Having trouble getting UPC numbers to show up properly in Microsoft Excel? Excel may format a UPC strangely if the cell is formatted as Text (e.g. 8.08282E+11) or may remove leading 0's if the cell is formatted as a Number. Some solutions involve using a function or adding a single-quote to the beginning of each UPC, but those don't work well with bulk UPCs. The better solution is to use a Custom format for the UPC cells.

In case you don't know who he is, Robert (Bobby) Kotick is the CEO of Activision Blizzard, one of the largest "interactive entertainment" companies in the world. Through a "laser focus" on profits, Mr. Kotick has earned quite a reputation among gaming enthusiasts.

Many of the below quotes come from financial calls and the verbiage reflects this. We gamers understand the importance of profit, but feel that it should not be the main guiding principle in a gaming company.

There are two common methods to determine if a property/attribute/variable of some object exists. Both use the property name as a string and neither rely on checking for an error report.

This error is often caused by the accidental use of a colon (:) to terminate a statement instead of a semi-colon (;). The error report should give you the error location.

In Windows 7, numbered file names are sorted based on numerical value:

If your website has a fixed width and you want it to fill the screen, use these three meta tags for good browser coverage (replace 400 with the correct fixed width of your website):

Ternary is a short way to write if/else condition checks on a single line, and allows you to perform condition checks inline with variable assignments and more.

The information in this post is outdated. Please use PDO with real (non-emulated) prepared statments to properly prevent MySQL injection.

Any data that comes from the client-side needs to be properly validated and escaped before using. This is extra important if you're using that data to form part of a database query. Always assume that your users will try to input incorrect information and special characters into fields, and do not rely on HTML or JavaScript to prevent this.

PHP is a fairly loose programming language, which causes many new developers (and experienced ones) to get lazy. If you suppress errors, you can get away with ridiculous things like using undefined variables, without anyone being the wiser. But just because you can get away with it, doesn't mean you should.

Want to see how well your web server is performing? It's a good idea to have some sort of 3rd party monitoring program that regularly pings your web server and logs the response time and timeout events. If your server is not being nice (or not meeting their claimed uptime), you can use this data as leverage for negotiating or just to inform them that you're seeing more downtime than you'd like.

You can spoof the user agent on your Android phone fairly easily, using Firefox and the Phony plug-in. This allows you to make websites think you're browsing on a desktop computer, iPhone, or something else.

When comparing two values against each other, it is common to use the "equals" operator (==), and this is fine as long as you have control over the values that are being compared. But what if you're comparing user input against a value, such as in a sign-in script or captcha? Using the equals operator can potentially leave you open for security issues, since PHP handles comparisons between different data types non-intuitively.

Using PHP, you can change the whole site or redirect users to a different site when they browse from a mobile device, or just change the CSS.

The style of a text link on a web page (hyperlink) should do two things effectively. It should clearly distinguish the link from normal text, so that users can see it at a glance, and it should create a clear hover effect, so users know when their mouse is hovering over it and that a click will activate the link.