MySQL Duplicate Entry, But Not Really
August 25th, 2016
I chased an interesting bug today. MySQL was complaining about “Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry”. I had all the necessary safeguards in my code to prevent duplicates in tha column. I gave up on logic and simply dumped the contents of the problematic column for every record. I found that there was a record with […]
File Permissions for Web Servers
June 21st, 2016
Many of you have asked me to write an article about Unix file permissions for web servers. This will serve to combat all those recommendations that are floating around, such as chmod -R 777, which I like to call the “hacker’s jackpot.” Basics of File Permissions The first concept to understand is the three roles. The user has the […]
We are all biased
April 22nd, 2016
If you think that you are special and not biased, you’re not. We are all biased in some way. Before we talk about bias, let’s talk about inference and prejudice. Why does prejudice exist? When we are children, everything is new. We don’t have the experience to decide whether something is good or bad, so we don’t […]
Experience With Immigration Fraud
April 13th, 2016
As you may know, I organize a conference that gets many international speakers and attendees. Although many of them have no issue travelling to Canada, some require a travel visa, which means that the Canadian embassy in their country will grant them permission for a temporary stay. Citizens of some countries have an extra step […]
Fixing Doctrine Segfaults
March 21st, 2016
I had a tricky segfault when trying to save a very simple Doctrine object. Here’s my debugging process and solution. Context I was using the sabre/vobject package to parse and save some iCal data. The parsed data was assigned to properties of a Doctrine entity and then persisted. The segmentation fault was happening every single time I called the […]
Testing Methods That Make Static Calls
January 13th, 2016
I had trouble testing a particularly painful codebase. It had static calls and implicit dependencies all over the place, to name just a few problems. One of the things that it often did was to call static methods that would increment counters in the database and cache stuff. […]
Better Link Previews on Social Media
December 3rd, 2015
There's a protocol called Open Graph that allows you to specify metadata for social media sites. Add some these tags to your
[…]What Clients Are Really Saying
September 11th, 2015
I build software, guide teams and consult with management to help them achieve their goals. I can spend an insane amount of time developing a relationship with a prospect that just isn’t going to pan out. From the first 10 minutes of conversation, I can have a pretty accurate assessment of my success chances with the prospect […]
Creating Courses and Talks with Mind Maps
September 2nd, 2015
Many people are intrigued when I say that I am able to cut my course and talk preparation time by roughly 70% using mind maps. The first instinct is to write slides, but that is wrong. Slides are linear. With the ability to make transitions, add pictures and express ideas in full sentences, they are a […]
Forcing Doctrine to Persist
August 12th, 2015
I stumbled upon a case where Doctrine would refuse to persist my entity due to a very special circumstance. Here’s the context: I’m using a generic method in my Repository to fetch a Post. I’m selecting partial fields like this: […]