Merchants of Deception

Just finished reading “Merchants of Deception” by Eric Scheibeler and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who has suspected that there might be dodgy goings on at Amway, one of the largest privately held companies in the world.

If you might have suspected that the Amway business is designed for Amway to make lots of money, while the majority of the recruited distributors slowly go financially broke while destroying their existing relationships, read about one man’s experience of nearly a decade in the Amway inner circle.

Then make up your own mind.

Replacing stupid laws with moronic ones

Has anyone read the Australian Government’s proposed new copyright laws? The new reforms on Philip Ruddock’s website defy logic and common sense. From their Q&A section:

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The perfect HTML markup guide

While there are lots of HTML primers out there, there’s one which every web designer should read and understand. It’s 37 Steps to Perfect Markup by Tommy Olsson. Strictly speaking, this is not for beginners but rather for those folks who think they know enough HTML to get by. Because, it’s often these same folks who lack the understanding of the repercussions of getting it even slightly wrong.

Checking for Office applications in Visual Basic

I recently got an email from one of our readers who found our Spellchecking from Visual Basic article useful but wanted to know if there was a way to ensure that Microsoft Word was installed before attempting to invoke the spellchecking function.

The short answer is “yes, there is”. The actual VB6 code required isn’t all that much but you’ll have to call the Windows API to do it. Put the following code into a module and name it something meaningful:

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MySQL query cache to the rescue

Dynamic database driven websites are great. You just add your content and the website software grabs that content from the database, applies all the necessary formatting and displays it nicely and consistently to the user.

Until you wind up with thousands of “articles” and a very popular website, as one user complained in a recent forum topic. Googling for “+php +memory_limit” produces over 400,000 results, which shows just how widespread this problem really is.

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