Category: Programming

Nerdy News For This Week

James AsherLeave a comment

There was a bunch of news items that I thought were kind of interesting, but didn’t warrant a separate post for each, so I’ll just do a group post.

  • Google Dumps Gears – Google is halting development of Google Gears in favor of HTML5. This is a good thing. The problem with Gears was that it was a separate install and most users wouldn’t do that. Thus preventing widespread adoption. HTML5 will be baked into (newer) browsers.
  • Google Analytics Goes Async – While I don’t personally use Google Analytics, a lot of sites do. Up til now, the javascript that gets embedded for uploading statistics to Google was blocking. Ever been to a website that seems really slow to load only to look in the status bar and see ‘Connecting to google.com’ (or whatever it is)? That’s the blocking javascript preventing the page from loading. It’s now set up to be asynchronous so there is no more blocking. Yay.
  • Mozilla Sunbird / Lighting Approaching Version 1 Release – I use the Lightning plugin for my Thunderbird and probably couldn’t live without it. I will say pre-1.0 versions, at varying times, have sometimes not played well with 3.0 Beta versions of Thunderbird. I suppose that’s the price you pay for being on the cutting edge of software. I deal.
  • Google Releases Public DNS Service – Jeez, a lot of Google News, eh? I hadn’t even realized it. Anyways. Google released a public DNS service. From what I’ve read, this is nicer than OpenDNS because it doesn’t have ads or redirects like OpenDNS does. I don’t use either, so I wouldn’t actually know firsthand. Google’s reasoning for releasing this is pretty obvious, by having more people using their faster DNS servers, it speeds up the user experience for users – particularly for Google users – and somehow that translates into more money for them.
  • New Java 7 Features – This is a little bit older, but I had it bookmarked. I haven’t written much Java lately, but I’m slowly but surely getting around to writing more. Language support for collections seems quite useful, reminds me of some of the Javascript work I’ve done lately. I don’t particularly like the syntax for Automatic Resource Management in try/catch, but I like the idea at least. Strings in switch statements is way overdue, but at least they have it now.

That’s all I have for now kids!

Reorder Mysql Table Columns

James Asher1 Comment

Ever use something like phpMyAdmin? Ever add and/or remove some columns to a table, but then realize that the order of the columns aren’t really the way you’d like them?

This has bothered me ever since I started using phpMyAdmin. To the best of my knowledge there isn’t a way to fix this from within the software. However, it’s quite trivial to do it via regular SQL:


ALTER table `table_name`
MODIFY COLUMN `column_name` your_data_type
AFTER `other_column_name`

And by golly it works!

Found at Treble Click: Reorder mysql table columns via a Google search.

Nerdery Links

James AsherLeave a comment

In an attempt to post more on this site about stuff I find interesting, I think I’ll try doing a few ‘link round-up’ type of link lists.

Ext JS 2.0.2 Released

James AsherLeave a comment

If you haven’t looked at the Ext JS framework yet, you really ought to. We use it extensively at work and we are quite happy with it. I just wanted to point out that the 2.0.2 version of Ext has come out. This release was mostly related to the new Adobe AIR 1.0 that was recently released. Currently at work we don’t do any AIR related things, but we’ve looked at dabbling in that field in the future. That being said, there are a few custom Ext components that were put in the Simple Tasks example that came out with this release. The TreeList, custom grid columns, and a switch button are all used in Simple Tasks, but their code could very easily be copied from that example to be put into any 2.x-compatible code.

Protocol https not supported or disabled in libcurl

James Asher12 Comments

Have you ever seen this error before when working with CURL:

“Protocol https not supported or disabled in libcurl”

Yet, you know that https works. Or even:

“Protocol http not supported or disabled in libcurl”

And you think, “What the hell? That’s basically what CURL is for. Why would HTTP not work!?”

Try wrapping that echoed out error message with <pre> tags:

Protocol  https not supported or disabled in libcurl

Notice anything?

There is an extra space before ‘https’. Make sure that when you do set CURLOPT_URL, you don’t put a space before the http, CURL won’t know what to do with it.