Archive for Tips
Now that I know how to do this, it seems so easy and straight-forward. To change the default application files of a specific type are opened with, do the following:
- Right-click a file that you wish to change the default application for and select Properties.
- Click the “Open With” tab.
- Select the desired application’s radio button.
- Additional applications can be added if the one you want is not listed. Use the Add button to find the desired application.
- You can also remove applications from the list by highlighting the application and clicking the Remove button.
- Adding applications to or removing applications from this list changes which applications are available in the “Open With” option when you right-click a file.
- Click the Close button.
Again, it seems so easy and straight-forward now. Go figure. 
I’ve spent a little more than a month working with Git now. I can honestly say that while there are many things that I like about Git, there are just as many things that I personally find to be a pain in the butt.
Submodules specifically have managed to be a thorn in my side on many occasions. While the concept of submodules is simple, figuring out how to actually work with them can be a chore. I say “figuring out” because not everything about working with submodules is well documented. I’ll cover two of the more difficult things to figure out: removing and updating submodules from your repository.
Continue reading “Git Submodules: Adding, Using, Removing, and Updating”
I recently worked on a project where I had to sort a set of rows returned from a MySQL query. The problem is that most of the data in the field being sorted is numeric yet the field type is varchar since some of the entries contained characters.
The reason that this is a problem is that MySQL sorts character fields using a method that will produce undesirable results with numeric data. For example, sorting 4, 10, and 50 as character data produces 10, 4, and 50. In most applications, this is highly undesirable.
The solution to this is to force a sorting order that is commonly referred to as a natural sort. Natural sort is just a term that refers to how humans would commonly sort a set of information (numbers as numbers and non-numeric characters alphabetically). Fortunately, this isn’t difficult to achieve in MySQL.
Continue reading “MySQL Natural Sort Order By on Non-Numeric Field Type”
Web applications developers such as myself often have a hard time keeping up with everything that’s going on. There’s always some new programming or scripting language, new standards, new browsers, new technologies, new paradigms, new social networks, and on and on. Every day, something new happens. The end result of all of this always ends up being very similar: people demand faster applications that deal with ever-increasing amounts of data which end up putting massive stress on the server architecture.
As we toil to improve the performance of the applications and their snappy response times, it becomes easy to forget about how we can tweak settings on a low level to provide massive speed improvements on the front-end. For example, most people don’t know that you can configure MySQL to take better advantage of the resources that the server has available.
By default, MySQL is configured to consume a relatively limited amount of memory resources. Start giving MySQL more memory to work with, and your application’s performance can improve greatly.
Continue reading “Tool to Optimize MySQL Configuration and Performance”
Many clients have shared concerns with me about using the built-in Update Services feature of WordPress to automatically ping services like Ping-O-Matic. Why are they concerned? They have heard horror stories from fellow bloggers or read random stories you can find on the web about WordPress sites being blocked from these sites due to a variety of different reasons. Unfortunately, there is much more information out there about the problems and very little information about solutions. In this post, I aim to address the major concerns and provide solutions where solutions are needed. Continue reading “Can pinging get your WordPress site blocked?”