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musings of mark since 2001

Indiana Jones flew into Snug Cove yesterday in a float plane and tied up to the other marina’s dock. Him and the pilot from Baxter Air went up to Doc Morgan’s and had lunch; it didn’t take long for a few of the actors on the island to make their way over and do some posing.

Earl and I were down at the float plane when they were done, neither of us clued in to who the famous guest was and joked with the pilot as he prepared for takeoff. It did seem odd that the pilot let his passenger start the plane up and taxi out of the cove, less so when you find out the passenger could afford to buy the company, let alone use a piece of their equipment.

Well, that was a fun weekend! It’s been ages since doing anything with a command line in MySQL and the new client only had ftp and ssh access to their web server. No problem, dug out my copy of PuTTY and was able to log in no problem. Typing mysqladmin brought up a screen showing that the daemon was running and I was in like Flint

Been a while though, and my typing is lousy so after the first syntax error it was off to the phpMyAdmin site to pick up the latest version. It’s a good one, at least on my servers as typing out the tar command with the proper flags (tar -xzvf) worked perfectly and I was running in just a few minutes.

So far so good on the schedule display, switched to mid-week just fine and didn’t have to play with GMT time as the server it’s on is in the same time zone as the radio station. They wanted the home page showing the full display of what was on, almost the same code worked for that as the side bar, cool Set up a Coppermine photo gallery for them too, nice program! Pretty easy to change to customize for a site, so easy I did another one for the marina I’m living at. Colours are a little funny yet, but easy peasy to change from the original template to this custom one in about an hour.

Love it when a tricky programming problem ends up with an elegant solution. The schedule for a radio show was not your “normal” schedule in that there wasn’t something playing every hour, and the days of the week consisted of Sunday, Saturday, and Mon-Fri. No problem just listing out what is playing, but a sidebar was also wanted for “now playing”, “next” and “after that”. After a couple weeks of trying, using the normal SQL queries sorting by time or date and further sorting in the php just wasn’t working as there was just too many non-standard “events” involved to be reliable. Just to throw another wrench in the works, the actual display of the show times was non-standard which I ended up working around with having a plain text field just for that page element, along with the expected time start/stop fields for the client to update their database with.

One of the best places to go for new ideas when you are stumped is Evolt.org where amongst a plethora of clever people someone is sure to have run across the same problem before and if not, a novel solution is usually in the offing. My post was a rare one, I’m usually on the answer side so it didn’t take long to get some good ideas and Burhan Khalid’s gave me the spark I needed. It was while playing with his idea to use mysql_fetch_assoc that it dawned on me I could simply pull the records for the day that were greater than or equal to the present hour. Then by placing a counter on the result, just call the events needed by their count rather than the problematic method of using/manipulating their place in the array index.

It’s always the simplest solutions that work best, before this I had the script making three calls to the database and it’s a normal single call now. The number of lines of code dropped a third, and even more when I make a single function out of the three echo’s it’s displaying. Just in time too, the client has just moved over to a LAMP server and is ready for their newly designed web site!

Funny how the statistics for this blog go up and down. Before the start of the Iraq war, unique visitors were at a high of about 600 per month. Then for the next year or so it died down to what was the lower normal for the years before, of a few hundred people reading this thing every month; minus my Dad’s frequent visits to find out where my head is at any particular time.

Things are picking up lately, not sure why either as the number of bots are staying about the same, but unique visitors are topping 1100 for the month of January. I have been getting Google Alerts from some far off places for blogx though, and linking to and from other popular blogs like Chris Corrigan’s certainly hasn’t hurt either of our traffic patterns.

Haven’t written anything in a while, trying to get this odd Gospel program schedule using php/mysql to work is taking a large chunk of time and still don’t have it going right yet. Keeping busy at the other marina too, spring will be here before you know it and then every summer seems to bring something different.

Getting a surprise visit from Brenda middle of next week, she’s down from the frozen north for a week to baby-sit old friend Dee’s kids while they take a little after winter vacation. She will no doubt enjoy the balmy weather we’ve been having; it’s sunny all this week with a touch of moisture over the weekend and back to more of the same for Monday. The daffodils are already up eight inches in some gardens!