MySQL No-Nos: ORDER BY RAND()

It’s a classic. You want to return random rows from a table, say a collection of random users in your social network. Easy, MySQL’s ORDER BY RAND() to the rescue. After all, everybody’s doing it. At least on my last search on that topic, all the PHP kids did it.

Git Bits: Committing Partial File Changes

As if there weren’t enough reasons to love it, I came across a nice little article by Ryan Tomayko called “The Thing About Git”. He describes how to do partial commits of only some selected changes in specific files instead of having to commit the whole file. git add --patch to the rescue. Neat stuff. I still like git stash, but being able to commit specific changes while leaving others untouched in the local repository can come in handy from time to time.

Friday Tab Sweep (21.03.2008)

Lots of open tabs to be swept. Brace yourselves.

Git

Can you tell I’m looking into Git right now?

Ruby

Rails

Mac OS X

  • Secrets. An ever-growing list of hidden preferences. Comes with a handy-dandy preference pane.