Switch from Google Chrome DEV to Beta Channel

If you are like me, then you’re sick of the Google DEV channel getting screwed up by new bugs. (I thought that was the whole point of the Canary build?)  Recent hair-pulling bugs include: fonts no longer rendering properly, sluggish performance on Twitter, or random crashes that weren’t there a build ago. Well, fear not. [...]

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Is it hard to be use logic?

This is just one of those random thoughts I had.  As a programmer, everything I do involves taking complex problems and breaking them down into small pieces of logic.  I look for the simplest and most effective answer to a problem.  Pretty cut and dry, right?  But after being a programmer for almost 10 years now, I’ve realized that [...]

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Fix the WordPress SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS Bug

Anyone who has a WordPress blog with a lot of posts will eventually encounter an extremely slow query. I refer to this as the SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS Bug. If you have slow-query-log enabled then a query similar to this might have shown up before: SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.ID NOT IN (44682, 44657, [...]

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Fantasy Sports Sites Need to be Faster

The web is a mighty big place and the fantasy sports market has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 5 years.  All of that growth spawned many sites that have come and gone, in the news one day and no where to be found 6 months later.  Some of today’s best fantasy sites [...]

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Google instant previews for Twitter & Gawker are broken

Making websites javascript heavy seems to be all the rage these days. Some sites like Gawker (and related sites by the company) have been heavily criticized for their javascript heavy redesign. While others like Twitter have been mostly praised for their work.  Both sites are very similar in URL structure and functionality.  But did you [...]

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Does Cloudflare live up to the hype?

I have given Cloudflare a try for the past week or so for FantasySP.com and want to pass along my thoughts.  I saw a few reviews that were quite astonishing and decided to find out if they are accurate.  I have been reading great things about it and couldn’t resist trying it out. Will Cloudfront Increase [...]

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My Review of New Relic, with some Performance Numbers

When optimizing your web application or server, the process can be a bit daunting.  In fact, its usually something that is never fully checked off your to-do-list.  The reason being is that you’ll never really know how your application will scale until it starts to show its growing pains.  Just when you thought that you’ve [...]

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Social Buttons are Bad for the Internet

Have you ever watched Man Vs Wild on Discovery and noticed that every time he went to some small tropical island there are always plastic bottles washed ashore?  Those plastic bottles are social buttons on the web.  They litter headers, footers, everything in between!  No matter what website you go to, small or large, you [...]

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Browser Wars: The Truth about Firefox 4.0

I was just reading Maximum PC’s article reviewing modern browsers and they crowned Firefox 4 the best browser out there.  This is extremely unfortunate for a multitude of reasons and this post is my rebuttal.  It feels like Firefox 4.0′s feature list was created in response to using Opera and Chrome.  To put it more bluntly, [...]

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Verizon has the iPhone 4 and it means absolutely nothing

Verizon Wireless finally has the iPhone 4.  There have been commercials running for the iPhone by both Apple and Verizon for the past month.  Fans rejoice, our savoir has arrived. . . right?  You couldn’t be more wrong. The iPhone is coming out during a time when 4G and dual core phones have already been [...]

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