Yea thats right, we finally get a good excuse for taking on less work. For the details, read on. By the way this is ripped off verbatim from Slashdot. "Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning.  [more ...]

There is a Google Group setup to discuss Google's Checkout API only the group sucks. I have no patience to read though thousands of meaningless posts just to find what I'm looking for and sadly searching Google for help on their API is actually pretty tough. Basically when you are working on the responsehandler.php file, the file that gets callbacks from Google on all kinds of notifications, it isn't initially clear how you receive the data and then utilize it. Your variables wind up looking [more ...]

Today I was pulling a query from MySQL and some of my columns were NULL. Now this isn't the first time I've gotten NULL as a result and usually my code has an if statement in there to swap out the NULL values with zero. The problem is this time that I don't have the option to edit the code after the query has been returned, I need the actual query results to have NULL removed from them. This lead to my discovery of COALESCE [more ...]

It is widely accepted that over the long term the market will almost always outperform any given fund. The problem with that is the market does on average 8% a year, and well at that rate we will all have to wait until we are old and wrinkled before we invest our way into the seven digits. Below are images courtesy of Morningstar and Vanguard that demonstrate the findings of their study in 2002:
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So you are a web developer and the search engines just aren't picking up your deep links. Maybe your links aren't that deep but you want to provide more memorable URLs. Either way the solution lines in .htaccess file and mod_rewrite. Once I tried to do URL reformatting within PHP and not only was it ugly and hacky, it really didn't work. Plus http://fiebert.com/index.php/experience just doesn't look as sweet as http://fiebert.com/portfolio/experience. This whole revamping of your URL structure is actually fairly easy. The first step is creating a file ".htaccess" in your root folder. From there we just decide exactly how you want to structure your URLs. This is the first part of my file: [more ...]

We have all heard the stories, 18 year old child prodigy builds incredible online system only to be bankrupted by some bad apple through various SQL injection attacks. Well, maybe not so dramatic but still the thought of people being able to gain complete access to your database because of one small oversight is frightening to say the least. How do SQL injections work? Let me give you an example [more ...]

I've been working on an e-commerce site for a client and I really start thinking about the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PR (Google's Page Rank); suddenly it dawns on me how easy it is to improve your rank. Now I know I'm probably the last web developer in the world to learn and implement SEO but just in case there is someone else out there who doesn't know I will detail for you how to improve your rank. [more ...]

Since I'm writing this prior to really writing any content, I'll take a moment to speculate on what this blog might be about. Originally I saw blogs as a platform to vent and complain about school or women, however it doesn't take long to learn that nobody wants to read about that... ever. So the idea behind this blog is to share my knowledge about various topics because that is what the internet is all about, right? That being said, this is also my portfolio domain so it wouldn't hurt to have a future employer randomly stumble upon my website. From there they will be able to see that I am not only incredibly awesome but that I truly am an autodidact. [more ...]