While the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin is far from a comprehensive online store, it still provides an easy and cheap way to sell products online. Although the stock implementation might work well for a simple product catalog, many users will need to customize the product listing based on product settings. In order to accomplish this, the cart as a feature called “Custom Meta” variables; we will explore how to use these variables to change the way products are displayed.
Continue reading
As the Internet has grown, three main protocols have reigned supreme in sending data online: IP (Internet Protocol), UDP (User Datagram Protocol), and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). Understanding these protocols is key to both designing computer networks and keeping data secure. Foremost among these three protocols is IP, as both UDP and TCP use IP as a base layer for sending their information.
Continue reading
Microsoft PowerShell is an incredibly flexible batch scripting engine – essentially the Swiss Army knife of Windows programming. Although the language itself is derivative of Batch files, it gains significant capability through .NET integration. PowerShell scripts can access SQL databases, execute shell commands, parse file and directory structures, and perform I/O, mostly through one-line commands.
Continue reading
When a hard drive is struck with a bad sector, although some of the data may be lost, it’s often possible to reformat the hard drive and get it working again. The bad sectors are removed from the array, and the hard drive will work as before, albeit a few megabytes smaller. Current hard drives are able to work around bad sectors and only store data in the good areas of the drive. Although this saves money vs buying a new drive, is it a good idea?
Continue reading
At a recent conference on tech trends in financial technology, Jason Henrichs provided his thoughts on BitCoin, the growing digital currency. With Jason’s self described “very promiscuous” experience in the FinTech sector, it’s smart to listen; he has been a part of over 40 financial technology start-ups, and has helped bring to market several technologies such as high-reward debit cards. In addition, he is regularly paid to consult and serve on the boards of financial technology companies. With his extensive regulatory and operations experience, he has seen first-hand the challenges in launching and developing new forms of payment.
Continue reading
The key to successful rapid application development is a fast deployment and testing environment. Quick builds and deployments enable better testing of new functionality, since the developer retains the changes fresh in his mind and can make fixes iteratively instead of in large batches. Altogether, this results in more polished, full-featured apps, and faster app time-to-market.
Continue reading
Almost every modern programming language tutorial starts out with a short script that simply outputs the phrase “Hello World.” This sample code has been used so much that the phrase has become part of the computer programming lexicon – and its ubiquity has caused the words to lose much of their meaning. A stroll through the annals of programming history, however, give us a pleasant refresher of the true reason many of us started programming.
Continue reading
Just like certain clothes never seem to go out of style, there are algorithms that prove their mettle year after year, decade after decade. Chief among these is the Fourier Transform – a mathematical brilliance that is as resilient as it is useful.
Continue reading
When web designers code a site’s HTML and CSS, the built-in methods for positioning elements on the screen are “absolute”, “fixed” and “relative” positioning. Each method provides its distinct set of advantages and drawbacks, however there are times when a layout requires the best of all worlds. In order to handle these cases, a very useful hybrid technique is available, dubbed absolutely relative positioning.
Continue reading
Prior to SQL Server 2008, there was no straightforward way to pass arrays in TSQL. While programming languages such as Perl, C# and Ruby adopted array map functions as the lifeblood of the language, SQL Server’s TSQL stayed behind. Fortunately, the functionality is now present in most SQL Server instances, and can be leveraged for interesting new SQL constructs.
Continue reading
