Looks like another company is joining in the fight to unseat the top two web browsers. Others have come before, all have failed. See Flock, Avant, and Opera.

Now comes Pogo, by AT&T (a very unlikely development powerhouse). Many people will be turned off by the "deathstar" logo, but spend a minute watching their demo video and you will be amazed. [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.

[Read More]

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.

[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]

While messing with a new website that I am working on, I find a slightly annoying issue with CakePHP that doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. I was trying to store a thumb up/down record in a tinyint(1) field. A thumb up would have a value of 1 and a thumb down would have a value of -1. CakePHP was kindly(sarcism) converting my -1 to a 1 every time.

It appears that CakePHP assumes that all tinyint(1) fields are actually boolean fields. Therefore, if anything other than false is set in the field, it will store a 1 as the value.

So, if you notice that [Read More]

I wrote an article about how I think "content delivery" will be the next big thing on the internet. Today Google annouced, or maybe it was just discovered, that Google will be releasing their own internet browser, Google Chrome.

This falls easily into line with the ideas I outlined in the blog entry on blog.fluidesign.com. Google has a very vested interest in making sure content is delivered with relevant ads. I'd be willing to bet a [Read More]