João Prado Maia’s Weblog

Google I/O is a self-proclaimed developer gathering happening in San Francisco at the end of this month (just two days though, May 28-29). It seems like a really cool event with lots of sessions about Web stuff in general.

The downside is that there will be around 70 sessions in a two day window, each with a time limit of 1 hour. So it seems like it will be kind of rushed, and I wonder how many attendees will miss a session because 4 other interesting ones are happening at the same time. Maybe expanding the number of days would have been a bit better.

It doesn’t look like I will be able to go as we will be finishing up on an upcoming release of our product.

Stoyan Stefanov is continuing the work of Steve Souders on the performance front by publishing some new research from Yahoo! to extend the initial list of 14 performance rules with 20 new ones. He presented at the PHP Quebec Conference a few weeks ago.

Ludwig Pettersson has a really good overview of the Google Charts API, and how you can integrate your PHP scripts with it. He created a PHP library that wraps around the API, and makes it really easy to generate graphs that way.

I’m not sure if I would move away from JpGraph to this new library, but it seems really cool no matter what. I guess it could be an option if you wanted to avoid doing all of the manual work associated with different types of graphs, and offload some graph generation to Google.

Peter-Paul Koch expanded his set of event compatibility tests (not updated since 2005) to cover some of the newer versions of browsers available today. The results are very useful, and include dozens of bugs throughout the browsers, and lots of tips on things to avoid. Recommended.

Well, that was interesting. I was debugging a problem with a particular uploaded document on Insightory, and it looks like I made the wrong decision when choosing the datatype for a blob column in one of my tables.

Apparently MEDIUMBLOB stores up to 16 MB of data, and the uploaded document was larger than that. Not a big deal, I’ll go ahead and accept blame and fix the table schema and move on.

However, when trying to research on this and find the maximum length for BLOB fields in MySQL at the manual, I get this pretty data table with some formulas on how to calculate the maximum number of bytes myself. Isn’t that helpful?

How about the members of the documentation team pre-calculate this stuff for me, so I can just read and absorb the content without taking out my calculator? Mmkay thx bye.