These days everyone in IT is a consultant, employs a consultant, or both. I'm a consultant, aren't you? Outsourcing, offshoring, LEAN management, a lousy economy, and covering one's IT butt have led organizations of every type and at every level to look outside for answers to their IT questions and often even to ask those questions in the first place. This has led to the greatest disconnect I have seen between job requirements and apparent internal capability in the 30 years I've been around IT. It's scary. Hardly any organization can get by without using consultants and -- here's the bad news -- most consultants aren't very good. So here is my advice on how to select and use an IT consultant followed by a grim list of the 10 most common lies told by bad consultants.

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The Truth About IT Consultants | PBS

Project description
Treemap is a space-constrained visualization of hierarchical structures. It is very effective in showing attributes of leaf nodes using size and color coding. Treemap enables users to compare nodes and sub-trees even at varying depth in the tree, and help them spot patterns and exceptions.
Treemap was first designed by Ben Shneiderman during the 1990s. For more information, read the historical summary of treemaps, their growing set of applications, and the many other implementations. Treemaps are a continuing topic of research and application at the HCIL.

Died from out of memory on a big directory.

Treemap: Home page

/* Title: Jello AHAH Author: Russell Jurney, rjurney@lucision.com Release 0.1: 4-16-08 Description: Simple library for doing AHAH */

Put together this little minimal lib for doing AHAH so I wouldn't re-write this crap in each page.

Jello AHAH - Simple Library for doing AHAH (Using AJAX to update content of a DIV dynamically)

Although MySQL is a powerful and fast database server, there are certain tasks that cannot be done with it so easily.
If you've ever tried to

* calculate the median of any values,
* calculate the skewness and kurtosis of a distribution of value
* retrieve the effective length of the longest value in a STRING column,
* get the longest value from a STRING column,
* calculate the faculty of a value,
* calculate linear regression parameters (intercept, slope, correlation coefficent) of any values,

directly from MySQL, you'll already know what I am writing about.
In fact, these tasks can only be performed in MySQL with ugly workarounds or require the use of additional programming on the client side.
This is where UDFs (User Defined Functions) come into play. UDFs are a nice and simple way to enhance your MySQL server's functionality with custom functions.
As you've already guessed, the aim of this page is to provide you with UDFs for some common tasks that can't be done in MySQL without UDFs that easily or not at all.

Nice if you need to do median, but not sure about stability yet.

mysql-udf | MySQL extension functions

// Returns a new XMLHttpRequest for IE and others
function createXMLHttpRequest()
{
if (window.ActiveXObject)
{
return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}
else if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
{
return new XMLHttpRequest();
}
}

// Insert content from a url to a div AJAX style using a GET
function doAJAXGet(divId, url)
{
if(document.getElementById(divId))
{
// Until the div's content loads, assign a 'loading' image.
document.getElementById(divId).innerHTML = "

// Insert content from a url to a div AJAX style using a POST
function doAJAXPost(divId, url, args)
{
if(document.getElementById(divId))
{
// Until the grid loads, assign a 'loading' image.
document.getElementById(divId).innerHTML = "

How to do AHAH without a freakin framework

The plugins
Trac alone is far from ready even for non-tech users, let alone customer. You need to install at least 7 plugins, 3 admin side and 4 users side.

* TracAccountManager
* TracCustomFieldAdmin
* TracWebAdmin
* TracPrivateTickets
* TracSimpleTicket
* TracPermRedirect
* TracContentFilter

Trac sucks for non-techies and customers. This can fix it.

How we made trac customer friendly :: SpikeLab.org - a geek's playground

wat

What is a meme?

Free plugins for Photoshop & Illustrator...and other software
NO WAR! We are committed to cross-platform open source software and welcome discussion of any issue pertaining to the software on this page, including build issues. Contact us with bug reports, suggestions or other comments at support@telegraphics.com.au.
Adobe Photoshop and Elements plugins
In general, each plugin can be used with all versions of Photoshop (3.0-7.0, CS, CS2), under Mac OS X, 9 and earlier, and Windows.

Should also work with other compatible programs such as Elements, AfterEffects, Premiere, PhotoDeluxe, Corel PhotoPaint, Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks, Painter, Photo Impact etc. (incomplete list).

For information about using these and other Photoshop plugins with the GIMP (on Linux), see this page and issue 6 of fullcircle magazine.
No Software Patents!

Free and Open Source software is only possible in a world free of software patents.
ICO (Windows Icon) Format
An easy way to create your web site's favourites/shortcut/bookmark icon in Photoshop (all versions including CS and CS2), Elements or Paint Shop Pro (v9 recommended). More info. FREE, $5 donation suggested if you love the plugin. (MacHouse has a video tutorial on making a favicon.)

# New version 1.8b4 (Win/Mac PS7 older) supports PNG (Vista) ICO files.

Senor Toby's .ICO Photoshop Plugin

Telegraphics - Free plugins for Photoshop & Illustrator...and other software

Green on black terminal windows are the way they are for the same reason old oscilloscopes and radar displays were green on black - it's more cost effective to make a cathode ray tube that glows green. For a long damn time, all terminals came green-on-black, simply because that was the cheapest way to pair a CRT with a keyboard, and hardware terminals were what they used back before PC's were popular. Or invented.

The result of this was horrific eyestrain. Yes, some people can handle bright colored text on a black background. Most get eyestrain or worse, migraines. This is especially so if you switch from green-on-black to black-on-white (like a printed page).

Typists and transcriptionists and grad students and pretty much anyone who needed to refer to a printed reference hated it. In the early '80s, color monitors were pretty much crap for text (too fuzzy, not enough resolution) so there was a boom in the production of "amber" monitors. These used monochrome CRTs that phosphoresced a muted yellow-orange. This wasn't quite as jarring to the eyes.

Then someone came up with paper-white monochrome CRT's, and that was pretty much all she wrote for greenscreens.

Geeks keep it alive, because of nostalgia and tradition. It's looks high-tech and cool, because there was a time when it was high-tech and cool - and because there is an association with Unix, and by extension, Linux. What's more Unix than a DEC vt100 terminal hooked up to a PDP-11? Nothing. That's about as close to the metal as you can get without a soldering iron.

But, please, for the sake of your eyes and the eyes of others, don't pretend there is any inherent advantage to green-on-black for the vast majority of users.

What Font Color Is Best For Eyes?

You have multiple worker processes/threads pulling records, FIFO, from a table. If one worker 'dies' or fails processing, another worker should retry the same record.

Here are some ideas (partially tested).

-- find first record & select it, taking exclusive lock
SELECT * FROM q WHERE id = (SELECT @id := MIN(id) FROM q) FOR UPDATE;

-- now other threads need to see that it's deleted (new MIN())
-- This only works where reading session is in READ UNCOMMITTED mode!
DELETE FROM q WHERE id = @id;

-- ... do whatever processing is required...

-- then either COMMIT (if successful)
-- or ROLLBACK (if processing failed and another worker should attempt)

Journal of toby (759) - InnoDB as a Queue for Worker Bees