GPL payroll software: PayMaster

PayMaster by Treshna in New Zealand. Treshna has released a previous in-house product under GPL, and ported it to Linux.
It currently uses pg, but I’ve looked at the schema and MySQL 5.0 shouldn’t have a problem with it. So, if you’re currently looking for a little project, port it for MySQL and submit back the [...]

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Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
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Timezones on servers

People across North-America are scrambling to update their servers, in order to deal with the upcoming timezone changes.
I’ll tell you a little secret that has served me well… ever since the C libraries were a pest in the mid eighties (the ones on DOS defaulted to GMT-5, US EST, or something in that realm), and [...]

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Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
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Great circle and distances

I reckon that techies sometimes go overboard in accuracy!
Many sites use so-called Great-Circle calculations to find places within a certain distance of a specified location. The resulting queries tend to do full table scans with relatively few actual matches, then order by distance and page or limit that.
If, instead, you use a bounding rectangle and [...]

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Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
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Networking – people connecting with people

Doing some book packing in my office this morning (moving house soon). I didn’t keep that many books when I moved from The Netherlands to Australia, so at the time I did a very tough selection. Naturally, I wouldn’t toss my copy of “The C Programming Language”
One book that was given to me [...]

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Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
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