Category: Howto
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Avoiding the news with the nuclear option
Despite talking about avoiding the news, I’ll confess that I dip in more often than I should. I blame my data hoarding tendencies, but I think it started for me a little after 9/11 when I started obsessively checking the headlines every 5-30 minutes to make sure nothing else had blown up. The reality is, […]
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oDesk hiring tip: ask for the cat
We’re expanding again, but this time the needs are either fairly specific and short-term or fairly generic and not requiring close team integration, so it’s a perfect window of opportunity for some remote outsourcing. I gave oDesk another try after a fairly disastrous earlier hiring attempt a year or two ago, and partly it’s because […]
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New on LGG: how to quickly make a mobile version of a site
Over at LGG Media, we’ve started sharing some of the stuff we do in a series of Technical Notes (OK, there’s only one right now, but it’ll be a series, honest!). We’re releasing them as PDFs because… wait for it… yes, I frigging hate formatting source code in HTML even with a good plugin. In […]
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How to use Craigslist to hire effectively
So it looks like Scoble’s discovered the joys of hiring via Craigslist: the signal to noise ratio is off the charts bad. I don’t know if this is the first time he’s tried it, but judging from the helpful list of tips for job seekers, he probably went through the standard emotional ride: Step 1) […]
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Inbox Zero and Simplification
Having finally achieved a count of zero in all my inboxes (1 work, 1 personal, and 2 for various projects), the trick now is staying on top of them. I’m sure it’s been written a bunch of times, but an inbox isn’t a to-do list, and shouldn’t be treated as one. I’ll admit, I get […]
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Troubleshooting MySQL connection pool timeouts in ADO.NET
Twitter followers: this post deals with MySQL troubleshooting which might not mean anything to you, depending on why you follow me. Still, welcome! Here’s a funny cat picture for you! Since I spent a chunk of my Saturday figuring this one out and there didn’t seem to be a lot of existing guidance online (maybe […]
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An actual key to the office is semi-prestigious but not as cool
Stolen shamelessly from this 37 Signals thread because I couldn’t find an official place to steal it from, but getting through the security gate each morning was the highlight of my day at my old job, and I’m pretty sure I let everyone know. (Yes, tagged with howto) Technorati Tags: Dilbert
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Regex: Make sure a phone number is 10 digits
I needed a generic validator for a phone number, and I started thinking about the format of the number but at the end of the day I just want to be sure that there are 10 digits in the entry, and the user can decorate that however he or she like with brackets, hyphens, dots […]
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Generating dynamic dates for MySQL test data
A quickie MySQL tip: I’ve been working on creating a standard testbed of data (more on that someday) for one of our apps, and the issue of dates came up. Dates can be a problem in test data if they’re being compared to today’s date, i.e. if it matters if the date field represents something […]
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How to enable the Goto Line command in Notepad
This was driving me nuts during a recent server migration where Notepad was the most readily available troubleshooting tool – sometimes I’d hit Control-G and a “goto line number:” prompt would appear, and sometimes it wouldn’t. As it turns out, the Goto command in Notepad is only enabled when word wrap is turned off. Ah. […]