Dennis's Corner of the Internet

It's been a few months since my last post around these parts. I've mostly been keeping busy with fitting into the whole West Coast lifestyle and, of course, busy at the job. Although I do miss New York City from time to time, particularly

Well, after writing in my last post a month ago that I was officially unemployed, I was blessed with acquiring a new full-time job just four days later. Best of all, it's where I always wanted to be, the Bay Area! Tomorrow will officially

After two years, yesterday was my final day of being a developer for BarterQuest. As anyone living in expensive New York City in the same situation, I have been focusing part of my energy looking for a new gig. I'm pretty confident, despite the

As many other developers, I've been experimenting with the different "NoSQL" data stores. Most of them are really great, like Redis, Tokyo Cabinet and CouchDB. My favorite so far, however, is MongoDB. I think it hits the sweet spot between a normal

In my development blog, I previously wrote that MongoDB was the future of database storage. I might reconsider my decision, now that I've discovered Redis. In a nutshell, Redis is a key-value store. But it's not a simple key-value database, as it has lots

Recently, I've been looked over two different job opportunities. That's nothing new, and nothing that will bring me down. However, the reasons behind why I was looked over annoyed me a lot. Apparently, these companies were looking for people from Ivy League schools. Seriously?

Today I stumbled upon a site which shows how to create a 'magical' user registration form, using a little bit of CSS and jQuery magic. Go ahead, play around with it once. I'll wait. Are you finished? Good. Now please don't ever do this

It seems like the current hotness is Twitter, with tons of publicity about how their growth in the past couple of months has been staggering. Of course, as with any other service on the Internet, with more awareness about the product, more people feel

I had some time to spare during the weekend, so I decided to have some fun with my MacBook Pro. Now, I've been more or less full-time Mac user for the past year (I use Ubuntu Linux from time to time, though) ever since

Ever since I bought my MacBook Pro a few months ago, my poor ol' Mac Mini has been alone and lonely. I really didn't have much use for it, since I transferred all important work files to my new laptop. So what would I

For the past few years, I've more or less kept the same RSS feeds in my reader for all that time - TechCrunch, Signal Vs. Noise, Seth Godin's Blog and Penny Arcade. I also have a lot of smaller, niche blogs that either don't

Note: Unfortunately, due to some lack of time, plus a large amount of spam comments being targeted at that site, I decided to take it down. Hopefully in the near future I'll be able to continue this small side-project. I recently deployed a small

One of the not-so-joyous moments of being a web developer is the fact that we still need to support browsers that are ancient (by technological standards). Specifically, I'm talking about Internet Explorer 6.0. A quick look at the site statistics of one of

Yesterday morning, someone posted a comment on a post I wrote at the blog of the company I work for. This person, named 'Tom', said that our site was filled with lies, and that we had false advertising all over the place. Of course,

Today I had a pretty frustrating moment. I made some new changes in the morning, which included the addition of a new column in the database. This field wasn't required, but I needed to limit the amount of characters a user could enter in

Today I noticed that whenever using some of the Prototype Helpers in Rails (such as link_to_remote or remote_function), it was setting by default the evalScripts parameter to true. For those who don't know, Prototype uses evalScripts to evaluate anything in <

I just stumbled upon a script that MySQL includes nowadays called mysql_secure_installation. It runs a series of steps to remove some of the default installation options that MySQL installs, like an anonymous user and a test database. When you run the script,

On a recent Rails project, I was asked to verify if the visiting user's browser has cookies enabled, and display a message on top of the screen if they don't. While I don't want to get into the reasoning why, or get into a

I was having a quick tech discussion the other day on a non-tech message board I visit on a daily basis. I had mentioned how frustrating it is to have to spend hours developing for good ol' obsolete Internet Explorer 6.0, and why

Yesterday afternoon, I had the urge to get a new Rails book, so I went to Amazon and ordered The Art Of Rails. This post isn't about the book, but I'll try to write about it after I read it. This post instead is

Last night I was in the mood to just review some of the stuff I already work with on a daily basis. I've been reading up on a lot of new stuff that I'm dying to play with, so a quick review of familiar

I'm pretty damn excited by the long-awaited public launch of Dropbox, an online file storage service. Well, it's more than that. It's a service that allows you to store, share and synchronize your files, either on the web, or as a 'dropbox' folder on