Tag: howto

  • Laravel: Adding A Default Message to a Select Drop Down with Eloquent

    I ran into an issue earlier where I needed to add a default message to a drop down box created through Laravel’s Form builder. The difficulty was that the form select doesn’t allow for a default option. You have to manually add that. If you pre-populate your select with an Eloquent model, you will have…

  • How to Properly Use An Ad Blocker

    One of my biggest pet peeves is the return of the popup subscription box. Unlike the old popup/pop-under style Javascript boxes, you cannot easily prevent these from showing up. Usually, they are the incarnation of some desperate content site who will sell your email address to a hundred other soulless spam bots to keep their…

  • Diablo 3: Seasonal Demon Hunter Tips for Casual Players

    For season 2, I decided to push a Demon Hunter character since for the most part I’ve accomplished as much as I could on my normal characters. In short, I felt somewhat bored and wanted to give the new seasonal game play a try. I consider myself a casual player (although I do play quite…

  • Signs of When You Should Quit Your Job

    As someone who has worked in the technology industry for 15+ years, I’ve become somewhat of an expert on corporate politics. I’ve had numerous jobs in the states and abroad, learning over time various signs of toxic environments that have made me jump from spot-to-spot. My post here will hopefully help others in making a…

  • Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls: Vlog on Public Games Etiquette

    Here’s a video of my first vlog using Twitch to provide my thoughts on public games etiquette for Diablo 3. Watch live video from conark on TwitchTV

  • PHP: References, Scoping, Arrays and Function Design

    Surprisingly, a lot of PHP code that I see in the industry rarely makes use of the ideas of references. However, references are an exceptionally powerful tool in the programming world because it can mean the difference in terms of memory management and performance. Quite a few people might not grasp some of the basic…

  • jQuery: Autocomplete Issue with Select

    I found an interesting undocumented consequence when you override the _renderItem function with one of your own. Most people might attempt to follow the format from the code example which shows a line that appends an “<a>” tag to the string (specifically as follows):

  • Baldur’s Gate 2: Best Route Quest Route?

    When you play Baldur’s Gate 2 a few times, you eventually learn what works for you in terms of the game progression. Shadows of Amn is pretty flexible in giving you a fairly non-linear setup so you’re essentially open to do the various quests in almost any order you want (outside of certain key story…

  • World of Warcraft: Siege of Orgrimmar Wing 1 LFR Guide

    Now that Siege of Orgrimmar is on farm for me for LFR, I decided to post some tips on doing well. The thing is that there’s a huge variance of difficulty mostly due to how certain bosses had been nerfed or were pre-nerfed while others still are overtuned and can cause trouble for groups because…

  • Symfony 2: Many-to-Many Relationships and Form Elements

    One of the things I’m developing a love for with Symfony 2 is how Doctrine, forms and Twig work together in a fairly elegant manner. With a little bit of code and annotations, you can allow Symfony 2 to perform a lot of the heavy lifting and boiler plate code that normally is a pain-in-the-rear…