Dennis Forbes...Professional ← Software developer. Database expert.

Hacker News isn’t a Support Group

Jun

2013

Hacker News is once again mired in self-reflection concerning the mean people who bring the place down, reduced from the glorious-but-didn’t-actually-exist past when Hacker News was so much nicer. Today’s instance comes via the cynical You can’t impress developers. So don’t try (there’s a weird paradox that the people who are loudest about the purported mean people ...

Hide Those Coupon Code Inputs

Apr

2013

How my online purchases often (don’t) happen- Go to site to buy product I want (but don’t necessarily need. I am usually a marginally motivated buyer) Encounter “Coupon/Voucher” input Do some web searches for coupon codes Failing to find one, defer purchase for another day, avoiding the mental burden of being the sucker buying at ...

Some People Can Only Manage Suffering

Mar

2013

An Unproven CEO of a Failing Company Does Something. Held As Bellwether. The tech story of the week has been the edict by Marissa Mayer, the relatively new CEO @ Yahoo, that remote work is no longer an option. The people in such arrangements at Yahoo need to change their plans, moving if necessary, and ...

Defining Productivity or How Tablets and Consumption Improve Productivity

Feb

2013

During a break from some blissful productivity, I came across an intriguing post titled “I Can’t Find a Single Productive Use For My Tablet” (via Hacker News). It was a Saturday afternoon and I was biding some time at a local rec center while my five year old son attended a gym and pool party, my production ...

This Blog Is Running on an Amazon EC2 Micro Instance (for free!)

Feb

2013

This blog has been running on a miserable little Amazon t1.micro instance, alongside several other family blogs. Nginx serving WordPress instances on mySQL, lubricated through the use of W3 Total Cache. I have various other larger instances running in the EC2 space, but the blogs live in the poorly resourced fringes. Some days have seen ...

Professional Changes

Dec

2012

I’ve mentioned https://www.yafla.com quite a few times in the past, always hinting at coming-soon web properties in that space. It was put on hold while I sorted out professional considerations, deciding where and what I want to do, and for whom, in the next decade. My decisions, as an aside, mean that I’m going to be ...

But What Does That Practically Mean?

Dec

2012

One of the principle advocacy points used to pitch many NoSQL solutions is the flexibility of the schema. Whether it’s an amorphous binary blob in a key-value database, or a loosely structured JSON collection in a document-oriented database, the general benefit is that it’s up to you, and it remains flexible with each and every ...

WordPress and Comment Spam

Dec

2012

For years I blogged on a self-created blog platform. It was very secure, very efficient, and could serve up massive page render counts on miserably weak machines. It was deficient on the actual content creation side, however (the iPad of blogging…rimshot), making authoring new posts an onerous task. That was one of those “to be ...

Magic Is The Perfect Description – Paper for the iPad and the Colour Mixer

Nov

2012

I have low expectations of Fast Company articles. Which is fair enough, really, as the content is usually targeted at the layman: much like when I read Popular Science and get some superficial knowledge of something complex (say fusion reactors), but in reality have gained virtually no real understanding. It is knowledge pablum. This article on ...

MySQL Cluster Edition — Web Scale

Oct

2012

I’ve been casually building out https://www.tewdew.com for two reasons- Because I really believe in the core idea and the value it can bring to users. I actually think that it will make the world a slightly better place As a technical activity to exercise my knowledge of various tools and techniques I wouldn’t deal with ...