wade womersley – york based software engineer
Engineering notes from the sharp end
wade womersley – york based software engineer I write the way I work: direct, useful, and more interested in what holds up in production than what sounds clever on a slide.
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Just picked up a nice tid-bit on creating a unique index on a two column table where the values in each column may be either way around but you only ever want one instance of the value in that row. So what this means is, inserting 2,1 and 1,2 for example would result in only … Read More “#PHPUK2010 Part 2 (MySQL stuff)” »
Josh began by using the dictionary definition of simplicity (as given by Wikipedia) pointing out that the word is often used as a derogatory statement. He then went onto “clarity of expression” and that striving for it while programming is something a lot of people do but never quite seem to achieve. He spoke of … Read More “#PHPUK2010 Part 1” »
This amazing picture of an ant holding its own bodyweight while upside down was taken by zoology specialist Dr Thomas Endlein of Cambridge University while researching creatures sticky feet. This photo snatched the guy £700 in photographic vouchers from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. His hope is studying the way ants feet self … Read More “Photo of Ant Holding 500 times its own Bodyweight” »
We are sitting on the sofa at home at the moment discussing our holiday plans for the year and I got a song in my head that I started humming. Remembering the adverts on TV where you hold your phone up to a speaker and it tells you the song, I thought there must be … Read More “Find Music by Humming – it really works! #midomi” »
I recently posted an article about using BINARY(16) for storing MD5’s as unique identifiers instead of simple integer ID’s (usually auto increment); in that article I touched on one of the benefits, reducing JOIN’s, but there are other reasons for doing it too, so I thought I’d post an article discussing purely the reasons behind … Read More “MySQL and Binary(16) – The Reasons/Benefits/Drawbacks (#mysql)” »
Over the past few months at work, we’ve seen our database grown from silly big to really silly big, it’s still a way to go to get to the size of the big boys such as Facebook etc. but it’s still a database stored in MySQL that most day-to-day PHP programmers would avoid like a … Read More “MySQL – Binary(16) and scalability” »
On Tuesday night we went to see Avatar at the IMAX in Bradford’s National Museum of Film and Photography. I had semi high expectations for the film but had heard some bad press so how good it would be was left wide open. someone suggested we go to see it at the IMAX as it … Read More “Avatar is a must see film – at IMAX in 3D” »
It seems like it’s taken a long time for someone in the States to get up and do it, but someone seems to finally be ready to stand up in court and challenge the legality of banning same-sex marriage on a nationwide scale. The result of this trial should finally end the confusion the USA … Read More “Federal Court to determine constitutional legality of gay marriage” »
We’ve all seen the movies where interactive displays are done on transparent glass, well Samsung, using OLED (organic light emitting diodes) have finally created one for us all to gawp over. Details are scarce, but it shows that yet another sci-fi idea is becoming mainstream reality. For now, here’s a video of the display, courtesy … Read More “Transparent Laptop? Samsung’s new 14 inch OLED display” »
I’ve not watched much Celebrity Big Brother this time around, as usual it’s become extremely over the top and feels almost scripted (as in the housemates, obviously BB has a script!) One thing they have done this time around though is actually get a couple of people who can actually be classed as celebrities. I … Read More “What a line up – and now Ivana Trump! Celebrity Big Brother” »
