The past couple of weeks I’ve been asked to go find some article that talks about so-and-so or to go look at a forum topic that mentions XYZ. This is not the biggest pain in the ass as I can pop into sql and fairly quickly find what I’m looking for but DAMN I would [...]

So this Monday I found out that one of our datasets was not being parsed anymore — it was the most important one…FUCK! After much cursing and much bullshitting I admitted that I was being sent UTF-16LE encoded text and my program was set to receive UTF8. My first “fix” was to look for the [...]

Beginnings (circa 1 year ago) I had finally grabbed a schema dump of how their ‘wonderful’ database worked. I was so elated that we would not have to re-invent the wheel. This dump was actually a fairly nice looking pdf describing in detail about their 60 column wide 60+ table design — to say the [...]

So I have to admit — I kinda have a hardon for key-value stores, also known as hash dbs. Why? Cause they are hashes which is the data strucuture I’ll use right before deciding to make something a class and they are incredibly fast. Relational databases are about fucking retarded when it comes to storing [...]

So I come in Monday morning one fine week after a long drunken hiatus to find a ‘badhand’ in my inbox. A badhand is a feature I implemented on one of the sites we are developing so that users can inform me that my parser did not correctly produce the expected xml. This saves me [...]

Yesterday on the reia mailing list Tony asked all of our opinions on indentation sensitivity. This is what we had to say: This is what he had to say. So basically python can stick it! Don’t worry, it’s not just because of the ponies or because it’s a speed demon compared to ruby and we [...]

Hiro Nakamura is a level-3 programmer, from the television show “Heros” that one day discovers he can manipulate space and time. Hiro, however is not the best thing to come out of the Tokyo software industry. Recently I’ve been spending the last couple of months trying to learn how to scale our databases for the [...]

The very first thing you’ll want to after hopping out of bed and grabbing that first cup of coffee is to take your retard capsules (buy one, get one free!) Next tell yourself that today is going to be shitty because you stubbed your toe, your hangover is starting up and you just realized that [...]

Sounds like this is a security related article, doesn’t? Ahh, and right you are — only it’s not the security article that you thought it was. Rather this is here to point out the reasoning why being a professional programmer should only be left to those who hack in their spare time. I have been [...]