… even crashes. While it shouldn’t matter too much, the eye candy (cool graphics, sweet effects and other eye pleasing stuff) on a Mac even makes me smile from time to time – and you just have a little more forgiveness to a program, which crashes with grace. Take Adium - my favourite Instant Messaging client. Being a multi language expert (and thus speaking both MSN, Jabber, GTalk, ICQ and other protocols) it does have a hard time, and some times – weeks if not months apart – a may go down in flames.

Browsing in other people code can be an interesting experience. Sometimes you learn stuff, other times you just get scared of the things you see. One recent observation I seem to make a lot, is that handling “application configuration” is often handled less gracefully as a would have wished. The plain basic configuration handling in many PHP applications seems to be creating a php-file and declare all configuration values in this file – then have all other scripts in the application include this one config file – and sure it works.

(Legacy post in Danish) Hold da op…. Nu er det faktisk 10 år siden jeg startede med at arbejde med Internet hos den virksomhed, der lige for tiden hedder TDC. Selvom jeg som sådan ikke har skiftet arbejde, så har der dog gennem årene været flere omvæltninger og skift, end de fleste sikkert har prøvet – selvom de har skiftet arbejde og virksomhed flere gange. I ”de gamle dage” sad vi sammen med DKnet ude på Symbion – her var det en lille afdeling, der lavede internet-løsninger for eksterne kunder. Nu er vi en stor afdeling, der kun laver interne løsninger i en af TDC’s egne bygninger.

I’ve been reading a lo ton the GTD philosophy the past six months, and while I haven’t fully adopted the preaching’s, some things are working better for me, than in the past in terms of time and project management. This is how I try to work towards less stressful days and more actual work.

Inbox management

I used to have well over 1.000 mails in the inbox. Through focused and efficient cleaning, it’s now down to around a hundred on an average day. Short mails are read and killed. Important issues are managed. FYIs and reference materials are either killed or filed in archive folders upon arrival.

While working with databases – especially Mysql – most people seem to ask the same question over and over again when it comes to Primary Keys. Here’s my typical answer to the question(s) above (and more).

Do I need a primary key?

No, you don’t need it, but if you haven’t got one, there’s probably something wrong with your data model. A primary key is the unique key to a row in a table. It can be a single column, but in some cases it can be a combination of two or more columns.