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Monthly Archives : May 2008


I recently completed a project that required moving small amounts of data to different servers. Easy enough. The only complication was that it needed to make around 500 separate requests a minute (and growing), to different servers, with different data. Unfortunately cURL typically makes it requests in a synchronous fashion–the next event doesn’t fire until the previous one has completed. When you’re running 500 a minute, every minute, and you have to wait for the previous event to finish, you immediately start building a stockpile of requests–which is bad. Very bad. Every minute the queue grows bigger, and the performance becomes worse. However, cURL has a built in group of functions called curl_multi which allows you to send all of your requests simulatenously. It reduced the processing time so dramatically, that my software can now easily send the 500 requests in under 10 seconds. To that end, I ended up rewriting a function I found over at phpied.com to handle a variety of different scenarios involving post and get parameters. Most of the documentation you need can be found in the example.php file where I included a bunch of different case scenarios.

You can download all the necessary info here: Multi Poster cURL Library.


I’ve recently been doing some work on updating content (status messages) on the various social networks and social service sites. I’ve taken this functionality and encapsulated it into some classes which will allow you to simulatenously (or individually) update the following sites:

  • twitter.com
  • pownce.com
  • jaiku.com
  • tumblr.com

It is nothing fancy as this point, but hopefully in future versions I will clean up the code a bit and add some other sites to the list. In the meantime though, if you’ve been looking for a way to make your web application post to twitter, pownce, tumblr, or jaiku, this might be a quick and easy way to get going. NOTE: Your server needs CURL for these to work

Download: Status Update Class Version .9


I am once again up late at night writing a whole bunch of code to handle searching some poorly organized database tables (I didn’t create them), and I know that no matter what I do  it is not going to be as modular or as functional as I would like. Some times you can only work with what’s given to you. It makes me wish that Google would release an enterprise cloud search program. I want to have Google create an index on content I specify, that I can then query thru an api and have datasets returned to me. I would only have to get familiar with the API once, and then I could just modify some code and generate a few sitemaps (which I do anyway), and the whole search piece is taken care of. And the best part, is that no matter what I write code wise I know Google’s search will be better. I would LOVE to pay for this. As I move more and more stuff into the cloud, I would love to never have to worry about writing a piece of search functionality again.


Funny, I was cleaning out my photos and came across these gems from 2000. I think we (NursingHands, Inc.)  had just closed our first round of funding, and we were moving into our new plush offices that we had just built out. What I find especially interesting is that phone cameras, and digital cameras, weren’t everywhere back then, and as a result I think these are the only photos I have of this 3 year period in my life.