Today reading about MySQL Table Locking Issues. Of particular interest were the HIGH_PRIORITY and SQL_BUFFER_RESULT SELECT Statement options.
PHP Operator Precedence
Today I had cause to read about Operator Precedence in PHP. I think I will consider availing myself of the ‘and’ and ‘or’ keywords in future, I haven’t used them myself, although I have seen them before.
Scaling to 100k Users
Today on r/programming was an article Scaling to 100k Users which discusses the phases you go through as you grow.
Plain JavaScript can do a lot!
Today I saw on r/programming a post by Julia Evans titled A little bit of plain JavaScript can do a lot. She discusses some of JavaScript’s more powerful contemporary features.
PHP clearstatcache()
It’s very important to remember that PHP caches results of file-system functions. Details are here.
I’m trying to just literally never argue with people
I’m reading this great interview with Marc Andreessen in which he says:
I’ve really been trying hard to spend less time actually arguing with anybody. Because people really don’t want to change their mind. And so I’m trying to just literally never argue with people.
…I thought that was worth making a note of. I think I’m going to take that on board.
How much does it cost to run a blog?
Today I read How Much Does It Cost To Run This Blog?. The bottom line was:
| Item | Monthly Cost |
| Domain registration | £0.49 ($0.62) |
| VPS hosting | £12.00 ($15.23) |
| DNS hosting | £1.54 ($1.95) |
| WP Rocket plugin | £0.79 ($1.00) |
| ShortPixel credits | £0.65 ($0.83) |
| Updraftplus SFTP plugin | £0.79 ($1.00) |
| Yoast SEO plugin | £8.90 ($11.30) |
| Total: | £25.16 ($31.93) |
Feynman technique
Today (while reading this) I stumbled upon the Feynman technique.
Basically with the Feynman technique you just write down everything that you know about a concept/subject until you can see where your knowledge is shaky. It’s a problem solving tool.
Most bugs are in your error handling code
While reading What tools made you better programmer I came across a link to Error Handling in a Correctness-Critical Rust Project which included these two tidbits:
almost all (92%) of the catastrophic system failures are the result of incorrect handling of non-fatal errors explicitly signaled in software.
in 58% of the catastrophic failures, the underlying faults could easily have been detected through simple testing of error handling code.
Konsole column width
So after having read this I was trying to configure Konsole by editing my config files under
~/.local/share/konsole
and I couldn’t get my column width config to apply.
The problem was that I was configuring column width with the TerminalCols setting, but the correct setting is actually TerminalColumns, which was difficult to figure out! Not sure how I managed to get that wrong in the first place, but it’s fixed now.
My new Konsole dimension settings are:
TerminalColumns=100 TerminalRows=42