I found this excellent article on project management from the developer’s point of view:
(Originally written by Brandon Ching)

Today’s post is on something a bit different but still very much relevant in the web development world: project management. Now, I’m not all that old and I haven’t been a web developer for all that long (about 6 years in total, 3 actually getting paid but I have had the opportunity of working for a medium-sized media company with a development team of about 25 developers, a small 5-6 person development company (3 developers), and as an independent contractor.

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For a project I’m currently working on, I needed to be able to find people that a within a certain distance from a particular point.

I have a large database of people that each have a Longitude and Latitude of their location. One of the searches in the app I am building needs to find people that are close to the location of the Job. So if the Job is in Kumeu (NZ), I want to see the people that are close (lets say 25km).

This is made easy with the Haversine formula. Google has a good article that gives a MySQL query that will produce a list of rows from the database where the locations are within a certain number of kilometres/miles.

The MySQL query looks like this:

SELECT *,
(6371 *
acos(cos(radians(174.556107)) * cos(radians(latitude))
* cos(radians(longitude) - radians(-36.775700))
+ sin(radians(174.556107)) * sin(radians(latitude))))
AS distance
FROM Locations
HAVING distance < 25
ORDER BY distance

The location in the example above (-36.775700, 174.556107) is of Kumeu (NZ). The table currently has 4,500 records and the query takes about 0.0063 seconds (actually it is usually 0.0001 seconds).

Note that the above query calculates kilometres. If you are wanting miles, change the figure of 6371 to 3959.

The HAVING distance < 25 means that we are only getting the records who are within 25km of the original location.

I was having a problem trying to get the TinyMCE editor to display when creating/editing posts in my Wordpress 2.5 installation. Only the HTML version would display and Firebug would display an error saying: Illegal Character in the file: /wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php?ver=20080327

I read lots of posts with other people having problem with the TinyMCE editor, and eventually I found out that gzip compression may be causing the problem. I turned off gzip compression from the hosting control panel and cleared the javascript cache (/wp-content/updates/js_cache/) by deleting the file(s) in there.

This fixed my issue. Hopefully this will help someone else too.

I came across an interesting video today. It stems from an equally interesting article. For reference, I include a link to the archived version of the original post written way back in 2005. The original post includes links to websites regarding the information they reference.

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