September 27, 2006 – 17:58
I hope everyone using WordPress know that it ships with a backup plugin. It’s a great beginner solution that makes people aware that they should care about making backups of their data. But to me it didn’t make the cut a while ago when I really started to care about safe backup of my data. Part of the story is the fact I’ve got two blogs, this one and one in swedish, in addition to some other stuff in a hosted database they all share.
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September 21, 2006 – 22:07
Matt Mullenweg’s business card allegedly instructs people just to enter “Matt” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky” to get to his site. Well, now I can instruct people to enter “Ironicist” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”… should I dare to say that it feels “ironic”?
September 19, 2006 – 17:12
I just finished implementing the Verhoeff checksum algorithm in PHP, you can download it as verhoeff.zip. Yes, mathematically it’s a bit more elaborate than other checksum algorithms, but with look-up tables it’s fairly simple and lightweight.
The implementation provides two functions calcsum($number) and checksum($number). The first one return a check digit for the decimal number used as argument, just append the returned digit to the number and you got yourself a checkable number. The second function checks the number (including the appended check digit) used as argument, the number is only valid if the function return zero.
I noticed a small bug due to a misplace modulus (simple PHP syntax typo), the verhoeff.php is now updated, tested and in working order. The bug only affected the calculation of check digits, not the check function.
September 18, 2006 – 18:38
I’m currently working on an article that make use of some math notation. Normally, in such cases, when you need something out of the ordinary that can’t easily be marked up as XHTML you render an image (yes, I know about MathML). It’s quite easy to render beautiful math formulae off-line. But making the round-trip out of WordPress can also be quite annoying, especially if you do a lot of tweaking and I normally do a lot of tweaking.
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September 11, 2006 – 22:28
Excerpt from a Project/Programmers Guide I wrote earlier when the year was just days old:
The goal of the project is to succeed. To succeed we can not be afraid of failure. We need to embrace failure. If we are going to fail — fail early.
If we fail early then we have time to change the decision and try something else. And not building a big plan up front that weeks will be wasted on until it ultimately fail.
To achieve early failure we need short aggressive cycles between confirmed success or failure. Make sure only a week, day or hour(s) are spent at most on a failed attempt.
Failure have a negative connotation to people. But failure is good — we learn about what’s not going to work in a controlled environment.