Disseminating the sneakiness behind the Shareaholic WordPress plugin, which added ad links to sites without the owners’ opting in.
Checking for a Null value in SQL
Yesterday I fell into a very simple but dangerous SQL trap. Can you identify it? Found it? It’s the comparison to null. My intention was to get rows where another_column was null, however the query did not do so. It didn’t give me any results where another_column was null, but didn’t give me any error either. Why? Null in SQL is not a real value. Null means “lack of a value” or “unknown”. Anything compared to null leads to an “unknown” result. Therefore, in SQL there are actually three values conditions can evaluate to: true, false, and unknown/null. This is called Continue Reading
Wi-Fi everywhere!
Over the past year, more and more ShawOpen Wi-Fi hotspots have been popping up everywhere around Metro Vancouver. This is incredibly useful for Shaw customers (like me) because it’s so easy to find reliable Wi-Fi access anywhere we go. If you’re a Shaw internet customer, you get to save several devices so that they can automatically connect to the network without having to login through the portal. Telus is starting to form their own network as well, under the names #TELUS and #TELUSDirect. The one advantage they have is that for Telus customers, #TELUSDirect is a secured Wi-Fi network, whereas Continue Reading
“Error: Boot loader didn’t return any data” when booting up Xen guest
Error: Boot loader didn’t return any data I have come across this error two or three times before, and each time I spend hours trying to figure out how to get my virtual machine to boot. This blog post is just to document a fix so that I can refer back to it, and hopefully it will help people out if they’re experiencing the issue as well.
iOS Screen Resolutions
iOS screen resolutions from an app developer’s point of view. 2007: In the beginning Back in 2007 when the first iPhone and iPod Touch were launched, iOS developers only had to worry about one resolution: 480×320. Its aspect ratio is 3:2. Life was great. 2010: The retina displays Fast forward three years and three generations later. In 2010, the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4th generation were launched with the first Retina Displays, which doubled the resolution of the screens. The new resolution thus was 960×640. This was great for developers as the new resolution had the same aspect ratio of Continue Reading