Monthly Archives: August 2012

Documentation is important, but commonly forgotten. Writing any code requires filling your brain with information – what the language is doing – what the API you’re calling is doing – what you want the code to do – and most of this information will fall out again a few days later. A month later a bug […]

This post is part of a series about my development stack – I use an Ubuntu Server VM running on Windows. Part 1 showed how to set up the VM Part 2 demonstrated how we could share code on the host system with the guest in order to execute it in a Linux environment There’s some […]

This is the continuation of a previous post where we set up an Ubuntu virtual machine in VMWare Player on a Windows host. To recap, what we’ve got so far is: An easily-accessible Ubuntu server. Folders on the host shared with the guest. We can edit code on the host machine and then test the changes in […]

When designing a database schema, it’s worth trying to choose sensible sizes for each column. It’s obviously crucial to make sure that your field gives enough space to accommodate the data you want to store in it, but it’s good to keep the sizes down as far as possible in order to improve performance. Increasing […]

I wrote recently about my efforts to find a cheap VPS host. Recently I’ve come across http://www.cloudorado.com/ which aims to make this process easier. It looks pretty good, but doesn’t seem to help much with the really small case – there’s no AWS Micro EC2 instances, for example.

Sadly for this post, but luckily for the rest of us, VMWare have now released version 5 of the Player software. Everything seems to work as before and most functionality appears in the same place, but the screenshots are now out-of-date. I like Windows. I know my way around it, I’ve tried the alternatives and I […]