Web

OK, so this post is probably going to be mostly opaque to non-programmers, but that's fine. It's a rant. You don't have to understand it.

When I first inherited this web app, one of the first things I did was to move various display logic (namely, the URLs of icons) out of the database and into the display side. I did this in a somewhat "hackish" sort of way by just creating URLs named after the primary keys of the table. (A cleaner way might be to use CSS.)

Any way, time goes on and I move on to other things. Eventually I'm asked to come back and help clean some things up.

So after getting spun into another infinite error loop while editing a JavaScript file, I discovered that the error dialog is thankfully modeless. I was able to save the file and close it to stop the infinite error loop.

Powertip: You can right click on files and use the "Open With" submenu to select the plain old text editor for JavaScript files.

I finally gave in and created a Facebook account. It'll be interesting to see if anyone finds me and adds me. (It did actually list quite a few people I know when I created the account. Which I then basically skipped past. This is either laziness or depression, take your pick.)

Interestingly enough, Facebook can import RSS feeds, so I've pointed my account at my existing blog, which I post to almost never.

Maybe I'll post more often. Somehow I doubt it.

And no, I'm not really up this late.

With the addition of trophies, it was inevitable that eventually Sony would copy the online profile aspect of Xbox Live.

And they have, sort of:

That's it. An avatar, your user name, and what would be an "about me" message if I ever bother to fill it in.

Comcast claims that they don't interfere with active network connections. ORLY?

Either Comcast is, say, lieing, or Steam has some pretty severe reliability issues. The following log takes place over 12 hours:

So let's take a quick look at the Pidgin background color and foreground color icons:

Take a wild guess as to which is which.

I came across someone using a MySQL SET where they really should have been using a many-to-many mapping table. Wanting to know more about SET, though, I decided to open the MySQL documentation and look up SET in the index:

In case you're wondering, every other line if you scroll down reads "SET" with a location of "MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual."

So I'm creating a webpage using Microsoft Visual Studio. (And so far, both times I've had to write that, I managed to typo "Studio" into "Stupid," which seems to be more appropriate.)

It defaults to creating an XHTML page, and validates it in real-time. (Which is, honestly, a cool feature.)

Unfortunately, I want to support Internet Explorer, so I attempt to change it to an HTML 4.01 Strict page. No-go: Visual Studio decides it's still XHTML Transitional and starts bitching about missing items.

I'm noting I don't have a category for web comics. Oh well, I don't cover a lot of information on them anyway.

Anyhow, Real Life comic's Greg Dean is moving to Texas, which while technically is east of California isn't exactly east. It's more "center" if you're only looking at the US or "west" if you're looking at the globe.

But in any case, I don't really care about that. Instead I want to complain about the concept of making Real Life a "full time" job.