03.24.08

spring?

Posted in offline at 7:09 am by paul

Waiting, hoping for spring to come! Meanwhile we’ve got the first signs of it here: the melting snow giving us back everything we, uh, loaned it all winter long.

First sign of spring

Bring on the singing birds and the daffodils!

03.22.08

commandments, part II

Posted in work at 8:59 pm by paul

OK more commandments. In no particular order:

Thou shalt not put database connect() statements inside a loop.

For real people! If you have a loop on a page, and it has a connect statement inside it, and you use pconnect() (we’re talking PHP, for what it’s worth), you should not disconnect after every iteration of the loop! GAH! Your poor database server will groan and pop rivets … and then you will be surprised if any number of people ever looks at your page, that the database server falls over or runs out of memory. Fie on you, fie I say!

Thou shalt not  post public links providing access to user data.

Yes, what I am saying is that obscurity is no security. Even if the page URL is something like /foo/bar/baz/a189a61b68f99aff909872507f6768c1.php. People can, you know, mail it to each other and then download all the mail addresses and names and phone numbers of everyone who entered your lousy-assed contest, with little to no possibility of ever being tracked down.

Thou shalt not use images 30 times the size in the <img> tag.

If you want the page to actually finish loading in the time someone might take to read it, you don’t put  a 1500×1200 image in a 60×60 box (anamorphically scaled, natch). You certainly don’t put a 3000×2000 image in another 60×60 box on the same page … at least they had the decency to put the images on someone else’s server, so I never saw the bandwidth bill.

So I’m up to four commandments and spending fast …

03.15.08

now, people

Posted in work at 6:34 am by paul

I hate to rag on people for not having technical skill or knowledge, but when your title is “Senior Technical Lead for Content Management” you don’t get a free pass. And when you also happen to be a professional, pinkie-ring wearing engineer, that raises my expectations too.

I expect that you understand some basics about how computers work. I expect you to understand the difference between a SAN and a NAS. I expect you to understand the difference between page view and a request.

So when I find, by having to explain it to you, that you do not know the difference between RAM and disk space, I don’t know whether to be angry or sad.