Credit card data read from magnetic swipe card readers can be parsed using PHP’s preg_match and regular expressions. Learn how in this tutorial.
10 Steps to Capistrano and Plesk Subdomains Deployment
Plesk and Capistrano for subdomains is easily handled in this 10 step setup tutorial.
Marketing in Down Times
I’m always pleasantly surprised when I stumble upon the result of a company’s marketing efforts and realize how perfectly they succeeded in directing their message. My favorite, a television ad campaign for Prego, used music to drive home the old-world style of their spaghetti sauce and succeeded beautifully. In yesterday’s…
Can Management Understand Employee Needs?
During a conversation with a large national client, two of their staff members made the implication that their “boss”, the executive director, was out of touch with what was going on in the trenches, and he should not be consulted on important decisions.  Though I agree that the director may…
Altering Course: Development Team and Client Relationships
Today, we received a client request to improve a page’s load time while in the midst of making major aesthetic improvements to another site. When I suggested we switch gears to help the client, I was met with resistance in the form of frustration that the new project was being…
Fixing a Dysfunctional Team
Every Monday morning our team engages in a sprint planning meeting. Starting with a retrospective of the prior week, we discuss problems, successes, and ideas from individually posted notes on each topic Intended to be frank discussions, we are openly enthusiastic about the good things that occur, but our challenges…
Leadership: Actions vs. Words
Somehow, I ended up on this mailing list about leadership. The articles–put together by a local company–focused on teaching leadership and team building, and I always looked forward to reading them. Last September, I took a few minutes to write the author and company owner. I told him that I…
Feeling Lucky
Nicholas writes clean, elegant code. Paul contributes beautifully to interface interaction. Scott is a master of programming languages, and Manish and Manasi possess an enviable stick-to-itiveness attitude. Then there’s me. Fumbling as I am in learning Rails and attempting to pick up Scott’s reigns, I realize that I have been…
Ubercart: “Javascript Enabled”
For two days and many hours, I slaved over a Ubercart issue that insisted I must have “javascript enabled” in order to display missing credit card fields. Posts on the Ubercart forum suggested I look for javascript errors that might conflict with the onclick display of the credit card pane. …