Updated: September 16th, 2012

Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

Update 6/21/09: This server is currently under very heavy load (10-200), even with caching plugins enabled. Please bear with me as I try to resolve the situation.

Feel free to bookmark this page and return to it later when the fires have been put out.

Update 06/21/09: I think I've got the situation …

Updated: October 6th, 2009

Introduction

Every time I have to deal with svn:externals in SVN, I forget the command line syntax. Every single damn time. Normally, I use SVN GUI clients, such as SmartSVN, which make it very simple to add an svn:externals property. But for command line, it always takes looking at 25 different sites on google, which are all incredibly unhelpful for this question for some reason. Trying "svn help propset" on the command line was bloated and equally useless.

So this time I needed to write it down and make sure everyone who needed help with svn:externals would find exactly what they need here. I hope this page will soon come up on top of all the unhelpful results on …

Updated: September 27th, 2009

Introduction

Welcome to part 2 of the Essential Firefox Extensions And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide series. In this article I’m going to describe a number of time saving pragmatic extensions that make me a better, faster, more efficient browser user (browserer?).

Pragmatic Extensions

All-in-One Gestures

All-in-One Gestures introduces customizable gestures for all kinds of actions. To perform a gesture, hold the right (by default) button and move the mouse in the specified direction, drawing the needed shape.

I use it mostly for 3 things: history back/forward and close tab (see below). Once you start using gestures, there is no …

Updated: June 10th, 2009

* Lightning Fast is a blatant exaggeration. Got you to look though, didn't it?

Introduction

Whether you are a web developer or a self-hosting business owner, the only excuse for not activating compression capabilities of your web server can be that you didn't know about it. And now that you are reading this, there is no excuse left at all.

Here is how big a single page of this blog was before compression was enabled on CSS and Javascript files (computed by YSlow):

And here it is after compression:

As you see, the difference is quite substantial – almost 30% savings.

Compressing your HTML, XML, Javascript, CSS, etc pages will mean less data transferred between the server and the …

I've been looking for a new laptop and started looking at Lenovo Thinkpads (W500) and Dell Latitudes and Precisions. I was worried that I might not like the look and feel, so I tried looking up their US laptop return policy.

Dell's return policy was found in about 5 seconds.

Lenovo's site, google, bing, or any other resource, however, proved to be useless while looking up their US return policy (all I could find was their Australian policy for whatever reason). Lenovo tried VERY hard to bury it, and I was only able to find it after tweeting at lenovosocial, which at first gave me the wrong policy by mistake (it was a 30 days, no questions asked guarantee). …