Step 2 - Construct the query Yahoo offers a REST interface to handle the conversion so we can use either a plain HTTP GET request, or if you want to do it inside of a script that is doing many other things you can use CURL, a set of very useful functions for querying and "scraping" web pages and ...

Troubleshooting I isolated the process into three components: the email builder (my code), the mailer application, and the sending application (in this case, smtp through postfix). I followed the below process to troubleshoot: Changed the mailer application to use the built in PHP mail() fun...

Background I'll just link to the best places i've found to read up on the background. Read these first if you want to understand whats going on: Excellent intro to character encodings Joel On Software, on Unicode The Details In order to get your website working harmoniously with ...

Having spent the majority of 2011 in intense self-study to finish my transition from developer/project manager to UX engineer, I thought it would be useful for others out there to share my reading list and some brief thoughts. Steve Krug- Don’t make me think The best book for a quick introd...

I have just finished a wonderful book, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, which ostensibly is about the origins and the neural underpinnings of the human ability to read. Dehaene not only takes on the conventional wisdom that reading is a sequential, letter by letter process, but...

My OS is CentOS, so I used yum to handle installs from the rpm database. The thing with CentOS is that it is purposefully one step behind the cutting edge, so the most recent version of certain applications are not available (PHP, Postgres, etc). To get around this limitation, you have to instruct...

The most confusing thing is when you use the perl script on the official apache site here it's written for the NDBM format (which isn't available on my box). Here's the perl script: #!/path/to/bin/perl ## ## txt2dbm -- convert txt map to dbm format ## use NDBM_File; use Fcntl; ...

RewriteEngine On RewriteMap redirects txt:/home/.../.../rewriterules.map RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ${redirects:$1|$1} [R,L,NC] How does it work? (See here for details.) The first line turns on mod_rewrite. The next line sets the location of the map file (the two column list of source/destina...