If you’re part of a larger team developing (and sharing) code, it is a pretty good idea to have some common standards. In the PHP work, such a set of common standards include the PEAR Coding Standards. While it may be a challenge to agree on standards, it can be done - the hard part is following the standards.

One excellent tool to help you check for standards compliance is the PHP CodeSniffer. We’ve had it running for quite awhile and it seems to work as advertised. We’ve made our own (“TDC”) coding standards which is a variation over the PEAR coding standards, and checking if you follow them is as simple as running a simple command line. While it doesn’t enforce following of the coding standards, it does make it a no-brainer to check if you do follow the common standards.

If you’re working on heavy duty websites, knowing your database and how to use it best can make a world of difference in terms of performance, and thus you should always optimize the database. That’s pretty much obvious.

The tricky part is how you do the optimization? Often it requires a lot of reading up on how the database works - strengths, weaknesses and other details — and loads of experience. Having a DBA available to help you optimize would be ideal in some cases, but often you need to do it yourself.

A while back I complained you couldn’t change title on documents in Google Docs. Well, you can. It just wasn’t obvious to me how you do it. Just click on the title while the document is open, and you can change it.

Mysql is a wonderful database, and while many use it, most people only scratch the surface of what the database can do. One of the practical functions available is the substring_index function, and an imaginary mailing list example is a nice way to show how to use it.

Let imagine we have a mailinglist in a table named “mailinglist” and it has a (char) column with the email addresses subscribed to the list. We now want to figure out how many users, that are subscribed from the various domains in the list.

Earlier this week Apple introduced a new line in their laptop lineup - the MacBook Air. On the web there’s been a number of people criticizing the MacBook Air, and frankly I really don’t get why they need to have every Apple product be a perfect match for them - they aren’t and they’re not supposed to be.

“Top 10 Flaws of the Macbook Air”

Let me add a few comments to some of the points on one of the lists criticizing the Macbook Air: