Latest blog posts

This is an update to the RunExit tool I created a few years ago for Windows 3. The original tool just plain ran the program and waited for it to complete. It didn't set the working directory for the program it ran (which messed up some programs, such as the games from Microsoft's Best of Entertainment pack) and didn't pass parameters, which may limit the usefulness in some other cases.
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Version 4 and later of popular database management tool phpMyAdmin "helpfully" displays warnings when a column name in a database conflicts with a reserved word in MySQL. This may or may not be an actual problem. If you are in the habit of enclosing table names in your SQL queries in `backticks`, it shouldn't be a problem at all. For others, it may depend on the actual column name. In the example provided below, "start" and "end" can safely be SELECTed unquoted, whereas "group" needs the backticks. At any rate, having the warnings show up the whole time rather than just at table creation time is annoying. Here's how to disable them.
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Open source e-commerce platform Magento is widely used and flexible, but at the default settings, it can be dog slow. Packt Publishing recently released "Magento Performance Optimization How-to" by Nayrolles Mathieu in print and ebook format. It aims to be a short, fast and focussed guide to improving the perfomance of Magento stores using practical, hands-on recipes. So is it any good?
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Recently, I posted a guide to speed up Magento using Memcached. If you've followed another guide that has incomplete information, Magento may fail to work, greeting you with a rather unhelpful error message "Unknown number format type 'boolean'. Format '' must be a valid number format string.". The fix for this is simple.
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Magento is a highly flexible, open source e-commerce solution. Unfortunately, it can also be dog-slow, especially on servers with modest hardware specifications. Throwing extra hardware at the problem is not a great solution. There is a lot of tweaking that can be done, though. Very significant speedups may be realised through the use of Memcached. Magento supports this out of the box, but it is not enabled by default. Here's how to set that up.
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