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Podcast: Donald Knuth Lectures on Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

I recently read ‘Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About’ by Donald Knuth from 2001. Recommended reading if you like reading about how a world-renowned computer scientist wrote a book about how he wrote a book that deals with another book! Sounds recursive 😏 That last book is of course the bible and the book Knuth wrote about it is ‘3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated ‘ — published in 1991. And… Read More »Podcast: Donald Knuth Lectures on Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Cruddiy: table relationship support via foreign keys

Read here what Cruddiy is and what it can do for you: here is the code. TLDR: Cruddiy is no-code Bootstrap 4 PHP form builder for MySQL tables. I started Cruddiy when the Covid-19 lockdowns happened this spring, to keep me busy. And I released it on GitHub. After 25 stars 🤩 and 13 forks on GitHub and a couple of really encouraging messages on the original Cruddiy post, I… Read More »Cruddiy: table relationship support via foreign keys

New WordPress theme: Neve

  • Tech

Frequent visitors might notice a change to the site: I switched WordPress themes. I have been a happy user of the Independent Publisher theme since this site started, and I still use it on my other blog. It’s a terrific theme and I like a lot. But because I really like clean and simple aesthetic I made quite a few tweaks to it, specifically to the fonts and CSS. My… Read More »New WordPress theme: Neve

Jitsi finetuning and customization

Jitsi offers a great user experience because it doesn’t require an account, you just go to a Chrome URL and you’re pretty much good to go. You get a full blown video chat environment: complete with gridview, screensharing and chat options. No add ons or third party installations needed. I greatly prefer this instead of Zoom, Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams or what have you. Jitsi is also a great… Read More »Jitsi finetuning and customization

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. But 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/ˈfɒstə/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) 🙈 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!