A day in the life of…

If you maintain a tecnhnical programmers blog, you occasionaly need to post code snippets. I use a syntax highlighter plugin on my blog to make those snippets look nice and highlighted. It works and it’s easy enough to implement and maintain. But Github might come with a even better solution: gists…

I’ve posted a blog at the @enrise techblog about enhancing SPL’s appenditerator. This lovely iterator can be useful from time to time but it does not always do what you need. Here’s how you can easily create your own iterator: http://www.enrise.com/2010/12/appending-the-appenditerator/ At Enrise, we decided to start blogging more about our projects, the techniques we [...]

When asking what THE advantage of InnoDB over other MySQL engines like MyISAM is, then 9 out of 10 times the answer will be that InnoDB supports transactions. And it’s true. But there is more about transactions than meets the eye. Let’s explore one of the most difficult area’s: isolation levels.

I was on the verge of creating a post about the TSL/SSL handshaking, when I discovered a blogpost about the very same subject. Since I don’t think it’s of much use to blog about exactly the same thing, and I can really recommend Jeff Moser’s page so please read and understand it. http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html So I [...]

This post is not so much for developers as it is for the managers and bosses from those developers. As you probably know by now, managing software engineers (or programmers) is not an easy task. They just don’t like to play by the rules you always took for granted. Why is that? Why are those [...]

Autoincrement is sometimes called a “poor-man-sequence”. Sequences in other DB systems are counters that can be used for automatically number fields when inserting data, just like autoincrement in MySQL does, but they can be much more complex. However, in MySQL you do not always you want or need increments of 1. Sometimes you need something [...]

Oauth is a very popular authentication mechanism used for a lot of web applications. And not without good reasons. It is relatively easy to implement, has different flavours (2-legged, 3-legged system) so you can use almost anywhere that requires authentication and authorization. This post is not about how to implement oauth. That can be found [...]

For the readers who get the Aaron Sorkin reference in the title, do not be alarmed: this will NOT be my final blog post, just the last of the season. One year ago I’ve decided to do some (active) blogging about all tech related things I encounter in both my professional as my private life [...]

Today I stumbled across an odd problem which took me about an hour to figure out what was going on. It had to do with mt_srand(), where it looked like it didn’t work properly. I needed a repeatable sequence of random numbers (which is EXACTLY what the Mersenne Twister produces) so I used mt_srand() with [...]

SSL & virtualhosting on 1 IP address? I can’t be done! Well, this might have been the case a few years ago but times has changed. Let’s explore the possibilites to have multiple hosts running on the same IP address AND all of them have their own separate SSL domain and certificates. It’s possible, but [...]