By mariya | Published:
April 10, 2009
There I was, coding up a fresh Doctrine schema for a Symfony app, when my plans to implement foreign keys were repeatedly foiled:
SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1005 Can’t create table ‘./mydb/#sql-xxxx.frm’ (errno: 150). Failing Query: ALTER TABLE cow ADD FOREIGN KEY (barn_id) REFERENCES barn(id)
I was using InnoDB, both tables were there, both columns were there, what [...]
Also posted in Technology |
By mariya | Published:
August 5, 2008
Dear Yelp.com,
After two years of silence, I appreciate your sudden and continued, nay daily, efforts to bring me up to date on the culinary scene in Brooklyn, New York, where I no longer reside. Happy to hear from you but, unfortunately, miles away from any city served by your delightful application, I scrolled to the [...]
Also posted in Technology |
By mariya | Published:
June 9, 2008
I’ve seen many a source code that is neat and XHTML-compliant everywhere except—for some mysterious reason—forms. There is some unspoken rule that tables are the only way to align form fields into two even columns. That rule is wrong. Without further ado, here is how to rid your pages of the final vestiges of layout [...]
Also posted in Design, Technology |
By mariya | Published:
November 27, 2007
This is not immediately obvious those who charge a flat rate per project, instead of by the hour. But unless you track your hours, you know neither how much you’re making on your current project, nor the fair price to charge for a comparable project in the future. Remember, $2000 might sound like a pretty [...]
By mariya | Published:
November 25, 2007
In your CSS, you specify that your #header, #footer and #sidebar elements should be baby blue. A week later, your picky designer asks that they be changed to lilac. Of course, you can change the color for all three elements, but, as the DRY gods will tell you, find/replace is error-prone.
You should only specify colors [...]
Also posted in Design, Technology |
By mariya | Published:
November 8, 2007
A dear friend noted that few of my posts are constructive: they’re mostly biting criticism and ranting about practices that don’t work.
But the topics I address (technology, business, recruiting) are so open-ended that you can do things many different ways. And they all work, except for the ones that don’t. It seems that as long [...]
By mariya | Published:
October 18, 2007
There’s no hope for the web, is there? Most sites are poorly made and look like oatmeal on a baby bib. Others are developed cleanly by someone whose code doesn’t suck only to face another hurdle: the idiot copywriter.
The fun at this jewelry outfit begins with the domain name: steveclarkweb.com. I admit, it’s hard to [...]
By mariya | Published:
October 4, 2007
Name your classes something sensible! If I see another CSS class named “blueText” I will scream. YOU CAN TELL IT’S BLUE WHEN YOU LOOK AT IT, STUPIDS.
CSS was invented to make attributes easy to change. Say you want a blue message on all your pages. You sensibly label it with a CSS class ‘message’ and [...]
Also posted in Technology |