Check out their website for more.

I enabled BitLocker today to encrypt my SSD drive and also a HDD drive that is in the machine and the SSD drive literally took minutes to encrypt whereas the HDD drive took over 2 hours.

There are many advantages to using a SSD such as speed, electronically accesses data (no moving parts) etc, but there are also some things to be aware of.

One of the issues of running a solid state drive is that if the drive fails, you’re most likely going to loose your data whereas with a HDD, you’ll likely be able to perform some data recovery.

Another problem with SSD’s at the moment is that they are extremely expensive, but I can see in a few more years once the price comes down, many PC manufacturers adopting them as a standard.

The upsides far outweigh the downsides for me. I now just need to save up to get a SSD in to my Mac!

Obviously, I will still be using my Macbook Pro as my home work station, but I am really excited to start working on this machine. It’s so fast!

<cfset columnValue = "#queryName.columnName[2]#">

Just change columnValue to the variable you want to set. queryName is name of your cfquery and columnName is obviously the name of the database column.

<?php
$array = array( 'blue', 'green', 'red' );
$count = 0;

foreach ( $array as $a ) {
	$count++;

	if ( count( $array ) == $count ) {
		echo "Last element";
	} else {
		echo "Just another element";
	}
}
?>

I used to use this method extensively but recently started looking at alternative ways to solve this problem which uses less code. So far I have come up with the following:

<?php
$array = array( 'blue', 'green', 'red' );

foreach ( $array as $key => $a ) {
	if ( end( array_keys( $array ) ) == $key ) {
		echo "Last element";
	} else {
		echo "Just another element";
	}
}
?>

It’s much less code and functions beautifully. We can obviously assign the last array key outside the loop and store it in it’s own variable if we don’t want to do an end() lookup on the array_keys array on each loop through.

Where as most young guys dream of owning a Ferrari or Porsche one day, I dream of owning a Land Rover Discovery. I’m not a speed freak, give me a very capable 4×4 with a luxurious interior and I’m sold!

The idea is to mark your calendar with a big cross after performing a daily task. You’ll eventually have a chain and mentally will not want to break that chain by not performing your task.

I’ve decided to try the idea out on my blog. I want to blog every day until the end of the year and beyond! Tomorrow will be day 4 of my chain. I’m excited about it and looking forward to sharing more on my blog.

Let me know if you make use of this technique too.

In the spirit of changes and my goal from earlier in the year to stay focused on a few things and get good at them, I’ve decided to blog a bit about some goals I’ve set for myself professionally.

I’ve been a programmer ever since I was a young teenager. It’s something that I love doing and don’t think I will ever stop. However, in my late teens I became very interested in the world of finance and banking. So much so that at one point I considered becoming a banker as my career path. My 6 subjects at school were english, maths, german, business, economics and accounting.

My interest in finance led me to a number of books that I read including “Rich dad, Poor dad”. That book changed my mindset and set me on a whole new path of learning about business, entrepreneurship and investing. I took an internship (actually 3) in the United States and spent my time learning how to build businesses (and programming of course).

I fiddled for a long time in the internet marketing space and tried to build numerous e-businesses. I had limited success and eventually moved on to doing client work and consulting.

Later, I returned to South Africa and took a job as a developer at a startup. I learnt how to build scalable web applications and we built a large advertising network. I’m very grateful for that time in my career and wouldn’t change it if I had to go back. However, I still had a desire deep down to be involved in the financial industry.

That brings me to today. One of the many reasons why I decided to take a job at Tutuka was because it’s in a really exciting industry (prepaid cards). It’s a good match for where I want to be going career wise.

So what this comes down to is that you’ll notice that I am going to start writing a lot more about the financial world. This mostly comes down to the fact that I’m doing a lot more reading and learning in this arena. It’s an interest and passion of mine and I want to share some of my thoughts on the industry and also developing software for it.

Most people find enterprise software boring, but I find it fascinating! I love using an IDE and writing large software applications. So as I read and learn, I am hoping to also write more about developing enterprise software and hopefully relate it to the financial industry thus bridging my two passions, software development and finance.