The Life and Times of Michael Shadle

One of my favorite parts about conferences is the schwag.

I'm a sucker for a free t-shirt. This year was a record - 11 shirts from OSCON 2012, and I missed going to the OpenStack anniversary event where I could have picked up another…

PHP 5.4 stuff I'm jazzed about...

I'm always excited to read updates to the NEWS file for each PHP version (yes, I am that big of a PHP fan boy) - and PHP 5.4 has quite a handful of noteworthy changes. I started…

PHP.reboot - are you kidding me?

Something just cropped up today on HN about a "reboot of PHP" - being a PHP fanboy, I decided to go look. I've had my own ideas on what I'd change (or rather, just clean up…

nginx goes "Prime time"

Today, Igor announced that he is establishing a company behind nginx, citing that he and some others are going to be focusing more seriously on development, support, etc. This is…

nginx hits 1.0(.0)

nginx, my webserver du joir, announced its 1.0.0 launch today. Along with the announcement, Igor has also posted a public SVN repository to grab the code from (which seems to…

Poor man's Global Redirect for Drupal 6.x

I was moving a customer's site from an old HTML and individual PHP page site to a friendly URL site managed by Drupal, and I only cared about intercepting URLs with those file…

How I sped up my MySQL restores

I want to share this with the world, as it may have been helpful up front for me. I had to move a database that is 13gb on the filesystem (not including the shared ibdata file) -…

Setting PHP INI parameters from nginx

A little known feature in PHP-FPM 5.3.3+ (since it was integrated into PHP core) is that you can actually define PHP INI parameters inside of your nginx configuration. This…

Verizon and Frontier have your password - just FYI

It was weird to see a company nowadays still have your password stored somewhere plaintext.

Mozy stops "unlimited" plan... and I mosey on

I've been a fan of Backblaze for a long time, and prefer it and recommend it over Mozy time and time again. Mozy was the golden child for a bit, but now the prize goes to…

United States of Google

Just saw this code on a site, I forgot this good stuff existed. I've seen it before in a post about Google's web fonts and using their jsapi to load the webfont.js file, and I…

True "Incognito" mode for Google chrome

I hate Windows. I do. This is a very hacky, no-garbage-collection, but still "working good enough" script. At the advice of #chromium on freenode, when asked about cookie sharing…

PHP 5.2.15 released, patch updated

PHP 5.2.15 was released today, and I've made a copy of the previous patch. It still applies without any issues (a "make test" looks good) - this is supposed to be the latest…

Netflix jumps on the fleecing bandwagon

If you've read some older posts, I have praised Netflix for multiple reasons: Great service Easy-to-use, feature-rich but not overbearing website Fast delivery times Actually…

I was wrong.

I was wrong, and I'm happy to admit it. I was worried that if FPM was to ever make it in to PHP core, it would stagnate and become part of such a big machine that it would take…

Pidoco - rapid prototyping/wireframing - why didn't I find this before?

A while ago, I was looking for tools to do prototyping/wireframing so I could explain my ideas a bit better than some crappy sketched out "wireframes" on paper. For some reason…

Drupal is NOT a CMS.

Contrary to what you may call it, and even what they say it is - a "Content Management Platform" - I consider it to be an extensible core framework that "happens to ship with many…

How to render Safari cookieless

Today we had an issue at work, an odd issue. OS X users using Safari wound up with a proxy issue after clicking on a button on our site, and reloading the page. The suspect seemed…

How would I change PHP?

Anyone who knows me knows I am a PHP fanboy. I use PHP for everything - web applications, web scraping, batch scripting, if there is an itch that software can fix, I try to…

Our credit system is broken

I got some results back on my credit report. Choice items such as: Length of account history is too short. Too long since most recent account established. What the hell? Don't…