Garbage collection, in a very real sense
Flickr is working with the Library of Congress on new project The Commons. Currently there are around three thousand photographs up there from two collections, and according to the Commons homepage they’re all copyright-free. More information in the relevant post on the Flickr blog.
This is wonderful news, especially because the collection is being released through [...]
A busy few weeks, but they’ve included an import from a Blosxom blog to a WordPress blog which is worth describing. There are a couple of established methods for importing the data, and I opted for the one that seemed the most modular. This was Eric Davis’ Import-Blosxom method, consisting of a PHP script on [...]
If your web application ensures that all your incoming CGI variables are free of the most common source of malicious site damage, can you stop worrying?
I wondered this as I got far enough into a PHP publishing system that I had to start thinking about adding new content through the system (rather than just jamming [...]
Programmers: know your Excel!
People who don’t know how to hide rows and columns still do hide them. They just find… innovative and unexpected ways of doing so. Changing row height and column width, then protecting the cells against being resized (how they can do that and not know how to hide the cells is beyond [...]
I’ve been asked a couple of times recently, as part of separate projects, to split the results of a SQL query on whitespace within. Simply put, how does one go from:
foo
foo bar
quux
blort wuu spong
to the expanded form:
foo
foo
bar
quux
blort
wuu
spong
efficiently and cleanly, only using SQL? (In case anyone’s worried, I’ve scrubbed the data sets of any personal details [...]
Database design, as an intellectual exercise, can be tremendously satisfying. As one builds up relations and constraints, making your database just rigid enough to support the more intelligent model soon to be layered over it, it’s possible to feel a sense of future-problems-solved: this check will prevent the model from trying to call a service [...]