Archive for the ‘rant’ Category

The Lack of Flexibility of Stored Procedures in MySQL

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Over three years ago I wrote about how you cannot use a stored procedure in a subquery. Well, it's 2010, and I'm still annoyed by this and a handful of other things. I was just working today on a report consisting of a series of queries, taking about a minute ...

Bad Web Developers Don’t Scale

Friday, September 11th, 2009

Over the last 5 years, I've read so many articles about how X doesn't scale. PHP, MySQL, SQL Server, Apache, you name it - everything gets a bad rap. Everyone has a different idea of scale and size, and sadly most people think their site with 1 million ...

Unsubscribing from ebay emails is insane

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Ebay deserves a lot of credit for building a massive system that never seems to be down. Great. But you know what? That doesn't excuse them for creating some really stupid interfaces or being complete assholes. At the bottom of an email they sent, I saw this gem ...

Stop Trying to be Clever

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

I'll keep this short. Please, stop trying to be clever. I'm talking to you, mediocre developer. I realized you think it's awesome to use a different file extension, like .awesome. It's not. You're really not accomplishing anything. If your excuse if that you don't ...

Experts Exchange should be removed from Google search results

Monday, July 30th, 2007

I was trying to figure out how to extend my wireless network down a few floors a few days ago, and one of my queries brought me to experts exchange. The question looked useful: Using Linksys WAP54G as Wireless Repeater. This is exactly what I wanted to do. ...

My beef with the Wikipedia

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

I used to think the wikipedia was pretty cool. The idea of being able to collaborate on a topic and create an article together sounds wonderful. Today, I say, it sucks. Want to know why? I edited an article, updating it with correct information, and my edit was ...