• SQL

    SQL and Date Functions

    SQL has some really great features for managing dates. Given that dates are a very common thing to store in databases, that’s a pretty logical thing to get to a good, mature point. But the most challenging aspect of working with date and time in SQL is formatting. There are lots of different ways to format dates around the world, and even different structures (e.g. epoch) that are often complicated by adding time to records. But, you need to do things in a consistent fashion with how SQL expects them, if you’ll be using built in functions to manage dates. Dates can be stored in a variety of formats, which…

  • Mac OS X

    Debugging Twitter

    I was recently working on a new project developing against Twitter using their JSON interface. Turns out that the Twitter app has an awesome little feature to assist with such a task, a Console. To see the menu for the Console, enable the Develop menu, by putting a true boolean ShowDevelopMenu key into the com.twitter.twitter-mac.plist: defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac ShowDevelopMenu -bool true Once enabled, use the Develop menu to open Console. Here, you can select various buttons and see the GET, POST, PUT or DELETE sent. as well as the entities sent. To disable the Develop menu: defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac ShowDevelopMenu -bool false