DataBoost » DataBoost

It’s Better to be Clear Than Clever

Gregory — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 04:12:47 +0000

In my years of coding I have had the opportunity to work with, or after, a wide range of types of programmers. Both self taught and professionally trained, and in small and fast paced companies there wasn’t always a set of coding standards in place leaving developers to do what was best in their opinion. …

Avoid Any Gadget with OLED Displays

Gregory — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:38:00 +0000

With each new device comes a bigger and better screen with sharpness, color range and contrast levels that are downright incredible. Tablets are now advancing beyond HDTVs and as tech junkies, it is in our DNA to purchase these bests of breed. However, these advances do not come without their faults. On the cutting edge of screen clarity is the OLED display (or AMOLED, or Super AMOLED) which is derived from ultra thin organic materials. You can read up on OLED displays here. The downside with these, like most any organically sourced product, is that they have a limited lifespan before it begins to degrade. In this case, I am finding mobiles suffering screen burn out where pixels that are activated the most lose their brilliance.

Give it Five Minutes

Gregory — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 05:07:49 +0000

This is a great post by Jason F @ 37Signals on conducting yourself and your state of mind. Its so important to have an open mind in business. Please do have a read.

After my talk Richard came up to introduce himself and compliment my talk. That was very generous of him. He certainly didn’t have to do that.
And what did I do? I pushed back at him about the talk he gave. While he was making his points on stage, I was taking an inventory of the things I didn’t agree with. And when presented with an opportunity to speak with him, I quickly pushed back at some of his ideas. I must have seemed like such an asshole.
His response changed my life. It was a simple thing. He said “Man, give it five minutes.” I asked him what he meant by that? He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. “Five minutes” represented “think”, not react.

Give it five minutes (37 Signals)

Using a Custom IDataReader to Stream Data Into a Database

Syndicator — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:36:19 +0000

In a previous post, I discussed how to use the SqlBulkCopy class along with a SqlDataReader to quickly stream data from one database to another. The reason that you can use a SqlDataReader as a parameter in the WriteToServer method of SqlBulkCopy is ...

Moving 6 Billion Messages Without Being Noticed

Syndicator — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:18:13 +0000

We’ve just finished moving every message in every user’s message center — all 6 billion of them — to a brand new set of database servers, and we managed to do it without anyone noticing. We didn’t find much published material about the best way to do this, so we wanted to share a few …

When to Use TRY / CATCH

Gregory — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 02:33:00 +0000

UPDATE: Due to some confusion and helpful feedback, this article may be more appropriately titled “When NOT to use Try Catch”. Its a sink hole that I’ve seen far too often working with a wide range of talent levels in the fields between consultant workers and past generations reintroduced to the codebase. Being fault tolerant …

HTML5 Got Pushed to 2014 and I Don’t Care

Gregory — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 04:59:05 +0000

Recently the W3C stated that after several more years of rigorous testing the final HTML5 spec will be ratified in 2014. This sounds nice but truthfully you need to be building and deploying your web apps in HTML5 now, because it is already here. The last major browser to gain HTML5 support(Internet Explorer 9) is …

The Daily – Also Poorly Architected

Syndicator — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 17:49:10 +0000

A few weeks ago I took a peek at The Daily (a “digital newspaper” app from News Corp.) and quickly decided that my time and money were better spent elsewhere when it comes to getting the news. Bear in mind that I am more strict in my eval...

Testing for HTML 5 Support

Gregory — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 05:17:55 +0000

HTML5 and CSS3 are the shiny new web development things which we all want to learn and use but the truth is today most internet users do not have browsers which support them or support them all the way. Even as newer browsers come out it’ll take a couple years to be able to depend …

CSS Primer

Gregory — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 05:54:44 +0000

The goal of this article is to take either a complete beginner or someone who has dabbled with or even just heard of CSS and get them a solid foundation as to what CSS is, how it works, its benefits and get something working. Having this understanding will make picking up downstream topics much quicker and painless.