John Cox

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30 Fantastic Examples Of Marvel Artworks

This is a curated gallery of Marvel superhero fan artwork by various artists, organized as a visual collection with links to each creator's portfolio. The post serves as a browsing resource for Marvel art fans rather than providing analysis or reporting, functioning primarily as a showcase to drive traffic to individual artists' work.

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Krumo: Version 2.0 of print_r(); and var_dump();

Krumo is a PHP debugging tool that presents variable data in a readable, structured format, offering a more user-friendly alternative to standard functions like print_r() and var_dump(). It was popular among PHP developers for making code inspection clearer and more navigable, though it has since been superseded by newer tools like Kint that offer better PHP5.3+ support and active maintenance.

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Crossing spaces and ideas « jabaldaia

The piece argues that innovation emerges from cross-pollination—connecting ideas across diverse disciplines, cultures, and backgrounds rather than developing them in isolation. It uses the metaphor of bees and gardeners to describe how organizations can become "idea pollinators" by hiring diverse talent, hosting interdisciplinary meetings, inviting external speakers, and working across varied projects, as exemplified by IDEO's systematic approach to sharing and combining knowledge from different fields.

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Canto.js: An Improved Canvas API - Ajaxian

I don't see a specific article to summarize here. This appears to be a homepage or index page for Informa TechTarget showing various news headlines and technology insights topics, rather than a single saved article with substantive content to summarize. If you'd like me to summarize a particular piece, please share the full text of that article.

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In defence of SQL | Seldo.Com Blog

This piece argues that while SQL is awkwardly designed for tasks like aggregation and filtering (which weren't part of its original relational algebra purpose), it remains invaluable because it enables ad-hoc queries on data without requiring advance knowledge of all questions you'll ask. The author contends that the real insight of the NoSQL movement wasn't rejecting SQL itself, but recognizing that specialized data stores (key-value, document stores, etc.) should match specific use cases—yet recommends keeping relational databases alongside these systems for their flexibility, and predicts a common query language will eventually emerge to bridge the fragmented NoSQL ecosystem as SQL once unified relational databases.

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Looking for something to read? Here's a messy collection of book-recommendation threads on reddit. : books

This is a curated index of Reddit book recommendation threads organized by subreddit and topic, compiled from various sources to help readers discover new titles across genres like science fiction, philosophy, dystopian fiction, and nonfiction. The author acknowledges the list is incomplete and skewed toward popular subreddits, noting that many threads overlap in their recommendations (particularly titles like *1984* and *Brave New World*) while still containing hidden gems worth exploring. The post invites readers to contribute additional threads, especially from topic-specific communities not yet represented.

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Caching could be the last thing you want to do - MySQL Performance Blog

A popular PHP ecommerce platform required caching to achieve basic performance (10 pages/second), exemplifying a common architectural mistake where developers reflexively add caching to mask underlying inefficiencies rather than fixing them first. The author argues caching should be a last resort because it creates unequal user experiences (some users hit cache misses repeatedly), obscures real performance bottlenecks, and introduces complex management problems like cache stampeding. Before implementing caching, developers should exhaust simpler optimizations: understanding query execution plans, eliminating SELECT * queries that fetch unnecessary columns, and verifying that every query on a page is actually necessary.

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HTML Media Capture

This W3C working draft specifies how HTML forms can access a device's camera, microphone, and video recording capabilities through enhancements to the file input element, allowing users to capture media directly rather than only selecting existing files. The spec proposes adding a "capture" parameter to the accept attribute (e.g., `accept="image/*;capture=camera"`) that hints to the browser which capture mode to offer by default, and defines a MediaFile interface to handle the resulting media data. The document is still in early development with several aspects explicitly noted as needing further coordination with other working groups and community feedback.

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Intro to OLAP - MySQL Performance Blog

This post introduces business intelligence (BI) and OLAP (online analytical processing) tools, explaining how they analyze data to provide insights into business performance through multidimensional analysis that breaks down measures like sales totals across dimensions such as time, geography, and product. It contrasts MOLAP systems, which use specialized pre-computed data stores for speed but require lengthy processing times, with ROLAP systems like Mondrian that query relational databases structured as star schemas, trading some performance for flexibility and ease of use. The post establishes that this series will focus on open-source ROLAP tools using MySQL, covering how they generate queries and handle aggregation to improve performance on large datasets.

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