Cory Hardman's Blog » Development Links

Floating Point Guide

Cory Hardman — Sun, 02 May 2010 16:24:36 +0000

I came across a great article about the pit falls of using floating point numbers in programming. All to often software bugs come up because developers expect something like 0.1+0.2==0.3. The article goes into very clear detail as to why it is not the case that we can expect exact equality while using float point representations.

No NoSQL

Cory Hardman — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:45:06 +0000

I’ve recently seen major websites start to move their database back-ends from MySQL to a NoSQL solution. NoSQL for those that have not yet heard of it is way to story data in a loose manner without a rigid scheme defined in a non relational way. The claim is that it these newer technologies can scale better than other relational based methods.

Which is fine and dandy for certain projects and if it works it works. However, a recent article underscores a feeling I have had with this trend. What is wrong with MySQL? The recent move to NoSQL would make one wonder how did we ever manage to store this information in the past? I’d have to guess that over 99% of all projects are not large enough to every be concerned with scale issues. By scale issues I mean trying to store Google’s search information. MySQL or some other relational database back-end is being used by nearly every large cooperation in the world to store and manage tons of information.

Relational storage based solutions are still perfectly fine for nearly every project and they are often much easy to use. Be sure to think carefully before trying to decide which direction to head down.

MySQL and Java common problem

Cory Hardman — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:52:01 +0000

Have you ever received the following error while using Java and MySQL:

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘????????????????’ at line 1

This is a common error when you first set up Java and MySQL to work together. To correct it simply add the following lines of code to your my.cnf in the section [mysqld]

collation_server=utf8_general_ci
character_set_server=utf8

Great C Tutorial

Cory Hardman — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 04:52:44 +0000

Dr. Dave Marshall at Cardiff School of Computer Science has written a great C tutorial. This tutorial is mostly aimed at UNIX C developers and covers the basics of C programming to advanced multi-threaded application development. This is the tutorial that I used to learn C and I still open it up whenever I need to look up something new or need a quick refresher on something. Unfortunately it appears that Google keeps burying the link so I thought it would be helpful to others that are looking for in my opinion the best C tutorial available online.