Ron Paul has to be one of the most courageous and honest politicians that has ever served in Congress.

Mr. Speaker, we should understand that decimating the protections that our Constitution provides us against the government is far more dangerous to the future of this country than whatever external threats may exist. We can protect this country without violating the Constitution and I urge my colleagues to reconsider their support for this measure.

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AT&T recently started their closed, limited beta of their new web browsing application, code named Pogo. This browser is built upon the same source code found in Firefox 2 which was recently laid to rest with the launch of Firefox 3 last week. After receiving an invitation to download Pogo, I started installing it. Oddly enough, even though it is based on the Mozilla source code, it didn't even ask about importing my information from Firefox.

The installation on my Windows Vista Home Premium x64 went off without a hitch. After watching the professionally [Read More]

One of the problems of using CakePHP with an Oracle database is that CakePHP does not utilize bind variables. One of the advantages of Oracle is that it can cache query results based on queries, as long as those queries use bind variables and not strings. An example of a query using binds looks like: When I first started working with Oracle, I was not aware of the [Read More]

A lot has been going on over the past couple weeks. Firefox 3 was released today and appears to have set a record for most downloads in a day. AT&T's Pogo browser appears to be in limited beta now. Its visual history and bookmarks looks like a major bonus. If anyone has a beta invite, I'd love to get my hands on it.

I'm headed to Denver, CO to help my brother-in-law and his wife move to Charlotte, NC on Friday. Looks like it could be three full days of driving, [Read More]

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During the development phase of a recent project, another developer and I spent a good amount of time trying to find a anayltics package to use on a new application. Our requirements were short and sweet, but it was difficult to find a package that did was we needed out of the box. We did not review any log analyzers due to the need for up to the minute stats.

Requirements:

• Collect stats via PHP (no javascript needed on every page).
• Work with Oracle, not just MySQL.
• We own the data (no hosted solutions).
• API available to access pieces of data.
• Handle stat collection for 2 million page views a day.

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My wife won tickets for the NASCAR All-Star Race last weekend. Since we moved to Charlotte, we've always talked about venturing over to the race track. We made it out there last year when she bought me a day at the track where I got to actually drive a NASCAR car around the track for eight laps. However, we had never experienced a race day. [Read More]

Since Friday was my last day as a web developer for SportingNews.com, I have been trying to reclaim my BlackJack from being attached to their Exchange server. I thought I had successfully removed the Exchange link, only to find that every single contact had been deleted along with my calendar. After scouring the net for a solution, I finally stumbled upon the answer from a comment ashvinlima wrote: [Read More]

Uncle Jay fights back... [Read More]

One of the major negatives of using Oracle 10g and PHP to build applications is the obvious lack of connection pooling.

Without pooling, frequent connection creation and destruction can be expensive and crippling to high scalability. Oracle's traditional middle-tier connection pools were not applicable to the multi-process PHP architecture. Caching connections within PHP removed connection creation and destruction costs but did not achieve optimal connection resource utilization, incurring unnecessary memory overhead in the database.

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