May 5th, 2008

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Just got back from a StartupCamp5 and the beginning of Sun’s JavaOne Conference. Was able to spend a few hours back in San Francisco, see some friends and family.

Posted in: Application Servers, Industry, Java, Startups | No Comments »

April 26th, 2008

0

Many PHP developers out there are probably aware of the change in MySQL’s password hashing algorithm changes between version MySQL 4 and MySQL 5. It requires you to update User passwords when upgrading your database version. The syntax for how to do this is below. However, I just ran into a situation while doing maintenance on a web environment that required me to switch database servers and move and existing MySQL version 4.1.21-community-nt to 4.1.22-community-nt. Much to my surprise, this password hash change existing in MySQL 4.x even between minor releases.

SET PASSWORD FOR 'user'@'host' = OLD_PASSWORD('original-password');

Posted in: Databases | No Comments »

April 18th, 2008

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Its Spring time so I thought it would be a good idea to ring in the season by refreshing the colors on www.brianjeremy.com. In addition, I went out with the Ice Cream Man yesterday for lunch and got my first viewing of the new Toyota Yaris. Keep your eyes open for that Popsicle driving around town.

Posted in: Blogs, Personal | No Comments »

April 10th, 2008

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Tonight is the TechCrunch Geek Goes Chic party tonight with PopSugar at the Vanguard in Hollywood. I was fortunate enough make it on the limited list of the gathering where one of the largest fashion, beauty, shopping and celebrity news blogs commingles with technology folks that put these startups together.  I’ll make sure to report back on the outcome of the event.

Posted in: Industry, Startups | No Comments »

April 6th, 2008

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Well, the time has come. Its been a year and a half in the making… Please register for the private beta testing of Zigabid.com. For the promotion code enter “BJK” and you’ll get priority selection.

Posted in: C#, Databases, Grails, Groovy, Java, Startups | No Comments »

March 18th, 2008

1

If you don’t frequent browsershots.org you should be aware that they have released two new and very useful features. First, you can purchase priority processing so that your screenshots are processed much faster. In addition, the source code is now available for download. If you are interested in configuring your own Browsershots environment locally, I’d highly suggest it if you are in the field of QA or HTML development.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with browsershots.org, it generates screenshots of web pages in a variety of different browsers on multiple platforms so you can ensure you visitors are seeing page designs as they are intended to be viewed.

Posted in: HTML Development, Quality Assurance | 1 Comment »

February 11th, 2008

1

If you have upgraded from the Apple Safari version 2.0 web browser to 3.0 here are two quick tips that developers and Q&A folks might find useful. The first tip is to turn on the built-in Web Developers Kit which is similar to the Firefox Firebug plug-in. Once you activate it (instructions are below) you can launch it by right clicking the browser window and selecting “Inspect Element.” The other tip changes the page loading progress bar (the standard filling of the address bar from left to write in blue) to a simple pie chart that fills clockwise indicating page load completion. If you wish to deactivate either of these features you can use the same instructions replacing the “-bool true” with “-bool false”

Finder->Applications->Utilities->Terminal
 
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugUsePieProgressIndicator -bool true
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

Posted in: HTML Development, Scalability & Infrastructure, Web Servers | 1 Comment »

February 3rd, 2008

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I’ve recently been working on performance tuning a set of application servers for optimal performance of a high volume website. YSlow is a Firefox Add-on that works in conjunction with the Firebug add-on that is intended to help you analyze and understand performance based on Yahoo.com’s rules of “High Performance Websites.”

If you work with the YSlow tool in a development environment you likely aren’t going to be using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Akamai or Limelight Networks. Thus, you get a lower optimization score when testing. This can obviously be misleading, and there is a work around documented in Yahoo’s YSlow FAQ. The problem is that the documentation explains the work around must be configured via: “Go to about:config in Firefox. You’ll see the current list of preferences.” The issue/confusion is that many people don’t realize that “about:config” isn’t an option of your browser preferences, or preferences of your plug-ins. You must type “about:config” into the address bar of your browser to pull up these configuration parameters.

The YSlow plug-in itself is very useful. However, the documentation seems a bit lacking so hopefully I am able to save others who attempt to configure it some valuable time.

Posted in: Application Servers, Scalability & Infrastructure, Web Servers | No Comments »

February 3rd, 2008

1

Here is a quick an easy way to select random rows in SQL Server 2005:

SELECT
     ColumnA, ColumnB
FROM
     dbo.[TableName]
ORDER BY
     NEWID()

Posted in: Databases, SQL Server 2005 | 1 Comment »

February 3rd, 2008

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I’ve been involved in a lot of E-Commerce development recently. This has lead me to do a lot of research on pending California privacy legislation and PCI compliance. I’ve since come to the conclusion that people have a skewed view of how susceptible people are to credit card fraud and identity theft. I’m sure my dad will be thrilled to find out that I have now confirmed he is a genius, and I am going to follow in his footsteps by taking an action he took many years back when he began to make on-line purchases. I think since I’m so immersed in the “Industry” it is sometimes hard to be objective. At the time, I thought he was a bit paranoid when he told me his plan for making purchases on-line. His plan was to get a new credit card and only use it for on-line purchases. Guess what, this is a great idea… and I recommend it to all!

Posted in: Privacy, Security | No Comments »