my so-called blog (redux)

Finished a week-long training course in SQL Server 2000 today. It was really more based around performance optimization and available facilities than a deeper look at Transact-SQL or ER diagramming. Still, managed to learn a good bit and found a bunch of things I may actually start using when I design databases and whatnot. (The goodness of views and triggers and stuff.) As a bonus I got a certificate saying Yes I Did Show Up For Class. Handy and dandy! Actually considering seeing how much it would be to become a MSCDBA, and then seeing how much it would be to do it for Oracle. I kinda like training more than school, simply because the stuff you learn you can apply right now. There are, of course, two sides to everything though.

The UofM beat Oral Roberts today (no surprise) so we didn’t lose in the first round. Reason to celebrate! We should win the next game too. Hurrah for basketball!

So I switched off Linux to Windows on my PC. Been trying to get it set up in a way that makes me not hate myself so much. The problem is that I’m so used to the various neat things on the Mac (mainly Quicksilver) that it makes trying to use anything else sucktastic. Even Macs that don’t have QS on them feel broken. So far, the best thing I’ve found to replace QS on Windows is Launchy. It doesn’t have triggers, though, and that’s the 2nd Big Thing I use QS for. It does the launching thing though, so that’s a plus.

In other news, I started using Opera. It has a built-in mail client that works better than Thunderbird. (I have folders. Thunderbird disagrees. Screw you, Thunderbird.) The mouse gestures, while not new, are addictive. Also, it seems to have an ad-blocker thing in it of some sort. Maybe I’ll poke around with it more. I’m pretty happy with it too, it even feels a bit faster. Maybe I have a new favorite browser. Yay!

Apologies to Kylie Minogue. Title is pretty true, to be honest. I am quite drunk at the moment and probably shouldn’t be posting. That said, I did click on one of those “cool new people” links on the MySpace page and was greeted by a picture of none other than Peelander-Z. This reminded me of the time I went to work… two days ago and saw a ratty old Buick that had “Peelander Or Bust” written on it, in soap. Figured it was going to sxsw next week. (Wish I could go. Stupid but beneficial training.) It was one of those things that made me doubt the youth of America less. Moreso because the guy driving it was obviously the parent of whoever wrote Peelander on the side of the car. (It also had CBHS stickers, so I was pretty sure it just wasn’t an older guy who liked ‘em.)

4 new CDs today: Jose Gonzalez, Say Hi To Your Mom, Neutral Milk Hotel, and the new Boards of Canada. All awesome, and all to be reviewed on the site when I’m a bit less drunk. There was way, way more but I’ve since left the keyboard and sobered up just a tad. Your loss, world.

update: think it’s funny that CBHS and the Peelander have the same basic colors for their websites. prolly change when Peelander Z releases a new album.

random random random… went out to the high-school-area last weekend (it’s a good 3hr drive away) and hung out with older friends over the last weekend. Got some new Doc Martens, and hoping they last a bit longer than the old pair. They are actually comfortable out of the box, which I was surprised at. And they look… kinda swedish. I have a “free” plane ticket to somewhere that i need to actually look into using, I think. Have been looking around and finding lots of cool stuff, just none of it here. Couldn’t convince the iframes to work in the way I want so I’m going back to seperate pages for everything (which isn’t too bad, to be honest). Will do more ajaxy stuff later, I think.

I would like it to be known that Chris sucks. Said “friend” introduced me to a song called Heartbeats done first by The Knife and then covered by Jose Gonzales. So yeah, that’s totally all I’ve been listening to. Over and over again.

Qcodo’s built-in Ajaxy stuff is rocking, though a bit slow. I have my tabs and an editable DataGrid element and It Works(tm). I just need to use iframes (blecch) to get everything to work properly where it needs to. Hooray automagic pagination and sorting.

So the tabbed view I wrote works. I’m gonna try to combine it with sliding doors to make it purty. Maybe I’ll even nice up the code and release it. It Fucking Works(tm) so if it’s on the Web maybe I won’t lose it.

As I said before, I’m trying to integrate more Ajaxy stuff into this project. I’m focusing on the admin console right now just because I need a good interface to edit stuff before I develop the client front-ends. It’s come to my attention that prototype.js ends up being Really Cool since I found some third-party docs for it, that authentication with this kinda stuff may not be quite as hard as I figure it might’ve been, and that I really don’t know what I’m doing. Right now I have some code that kinda works in Safari and doesn’t work at all in IE or FireFox. It’s weird, though, because it breaks in the same fashion in IE and FireFox. It’s actually kinda scaring me a bit.

I really want to write an iTunes library synchronizer tool. There’s already one - syncOtunes - but it relies on ID3 tags for matching. I’ve been kinda thinking up ways to do it by comparing the files themselves. The big problem with this is that you may have two songs that are the same song but, for example, encoded at different bitrates, or that are extended versions of the song. I had some ideas on how to chunk up and process the file to come up with a signature, and then compare them with a bit of uncertainty thrown in to make things interesting. Something to add to my list of things. Haven’t decided yet if it should be before or after learning Java/J2EE/JSF/etc.

Actually managed to wake up early this morning. Like, 7. I never wake up before 8 unless I have to and even then, 8 is usually a struggle. Ah well. Life sucks at the moment, work is scary, yadda yadda yadda. At least the team is doing well.

So, the weekend was fun. No, really. It decided to be winter again (went from low 70s on Thurs to mid-to-low 20s on Sat) and also rainy, so you can probably figure out where the hell this is going. I had to work on Saturday. This was not a bad thing initially, because I looked out my window and Everything Was Clear. For some reason the area outside my window was clear, and nothing else was. I got to my car and spent 30 minutes breaking my ice scraper. (Although, to be fair, the roads had de-iced themselves enough to make travel relatively easy. They were good enough to go near-limit in and at-limit back, so that’s not too bad.) Deceptive, the street outside my window be. To make matters worse, I’m also nursing a really stupid cold, and have been since late Friday or so. (It’s stupid because it’s just there and annoying, and not necessilarily bad.) So, to remedy this, I played racquetball tonight. Did better than I usually do. It all works out.

I’m trying to work in some Ajax-y stuff into this project I’m working on at work. To date, I’ve spent a few hours trying to coerce Dojo into doing a tab view type arrangement, which it evidently does. . That didn’t work out, and neither did trying to get Rico to do accordian stuff either, so I gave up and wrote it myself. I know basically shit-all about JavaScript - I spent some time trying to figure out how to declare a variable - but it worked. It probably won’t work in IE, though. I must be missing something, though, especially in the case of the Rico accordian thing, because nothing looks wrong. But there’s shit-all for documentation, so I’m really just comparing my page against the one with the stupid demo on it.

(Side-rant: Why are there so many cool toolkits and stuff available with no documentation? It sucks, cuz they’re all like “hey, we do cool stuff here!” and you look at the demos and you’re all like “wow, that is cool! and the snippet looks pretty simple, too?…. where’s the docs?” and they’re all “hey look at this wiki that only has one library function of 5,000,281,191 documented!” and you retort with “damn you”. I realize that a lot of these things are totally “I like to do cool stuff!” type projects, but could you please take a minute of your time to at least write down the function names and what arguments they require? Jeesh.)

I’m still using qcodo for the project, and it’s working out pretty well. Still getting used to just saying “object, load thyself” instead of writing SQL. I implemented group authentication in about a 40-line, probably way inefficient function. Now I have to shove it all into the template I came up with and make the tabs work and add form controls and ba-da-bing. Hopefully I can get bits of the admin thing up by the end of the week or next week. Damned project is taking too long. Stupid lack of planning.

So it decided to be winter for a day. Proof here! Hopefully it’ll stay wintery and there’ll be snow tomorrow, so I can take more pictures and have some that actually turn out.

Getting more used to the Linux thing. I made some changes to my desktop arrangement and it’s a bit better. I still feel lost without Quicksilver and Gaim just doesn’t compare to Adium. But, I have two screens that look about the same now and more total desktop space. Can’t complain too loudly. Would like to have my music, though.

update: most of the snow melted overnight. boo.

So I made the jump back to a regular desktop at home today. The difference in screen brightness between my actual monitor and the screen on my old TiBook was getting to me so I slapped Slackware Linux on my Athlon and set it up. I now have another computer without any music on it. I spent a good hour fucking around with sound on it so I can listen to something (at least Rhythmbox has some decent net radio stuff in it.. btw, Now It’s Overhead is good and indie). All the menu text and stuff is Too Big. Evolution doesn’t connect to my fricking Exchange server at work. But I’ll get used to it. If it keeps working tomorrow. On the plus side, XFCE is nice. Liking that better than I like Gnome or KDE. X did at least kinda figure out that I had 2 monitors (to be fair I added the 2nd after the fact - Slackware’s xf86setup is the way to go there).

In other news, at the recommendation of a friend I started checking out Ferret/Gerwin for doing entity relationship diagrams. Gerwin lets you graphically lay out the database, then make relationships. It’ll spit out a SQL script in SQL92 format or PostgreSQL-specific or MySQL-specific formats. It’s handy and gets all the FK stuff done easily and amazingly is more stable than trying to deal with phpMyAdmin (which I think is getting too “smart” with the Web features for its own good) or MySQL Administrator (which only really works right on windows). It’s a little rough around the edges - there’s no provision for setting random fields to not null, for example, and MySQL auto increment fields I have to do by hand - but even those minor niggling points are, well, minor.

Also, Qcodo’s 0.2 preview beta came out today. The new examples include a nice bit of AJAXy goodness, and you seem to get it For Free(tm) when you use the Qforms thing it comes with. Looking forward to using that more now that I’m a bit more comfortable with the framework.

Finally - good luck to Will on his move to California!

Having more and more trouble staying awake at work. it’s weird. not really going out, not really staying up late, but at work it’s hard to focus.

Been playing with a new PHP framework lately. It’s called Qcodo and it’s basically What I Was Looking For. I don’t believe I’ve written about what it was I was looking for, so here it is: most of my Web stuff is plug-and-chug with no real thinking or business rules or anything of that nature, so instead of spending a lot of time writing get/set methods in classes and re-implementing the same constructor over and over again, I wanted something that’d take a database definition (I wanted XML personally) and Just Deal With It and give me some classes and stuff to work with the data. Qcodo does that, but with some minor differences. The database definition is the database, so you have to have the DB created firstly. (I’d rather an XML DDL or something, just for the portability aspects of it.) Qcodo not only makes the data objects but also spits out a rough draft set of forms and such so you have an interface to work with the data Right Now. Plus, it has a templating engine thing called Qforms that encompasses things like editboxes with built-in data validation and grid views that automatically give you sorting and pagination and stuff.

It does have its niggling bits, though. The big huge one is the absolute lack of documentation. I can’t remember things so I usually have to have the PHP manual up or something when I’m starting on something new until I’ve got enough memorized to be comfortable. There’s nothing to have pulled up in Qcodo yet. The second is that I’d rather the core of the framework and stuff not be in the webroot. There’s a third too, but it’s not big - I’d like to have the Qforms controls be AJAXy but that’s coming. For something that’s still pretty early in its beta stages, though, it’s pretty impressive. I’m hoping to use it more as soon as I get more used to it.

Work needs naptime.