Sorting Geocoded Data by Distance from a Fixed Point
Here’s a common situation for you: you have geocoded data in a database (store locations, for example), and you want to provide a way for users to search for locations near their address. Of course you can’t store a “distance” field in the database, because the distance will be different for each query, so it [...]
Cut Grey Skies with Great Design
Living in Portland has it perks. Currently we are the cultural standout of hipster fashion, food, green culture, etc… you have heard it all so why shoot the dead horse. HOWEVER, what many recent transplants and new comers to the Rose City have not experienced is the months of dank and grey that haunts the [...]
Pop Art New Year
Welcome Back! I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. I went back to Washington D.C over the break to spend time with family, and close friends. This lead to the inevitable questions, “How is the new job?” and “What exactly do you do?” Most of the time I gave my best elevator speech (a short high-level description [...]
Errata & Notes
In this blog, I endeavor to be as factually correct as possible, but nobody’s perfect, and things always slip through. Just going back and correcting my posts isn’t good enough, because those changes won’t show up on your RSS aggregator, and it pains me to think about you walking around with false information that came [...]
Bon Voyage, 2011
Time to put another year to bed…fare thee well, 2011! In a lot of ways, I shan’t miss you, but professionally, you’ve been very good to me. I’ve always been a resolution maker; I haven’t always been a good resolution follower, but I’ve always liked the ritual and, you know, sometimes I do succeed in living up [...]
‘Tis the Season to Help Others
Volunteer this holiday season (and beyond). It's the cool thing to do!
What’s better than Internet dating … picking your seatmate on your next flight
Many of us have had a terrible flight experience; sometimes due to seatmates we would never chose to socialize with. Ever. Random seating is akin to playing Russian roulette with your sanity. KLM has stepped up to save the day by offering “social seating”, a chance to pick your seatmate using Facebook or LinkedIn.
I am the 10%
Our fearless leader Steve asked me recently “do 80% of programmers think they’re in the top 20% of good programmers?” I certainly think I’m in the top 20%. Heck, I think I’m in the top 10%. Putting aside my not-inconsiderable ego for a moment, though, it begs the question “what makes a good programmer?” In this [...]
Cus!*mer Serv!ce
Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Adobe – Who has better support. Today has been the ultimate bad computer day. We received shiny new ginormous monitors at work along with beautiful sleek new MacBook Pro laptops! My laptop bit it the second day. The problem – it bit it with all of my licenses for all my Microsoft [...]
Wither Thou Goest, Pseudorandom Number Generator?
I recently implemented a site (The 2011 Rosey Awards) that had to support the ability to display entries in a random order. The reasoning behind this was to give every entry a fair chance to show up on the first gallery page. You can change the sort order, of course, but it defaults to random. I [...]
