For many years, since version 4, I was an evangelist for the Drupal content management system. I built a lot of PHP modules for it and considered myself fairly expert with it. One Drupal site I built ran 90% on a custom module I’d built called FeedBuddy. It was an RSS aggregator of third party
AWS has become a fairly ubiquitous hosting option for small companies. But developers typically work on local dev setups outside the host and occasionally need access to the main dev and staging databases located on AWS. How do you do this and still run in a secure environment? One thing you don’t do is poke a hole in AWS‘ firewall and run PostgreSQL’s port
It’s ubiquitous on data driven web sites: the result set pager. We’ve all used them whether we built them from scratch or used one provided by the framework. Pagers are by nature performance suckers because we’re asking the database to re-run the same query for each “page”, slicing off just one set of contiguous rows
Developers, particularly web developers, have a need to work on external computers, often not within their local networks. Over the years I’ve employed everything from FTP to SFTP/SCP to Samba to NFS to VPNs to cranky Novell networks. All have their downsides, particularly with regard to security. I have a MacPro and originally ran NFS to connect to machines on my LAN. But as
Any developer who has worked with HIPAA compliancy knows that the law is murky at best and the fed doesn’t publish a programmers’ guide to make your life any easier. However, one of the cardinal rules is the requirement to keep track of who sees HIPAA data, who modifies it and when this was done.
One issue I run across occasionally is a table with duplicate entries such as two entries for the same company in an accounts payable system. This can create embarrassing problems with billing if ACME Inc #1 is 90 days overdue because someone posted a payment, and now a credit, to ACME Inc #2. I ran
One of the best things about motorcycling is spending a nice day exploring twisty back roads far from home. One of the worst things is getting lost while running low on fuel and being clueless not only about where you are but where to find gas. Fortunately, technology comes to the rescue again with a
A common reporting requirement in database applications is selecting the latest purchase, or latest job, or oldest chlld for each person in a table. Any beginning student of SQL knows how to return the most recent date in a table: SELECT MAX(rec_date) FROM sales; max ——————————- 2011-03-15 18:04:45.178057-04 (1 row) But that doesn’t tell us