all upgrade! 😉

There’s probably something to be said for this quote but I would hasten to add that once you start hacking I don’t think everything that’s been learnt before goes out the window!

First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack. — George Carrette

Esos shows a good way of removing duplicate entries from a database table. Of course, if primary keys were used this shouldn’t happen, but doing a select distinct into another table is neat !

This post by Justin Mason is a fwd of a mail announcing the startling news that software patents are now legal in the EU. *bam* There goes Free Software in Europe! (maybe..)
UPDATE! Justin posted a follow up stating that there’s another stage to go through before it’s law in the EU. Colm replied saying it was at the “committee” stage still, and asking people to get in touch with their MEPs to reject the upcoming law!

This looks really useful. A script that’ll convert CPAN Perl modules into RPMs. Thankfully I haven’t needed to use CPAN in a while so I haven’t had to use this yet, but I will!

John points at a story about relaunching websites. I dunno, It doesn’t make sense to completely revamp your site, but it still happens. We’re in the middle of a relaunch, and while the site design is going to change, the basic contents and structure isn’t. Does that count as a redesign? Incremental changes happen all the time of course, without them the site would stagnate and glaring bugs wouldn’t be fixed!

Never trust the data entered by your users. hehe.