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Ten pieces of software that removed roadblocks

Successful software is not defined by the number of lines of code or number of clever algorithms. More often than not, successful software is defined by how many roadblocks it removes for the user. Sounds obvious, right? But it usually takes a few iterations before software gains critical mass. And for a (critical) mass number of users, you need to remove roadblocks. Roadblocks that power-users or early adopters don’t mind… Read More »Ten pieces of software that removed roadblocks

Cruddiy: a no-code Bootstrap CRUD generator

November 2020: Cruddiy now supports creating and deleting table relations (based on foreign keys) for cascading deletes/updates and and prepopulating select lists. Read more here. So you have a MySQL database and a user who should be able to do some standard database actions, like Create, Read, Update or Delete database records. Nothing fancy. And, this is a non-technical user, so you don’t want to give them access to phpMyAdmin,… Read More »Cruddiy: a no-code Bootstrap CRUD generator

Use find (1) as a quick and dirty duplicate file finder

Run the following two commands in bash to get a listing of all duplicate files (from a directory or location). This can help you clean out duplicate files that sometimes accumulate over time. The first command uses find to print all files (and specific attributes) from a specific location to a file, prefixing the size of the file in the name. This way all files with the same filename and… Read More »Use find (1) as a quick and dirty duplicate file finder

Foster: how to build your own bookshelf management web application

foster/ˈfΙ’stΙ™/verb 1. Encourage the development of (something, especially something desirable). “the teacher’s task is to foster learning” TLDR: I made a personal bookshelf management web application and named it Foster and you can find it here. Here’s what I did — with gifs–, so you might build your own. Name I named it Foster. Because of *this* blog post — it accompanies the application, so it’s self-referential. And also, because… Read More »Foster: how to build your own bookshelf management web application

PHP: how did it become so popular?

PHP empowers a gigantic part of the internet. So it is, by definition, a very popular (i.e. prevalent) language. But it also very popular (i.e. well-liked) to dislike PHP as a — serious — language. This could be explained as one of the side effects of that same popularity. With great exposure, comes greater scrutiny. But that would be too easy. Because when discussing PHP as a serious computer programming… Read More »PHP: how did it become so popular?

Popular post postmortem

Yesterday I wrote a story about how Git is eating the world. And in less than 24 hours more than 10.000 people visited this article! This is not the normal kind of traffic for this site. So that calls for its own article. Not only did the above WordPress plugin tell me I hit 10.000, but my server logs said the same. grep git-is-eating-the-world j11g-access.log|awk ‘{print $1}’|sort -u|wc -l I… Read More »Popular post postmortem

Git is eating the world

The inception of Git (2005) is more or less the halfway point between the inception of Linux (1991) and today (2019). A lot has happened since. One thing is clear however: software is eating the world and Git is the fork with which it is being eaten. (Yes, pun intended). Linux and Git In 2005, as far as Linus Torvalds’ legacy was concerned, he didn’t need to worry. His pet… Read More »Git is eating the world

Gid – Get it done!

  • Tech

Last weekend I built a personal ToDo app. Partly as an excuse to mess around a bit with all this ‘new and hip’ Web 2.0 technology (jQuery and Bootstrap) πŸ™ˆ But mostly because I needed one, and I couldn’t find a decent one. Decent? Decent in my opinion would be: Self hosted Self contained Use a plain text file Mobile friendly Able to track / see DONE items And Gid… Read More »Gid – Get it done!

Create a Chrome bookmark html file to import list of URLs

I recently switched RSS providers and I could only extract my saved posts as a list of URLs. So I thought I’d add these to a bookmark folder in Chrome. However, Chrome bookmark import only accepts a specifically formatted .html file. So if you have a file with all your urls, name this file ‘url.txt’ and run this script to create a .html file that you can import in Chrome… Read More »Create a Chrome bookmark html file to import list of URLs

About WordPress, emojis, MySQL and latin1, utf8 and utf8mb4 character sets

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PSA: the MySQL utf8 character set is not real Unicode utf8. Instead use utf8mb4. So you landed here because some parts of your website are garbled. And this happened after a server or website migration. You exported your database and imported this export or dump on the new server. And now your posts look like this: When they should look like this: These are screenshots from this website. This website… Read More »About WordPress, emojis, MySQL and latin1, utf8 and utf8mb4 character sets

Use PostgreSQL REPLACE() to replace dots with commas (dollar to euro)

If you have set up your database tables correctly you might be using double-precision floating numbers to store currency values. This works great because dollars use dots to represent decimals. The problem starts when it’s not actually dollars you are storing but euros, and maybe you need to copy query output to Excel or LibreOffice Calc to work with these Euro values. Both of these spreadsheet programs don’t know how… Read More »Use PostgreSQL REPLACE() to replace dots with commas (dollar to euro)

Ten years on Twitter πŸ”Ÿβ€οΈ

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Today marks my ten year anniversary on Twitter! There are few other web services I have been using for ten years. Sure, I have been e-mailing and blogging for longer, but those are activities — like browsing — and not specifically tied to one service (e.g. Gmail is just one of many mail services). And after ten years, Twitter is still a valuable and fun addition to life online. But it… Read More »Ten years on Twitter πŸ”Ÿβ€οΈ