arturmarques.com iLog

Until HTML5, most solutions to embed audio in HTML involved 3rd party technologies, namely Adobe’s Flash or external players. With HTML5 and its audio element, things have become much easier and, above all, much cleaner and under the developer’s full understanding. For example, if you want to embed a playable MP3 file (showing play/stop controls) [...]

Frustrated with ThinkUp 0.8 beta database errors, I decided to invest a few minutes on the source code, just in case it was something trivial. Here is one common ThinkUp MySQL error, with the most informative parts on bold: Database error! ThinkUp could not execute the following query: INSERT INTO tu_users (user_id, user_name, full_name, avatar, [...]

I would love to be as superior as Bernie Ecclestone was after being mugged, selling is battered face for a fortune and showing the abusers how to brilliantly volte-face a situation, but of course I am just a nobody and the best turnaround I can ambition is to help at least one person with some [...]

Some big Web databases are making people more aware of *NO* relational databases alternatives. For example, Twitter and Digg are going Cassandra‘s way – as Facebook did.

I rejected VS.PHP as a viable solution for PHP debugging. It happened in 4 steps. (1) I was trying VS.PHP 2.8 with Visual Studio 2008, when I found that, for curl projects, it is needed to edit the file php-xdebug.ini located in the VS.PHP install folder, and then uncomment the use of the curl extension. This means [...]

If you, like me, want to customize some sites you visit, your best tools are Opera User Javascript, for the Opera browser, and GreaseMonkey, for Firefox. I use Opera for the sites I have to visit very regularly – I usually have 100+ open tabs on Opera, mostly news and finance related. Opera is the [...]

When you are working with cells formatted as having dates, if you subtract them, you get how many days separate those dates. Problems might arise when you are writing a “date” on some cell, but you are using a custom format for the year, month and day.Because of the custom format, functions like “DATEVALUE”, that [...]

If you want to use C# to write CGI applications, you might stumble on some technical difficulties, when using the IIS web server: no matter what are the permissions you set for the folder holding the CGI executable, whenever executing it, the web server doesn’t process the file and tries to serve it as if [...]