kaolinfire

but I spent all day integrating them and have nothing to say (except some news about a halloween contest I need to get up ASAP... but I need another pair of eyes on that before I post).

If anyone felt like contributing some discussion, I'd really appreciate it. :)

GUD Magazine -- click on the new 'forums' link (replaced 'statistics', which were linked from about and submissions, anyway)

Integrating phpbb was ... interesting. It's built to integrate into other systems pretty well at this point (as of v3), where you just write a small authentication module and everything works magically... but it took some real work to get the forum inside of my GUD shell... and some of it took some handwaving. For instance, the menus that appear based on your GUD permissions... are covered up with phpbb3 logo and suchnot, because the template system is not quite so simply integrateable... it's possible, just not something I could do in a day. Anyway. Pretty proud of myself regardless. :)

This was arguably work for HB as well as we've been asked to integrate forums before and I was skeptical as to how easy it might be. This gave me a much better idea of what it would really take, and where the problem areas would be (so what to tell clients to avoid wanting ;) ).

And apparently I don't have an ljicon for programming... strange. Maybe I consider that my default? I do have some for specific programming projects, but... eh. Right, then.

HandBrewed ... "says" - mouseover the logo to start playing. No instructions, really, but you're expected to recognize the game. That seems to be in style with simple flash games, anyway. :)

Hopefully we're starting a good thing. I'll say a lot more when the site actually launches, but for now there's a teaser up at http://livingecho.com/ and we're collecting contacts and the like. :)

ECHO -- environmentally conscious home & office

This is something my web development company is actually partnering in. :)

And the design will change. This is just something quick and dirty to make it look better than, say, times new roman with no images at all.

A warning with IE, sessions, and domain names with an underscore (and possibly other special characters?)

IE does not seem to be able to keep a session when your domain has an _ in it.

test it if you want to see:

session_start();
echo session_id();
die();

foozle.blah.bar.org will set the session and stick with it.

foozle.blah_two.bar.org will give you a new id every time.

I am sick. It is unpleasant.

But.

There has GOT to be an easier way to do this--doesn't there?

I just spent _two hours_ on this, so I don't know. Trying to get the id associated with the minimum sort order of each set of images for a given set of "stock number"s.

SELECT min(i1.id) as id, i1.stock_number, i1.sort FROM inv_image_groups i1, (SELECT max(sort) as sort, stock_number FROM inv_image_groups GROUP BY stock_number) as i2 WHERE i1.stock_number IN (SELECT distinct stock_number from inv_image_groups) AND i1.stock_number = i2.stock_number and i2.sort = i1.sort GROUP BY i1.stock_number;

Essentially, there can be any number of images associated with a given vehicle, each with a sort order so we know how to display them. When listing a bunch of vehicles, I want to pull each image with the lowest sort order for each vehicle, to just show that one thumbnail.

Bah.

So much to do, but I'm feeling minorly accomplished, which at the moment is a fairly wonderful thing. I fixed two things that have been bugging me for half a year or longer, and have high hopes that I can fix one more thing in the set.

My CPU fan had been making loud and obnoxious noises for a long time--it'd run smoothly (but loudly--it was the default AMD brushless fan--crap, but certainly good enough for my piddly 600MHz Duron), and then it would just start grinding. Not going visibly slower, but man, it sucked. Distracting, to say the least. Fooling around with that, long ago, I determined also that the secondary CPU fan (not really sure what is or what it's on top of--smaller thing, has its own housing on the mobo, but the housing doesn't seem conductive) wasn't even spinning.

So when I needed to power down my system to upgrade my AV, I decided to unscrew the (dying) fan and put a different one on (I have a box of standard and semi-standard cpu fans). Popping it off, I was amazed my computer hadn't died the good death years ago--the blades of the heatsink were almost entirely encrusted with dust. The fan's blades themselves were, as well, especially the undersides which hadn't been visible. TRUSTY VACUUM TO THE RESCUE! I vacuumed the #(*$#( out of my computer. Man oh man, it's looking kind of shiny. ;) Then I washed the chincy fan, and filtered through my box for something quieter. I tried a few, and picked a ball bearing one from... I forget who. Ice Cool, maybe?

So much quieter! And it looks like it's moving a lot more air, too. Then I pop off the mini-cooler, which has long seemed rusted cold. Spin, spin, spin, it don't like to spin. WD-40 to the rescue, and recue it did. The thing spins beautifully, now. Cleaned it up, put it back on, and whirrrrrr quiet as a bird (compared to the quieter-than-previous cpu-fan). Woot. :)

The fan on the graphics card isn't spinning, either, but I'll see about dealing with that _next_ powerdown. I have high hopes. =)

I haven't been feeling very accomplished of late, and part of that is now that I'm home the enormity of all the tasks I have in front of me is becoming more apparent. Working from home is not a panacea, and I knew that. But maybe I didn't know it quite as well emotionally--I'm slowly making a lot of progress on things that have needed to be done for half a year to a year, but none of the "glory" items that I spent so much time thinking about when I was working the dayjob. My writing has not increased. My drawing hasn't really increased. My videogames are still all at a standstill. I _am_ sleeping more, and I'm spending more time with Amy (both good things--she's rediscovered the joy of Star Craft, even!), but it's still frustrating, day to day, that I haven't done more.

And don't get me wrong. I'm still working in the day--my work is just more scattered about. It involves talking to people on the phone, researching technologies/platforms/whatnot, emails, detailing specifications of what projects are going to be, estimating costs, conferring with my partner on all of the above and more, server maintenance on our own server(s) as well as maintenance on client servers as necessary, maintaining and extending old code for various clients, developing new code, procuring servers and/or domains and/or security certificates and/or a host of other things as needed for clients, and so on ad nauseum. Ideally I would be defining projects and methodologies well enough that I and/or my partner could better parcel them out, but that's all part of growing. We're still trying to figure out a good timetracking system--we've tried a bunch, and nothing quite feels right, yet. I'm doing my own hours in excel, and until I find something that's as simple as the worksheet I've got, yet makes me feel like I have full reporting and visibility on what I'm doing... And it pretty much has to be linux-based, web-driven.

As for tools, we use svn for revision control (and pulling things onto production), mantis for bugtracking (and I'm thinking about making a timetrack extension to it--it has support for custom variables and custom reports, so ... yeah). mysql is our database of choice, mostly because that's what our clients typically have, because that's what shared servers and even dedicated servers tend to be packaged with; adodb is our database abstraction layer of choice (it so rocks). nusoap is the soap thingy we use, for some things. and we've got a basic email layer, too, though I wrote some quickndirty functions to do form email population. We tend to code in a barebones pseudo-MVC manner, with data population at the top of a given php file, display and display logic as necessary afterwards, and any form processing happening in separate ".do" php files (all, of course, interacting with data-oriented library pseudo-classes). Every "display" page includes a configuration header, does what logic/data population it needs to, then includes the "top" of the html template, then does what display it needs to, then includes the "bottom" of the html template. Oh, and CSS may not be God, but it's up there.