Category: Programming

  • Speed Up That Cheap Website with Cheap Amazon S3

    Do you have an economy-grade website host? Me too. BlueHost is great for only $6.95 per month but its response times and transfer rates are terrible. Fear not — Amazon S3 to the rescue. For pennies a day you can supplement your cheap website host using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon S3 is storage…

  • Easy Way to Convert UTC to Current Timezone in PHP

    $utc_time = “2009-01-12 21:28:21”; // As pulled from the database date_default_timezone_set(“America/New_York”); // Set to Eastern time (automatically handles daylight savings time) // Here’s the secret: add a Z (for zulu) to the end of your UTC date/time string $utc_time .= “Z”; // Now convert to the current timezone $cur_date = strftime(“%G-%m-%d %H:%M:%S”, strtotime($utc_time)); // Format…

  • Presenting Stock Rider :: Ski the Market

    Play Now Today is very special. After 150 hours of hard work and sleepless nights, I have released Stock Rider, a flash-based game where you ski real market data. This is my first big Flash piece and I am so happy with the results. It uses Box2D for Flash as the physics engine, incorporates sounds,…

  • Quote of the Day

    Web services are the coolest technology I know of that ends up turning everyone off. I don’t know about you, but when I go to a lecture on Web services, invariably tons of acronyms come out, like Representational State Transfer (REST), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Remote Procedure Call (RPC), SOAP, and RSS. And then I…

  • Quote of the Day

    Chris B: I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Me being a programmer is like a tool-using ape building star ships.