PHP 5.5 RC1 released – what I’m most excited for..

Where I work we have unfortunately had to skip the 5.4 release of PHP; the release cycle between PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 was pretty darn fast and we never got around to replacing APC. We've finally got everything up to speed to adopt 5.5 when it hit's stable release. I...
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A safer approach to using Monolog’s SocketHandler

Monolog is perhaps the most popular logging library out there for PHP at the time of this writing. It has a lot of support and a nice balance of features. Unfortunately I have one gripe to make about the rather closed implementation of the SocketHandler , er, handler?   The problem with the...
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My Google exit strategy

I've been saying this for a long time now, Google can't be trusted. I think it's becoming commonplace in other blogs to start talking about having an exit strategy. I've been planning for a while (starting with the removal of my blog from blogspot). The Google products I've unfortunately come to...
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MySQL command line – zebra stripe admin tool

I came up with a cool usage for the zebra stripe admin tool.  In MySQL you can set a custom pager for your MySQL CLI output; so one can simply set it to the zebra stripe tool and get the benefit of alternated rows for better visual clarity. Something like 'PAGER...
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Atlassian Fisheye starter license and 10 commiter limit

The problem with Atlassian Fisheye starter license: I love using Atlassian Fisheye at work. It's a very nice frill to have for a small team especially since it saves us time and adds a very easy, fast way to document the reviews and be open about feedback. I have one gripe however;...
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pt-online-schema-change and partitions – a word of caution

Just a quick word of wisdom to those seeking to cleverly change the partitioning on a live table using a tool like pt-online-schema-change from the Percona Toolkit. You will lose data if you don't account for ALL of your data's ranges upfront. (E.g: MAXVALUE oriented partition). The reason being is how...
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PHP: array_merge(array $a, [ array ...]);

Wait, PHP wants to array_merge an array with... itself? Take another look at this: array_merge(array $a, [ array ...]); If you're good at reading API's - you'll see how ... odd this is. Seeing as I just got nipped in the butt by forgetting to have another array to merge into -...
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Java – What do you want from me!?

If you're going to nag me to update every week with your super bad hack patches and your sneaky "Install McAfee" checkbox; The least you could do is not pull crap like this: Chances are; it's firefox; but I have the plugin disabled......
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Re: Linux and hardware support – specifically Graphics and lack thereof

The passion here says enough: (Linus gives NVidia a what for) Edit: Apparently embedded view won't handle the timestamp I used - skip to 49m 10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t49m10s...
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JQuery – Sparkline: Re-draw on resize / responsive sparklines

I've been suckered in by the awesome JQuery Sparkline plugin - I won't go over how it works or what it does, but rather a quick 'fix' for fixing issues with how the output deals with browser resizing. (Long story short, it doesn't by default). Here's a visual of the issue...
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