Programming: You're doing it wrong

If you're a programmer (as I am), please do yourself a favor and read this post by Marco Tabini in the 20th anniversary of his IT career:
http://www.phparch.com/2010/03/10/programming-youre-doing-it-wrong/

Some highlights of his post:

"Software development is the land of egos and opinions—and it seems that, no matter how bad we try, we're always doing things the wrong way."

"One of the things that I have learned in twenty years of attempting to program is that we’re all doing it wrong. You. Me. Everybody."

"If you’re agonizing over whether you’re writing good code, let me spare you the anguish: you’re doing it wrong—except if your code works, in which case you most definitely are doing it right."


Other posts by Tabini (worth to read):
- Stop Telling People to Optimize, and Start Teaching them to program
- 5 meta skills for the PHP programmer

Multiple IEs

If you are a Web developer you are likely to need a tool like this to test your site in multiple versions of Internet Explorer:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

Latex footnotes

Today I was writing a paper in Latex and tried to make a footnote referencing a URL... and the compiler threw tons of errors because it wasn't recognizing the http:// and the _ in the URL.

Here is the fix:
1. Use the package url:
\usepackage{url}

2. Inside the \footnote tag, open another tag for \url{}:
Some text here \footnote{\url{http://fix.com}} and some other text here.

Google’s PageRank algorithm traced back to the 1940s

A co-worker sent me this link today and I found it very interesting:

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/googles-pagerank-algorithm-traced-back-to-the-1940s-20100217/

The concept behind Google's search engine success is their PageRank algorithm. Well, it seems that the algorithm was first written in the 40s.

Regular Expression evaluator

If you work with Regular Expressions, you may find this tool useful:

http://rubular.com/

Page Rank checker

If you wonder what's the Page Rank of your website, you can use online tools like this one:
http://www.prchecker.info

PageRank (PR) is the "score" every page gets from every browser. Is the result of an algorithm that takes several inputs (the most important is how many links to other sites you have and the PR of those sites). If you like to learn more about PR, check:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

SQL Yog

A very good tool. Works for MySQL.

Here is a list of free downloads:

http://code.google.com/p/sqlyog/downloads/list

(don't try to download it from their site since it's not free anymore, these copies are the ones they used to give as freeware).