I put together a small utility to generate random user data several months back. I realized yesterday that I hadn’t released the source code - I thought I had. This generates plausible names, addresses, phone numbers and social security numbers. The phone number area codes don’t generally match up with the address, [...]

Posted in Database, Development, Ideas, MySQL, PHP, Software, Testing, Web, opensource 3 Comments »

Whew!  The last several months have brought a flurry of web tech activity, the likes of which I haven’t seen in years.
Apollo/Silverlight/JavaFX all are aiming at reinventing in-browser development.
Yahoo Pipes, Ning, Coghead and some other platforms are giving us new ways to think about web-based development.
The YUI/Dojo/Scriptaculous/Atlas/jQuery/GWT AJAX toolkits - what can I say?  They [...]

Posted in Database, Development, Google, Java, Javascript, Software, Tools, Web, Yahoo, opensource 2 Comments »

Hrm… My previous post on this seems to have been eaten. 
David Rasch put together a great presentation on using memcache with PHP for our local PHP user group last night.  In the interest of time and expediency, we didn’t touch on everything the PHP memcache extension provides (namely distributed caching between multiple memcached servers).  [...]

Posted in Database, Development, MySQL, PHP, Software, Web, opensource No Comments »

Based on some feedback, I’ve enhanced the random user data tool.  As I wrote earlier, the tool generates data suitable for using as test data in your applications which may need basic user accounts.  The accounts can include things like first name, last name, address, city, state, zip code, phone numbers, social security numbers, and [...]

Posted in Database, Development, Ideas, Software, Testing, Web No Comments »

Just putting the question out to the blogosphere (love that word!) - is there any interest in a hosted Lucene or SOLR search service?  It may be something that is a non-starter, given that google and atomz have wrapped up a ‘hosted web search’ market segment already, but perhaps not.  Most people need to search [...]

Posted in Database, Development, Ideas, Java, Software, Web, opensource 2 Comments »

During the mysql meeting last night, Tobias mentioned the sphinx search engine project.  Apparently some ex-mysql guys split off and formed a consulting company, and are also working on this project.  I don’t know the nitty-gritty details, but I do know this seems pretty fast.  Tobias said it smokes Lucene for speed, and my initial [...]

Posted in Database, Development, MySQL, Software, Uncategorized No Comments »

Not sure if I wrote about this before - can’t find a reference here, so I’ll assume I didn’t. 
Something that has been a request on a lot of projects I’ve worked on is keeping a changelog of all data changes to a table.  I’ve seen this handled various ways, usually using triggers to [...]

Posted in Business, Database, Development, Ideas, Microsoft, MySQL, Software, Web, opensource No Comments »