The other day, I ran into a situation where I needed to do case sensitive queries in MySQL. With a little Googling, I discovered that the keyword “binary” makes that possible, like this:
select foo_field from foo_table where binary foo_key=”foo value”
So I tried it out and it worked, but when querying a table with over a [...]

A few weeks ago, my wife and I decided it was time to cut our internet bill by switching away from Charter to a local wireless internet service provider named Internet USA. I figured it was a good time to reconsider our cable TV package too — we’d discussed switching to DirecTV in the [...]

For the most part, I love AWeber. But as I wrote last year, they’ve got a few really irritating problems. Here’s my latest gripe.
About a month ago, I deleted 11 follow-up messages from one of my autoresponder sequences — they weren’t converting, so I axed ‘em.
AWeber keeps track of the last follow-up message that was [...]

When Google Reader debuted, there was no question — it was as bad as all the other web-based feed readers. No way was I going to dump NetNewWire for it.
A few days ago, somebody (someone I follow on Twitter, I think — perhaps Michel Fortin?) commented about how they use Google Reader, so I gave [...]

I just checked the browser and screen resolution stats for www.geckotribe.com and wow, what a surprise!

Firefox is wiping the floor with IE on that domain! One of my other heavily trafficed domains reverses the picture, but another looks almost exactly the same as this.

As recently as January, I was still getting enough visitors at 800×600 [...]

A little over a year and a half ago, when John Reese announced his BlogRush service, I thought “oh, c**p,” (that word isn’t “CaRP” :-) “one of the big boys beat me to my idea.” At the time, I’d begun working on a site that was going to be similar, but with a few key [...]

Yesterday, I suggested we organize a Day Without Email where we’d all shut off our SMTP servers for a day. We wouldn’t send any email out, and no email would come in. (But messages to us wouldn’t get lost because the senders’ servers would keep retrying till we turned our SMTP servers back on tomorrow).
So [...]

I’ve had it! This morning I could barely connect to my server because it was so overrun with bounces of spam sent by people spoofing my email addresses (ie. spammers sending email with an email address at one of my domains in the senders address). I’m not kidding. The traffic was so heavy that HTTP [...]

I just uploaded version 2.0 of CaRP/WP (an RSS plugin for WordPress) to my server. CaRP/WP works with CaRP to display RSS feed content, including Amazon.com affiliate feeds and YouTube videos, in the posts and pages of WordPress blogs. This version also enables CaRP/WP to work as a sidebar widget.
 

I’ve released two new plugins for CaRP Evolution this week: One for podcasts and one for sorting.
The podcast plugin uses the 1 Pixel Out Audio Player (which is a WordPress plugin, but can be used without WordPress) to display Flash-powered MP3 audio players for each podcast. You can see an example on the podcast plugin’s [...]