I’m in the middle of testing a couple of new WordPress themes at the moment, so please bear with me.  I wanted to go with something a litte more readable.  I really like the ElegantGrunge theme by Michael Tyson, which I have been using since the site went live, but I think it’s time to simplify a little more.  We’ll see which new theme wins out ultimately.  I’ll take suggestions…

On a recent project I needed to calculate a person’s age relative to the system date based on an input value of a birth date.  In this particular scenario I needed to do so using the SQLite engine, and the specific requirement was to calculate age using the following logic: If person is younger than 1 month, present the age in days (e.g. 30 days) If person is 1 month or older but younger than [...]

Recently a colleague sent me a quick instant message asking if I knew of any way in Oracle to make a query run long enough to test a “cancel query” function he was writing in Java.  He had tried several queries that usually produced the results he was looking for, however there wasn’t enough data in his test environment to reproduce the wait time he needed.  I thought about it for a minute and then [...]

Well, it’s been well over a month since I discussed embarking on my Mac endeavor (http://www.mattoldham.com/2009/12/getting-ready-to-explore-the-world-of-mac/).  I cannot believe it is almost the middle of February, and today is the first day I have not been onsite at my client since before the holidays began.  That also means today is really the first chance I’ve had to come back around and give you an upadte on where I’m at with validating the viability of the [...]

Ever been working with an application window and wondered if it would fit into a particular screen resolution?  I have.  I am continually testing our apps in different browser windows and periodically I check to make sure we are still within the maximum screen resolution as indicated in our requirements documents.  I had been using this nifty little Firefox plugin which did the job for me.  But, I don’t have that capability yet (that I [...]

Never thought I would be saying that in my lifetime, but here I am nevertheless.  I have been running Linux on my laptop for almost a year now, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the flexibility it has offered me.  I weaned myself off of my old Windows XP VM a while back and have been living my daily development life exclusively in X Windows (Gnome).  My Gnome environment has exposed me to GnomeEdit, Compiz, CairoDock, [...]

I thought I would post a whitepaper I wrote earlier this year under the auspices of my employer, M. Miller & Associates.  This whitepaper is basically a summary of things I have observed over the course of my career in IT, particularly in regard to database design.  I can assure you that I eat my own dog food when it comes to the things I discuss.  I’m in the trenches every day putting into practice [...]

My current development environment has to be the best configuration I’ve had to date in my development career.  Here are some of the specifics: HP EliteBook laptop (8730w) 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 64-bit 6GB Memory openSuse 11.1 64-bit The move to Linux from Windows has been a huge plus, though not without its own challenges.  But it’s not just the hardware and OS.  Here are the tools that round out a highly productive development environment: