Bryan's thoughts on web design and development

A better programmer’s font

For years I’ve used Courier New or whatever font my IDE chose for me. On a whim, I decided to search for a better programmer’s font; one that’s not only is easier on the eyes, but is more compact and efficient. I think I’ve found it: ProggyFonts

The Proggy font collection is composed of several free […]

IMAP + Gmail + Outlook + Xobni = Bliss

In case you haven’t heard, Gmail has finally released IMAP support for Gmail. This means that you can access Gmail from Outlook (or any email client for that matter). The clear implication here is that I can use Xobni on my gmail inbox, finally!
Setting up Gmail on Outlook

Memory Leak in Google Desktop

The last few days I’ve been noticing my system lagging pretty badly at the end of the day.
On a whim, I took a look at mem usage in the task manager, and noticed the largest memory hog was not firefox as is the custom, but google desktop…

As I watched, google gobbled up memory […]

Simple dynamic graphs with PHP+mysql

Graphing in PHP has always been an annoyance for me - while it would be cool feature to have, the need doesn’t come up nearly enough to warrant paying the exorbitant fees associated with most commercial graphing libraries. Besides, commercial PHP libraries always bring out the miser in me - it just doesn’t seem to […]

Zend Optimizer + APC = death

Our supporttrio support ticket installation went down last night. Their code is protected via Zend Guard, which requires Zend Optimizer to be installed.
Our site is served and managed by Rackspace. Last night I realized that I should actually use their services rather than keep installing things myself. So I asked them to install APC.
All seemed […]

Setting up multiple blogs with a single Wordpress install

I wanted to enable the rest of the Xobni team to create their own personal blogs, giving them the freedom to communicate their technical ideas and discoveries with the world. Unfortunately, while Wordpress supports multiple users, it doesn’t allow each to have distinct themes and posts. The recommended workaround is to install Wordpress multiple times, […]