Blog
Be Careful with MySQL Field Names
Tue, 11/24/2009 - 14:43 — Mark
Today's tip is going to be a quick one, but I wanted to share since the solution wasn't completely obvious to me for a while even though I've been using MySQL for several years now on a daily basis.
When naming your fields be sure you don't name them using language that MySQL might attempt to parse as a command. I was going along creating my database, and named a field 'primary' because that was what I'd called the value in the form, and it made sense in context. I then spent a good amount of time scratching my head wondering why all my values were saving in my update SQL I was sending unless this one was included. I realized the problem when I copy and pasted the SQL being run into PHPMyAdmin and saw that the line was breaking after it saw 'primary' in the command and realized my mistake.
Internet Explorer Doesn't Like Your Trailing Commas
Thu, 11/19/2009 - 01:42 — Mark
I just got bit by a strange bug that I haven't encountered before and wanted to share the 5 minute solution with everyone so they don't spend the hour I did trying to install Visual Web Developer Lite in a virtual machine to debug IE's Javascript wackiness.
Firefox could care less if you write your code like this:
iPhone Development Crash Course
Mon, 08/31/2009 - 19:19 — Mark
One big reason you haven't seen a post from me in the past few months is that I have been spending every available moment getting up to speed with developing iPhone applications. Aside from a short-lived attempt at becoming a game programmer using C++ years ago, this is my first venture away from the web development and into the world of compiled applications. Moving away from mostly open source to a proprietary SDK I was initially surprised at the lack of good tutorials and learning materials available online, but over time I've found some very good resources that have helped me out along the way.
Living with a Water Damaged iPhone
Tue, 03/17/2009 - 13:51 — Mark
A few months ago I had the horrifying experience of dropping my beloved iPhone into the toilet. After a few weeks of rice baths, contact cleaner, and other attempts at recovery, the phone is working except for the home button.
Those of you who own an iPhone know how important the home button is to the every day use of the phone. Its the only way to exit an application to the home screen, the only way to take a screenshot, the only way to put it in recovery mode, and needed for a lot of other common tasks.
Make IE6 Understand min-height
Thu, 02/05/2009 - 16:03 — MarkIE6 is the thorn in any standards aware web developers side. I've always been a bit frustrated by IE6's inability to understand min-height, but have usually just forced a height on the container for IE.
Looks like I gave up too soon because a quick search this morning revealed this gem. The only thing I did differently was include the default min-height in the main stylesheet and loaded in the other two lines using an IE6 only stylesheet.
Hopefully this knowledge will prove completely useless in a years time when IE6 drops off the map, but until then you can have your min-height and IE6 too.
