gsnedders

There was a post at Engadget yesterday about the truth of the Super Shuffle, read it here.

After the downtime in the last week, I'm closer to moving hosts than ever, while nothing is certin, it seems as if I'll be moving to ithium sometime in my Easter holidays (26th March till 19th April), I can immediately discount the first week, as I'm away on holiday in Majorca. The downtime was caused by my host having problems changing host.

I brought all of my websites back online over a period of a couple of days, doing each MySQL table at a time, and adding the subdomain when the site was ready to go back online, however, now everything is back online, it's faster than ever.

When I do move to ithium, they'll be almost no downtime, because I'll get the account, upload all my files, get all the MySQL databases ready, so as soon as the DNS changes, we'll be on a different server. It should also reduce the amount of downtime normally, which is good for both me and you :). It also allows me to properly start one of the projects I never really started, Speed PHP, as my current host doesn't have enough permissions on the server (only having a reseller acount) to do what is needed, however, I'll give you more on Speed PHP at a later date.

Also, almost all development of everything has come to a stop, as I've got other, more important things to do, like relax, after spending a couple of months of web developing. I personally recommend Gran Tourismo 4, brilliant game ;). On a more serious note, I do have real things to do, which need to be done.

Apart from that, there's little to say, apart from the fact I've quitely put version 2 of my wishlist online :). Remember, it's my birthday on the 20th April (yep, first day of term, aren't I lucky ;)). At least something to smile about has happened :P

This is the first real project I've started working on, although it is still primarily for myself, it doesn't mean I'll be compromising things for other people using it just for me. Although this is only version 0.8.1, it already has some features that I wouldn't of put in if I was doing it just for myself.

Anyhow, time for more detail, like what the hell it is. MyDB is a lightweight, yet powerful, database class. It grew out of part of Location Unknown, I was looking at various database engines, but there was always something wrong, I ended up deciding that I'd write my own. It took me around a day to plan and code the original MySQL version. After a couple of days of thinking about it, I decided to untie it from MySQL, adding support for other databases, such as PostgreSQL and SQLite. This lead to the class getting two extra functions, to keep one of the principals I had set myself when I decided to untie it from MySQL - Make sure as little as possible has to be changed when changing what database server you're using.

That pretty much tells you almost everything you need to know about it in one paragraph. But that doesn't mean I've got nothing more to say.

One of the principles I set out right in the very beginning was it would have very clear, commented code, as to make it easy for other people to build upon it, and hopefully release it to the web developer community. Modify it to your need, and if you're kind, release your code (in accordance with the license, of course).

Personally, I doubt I'll ever need anything more than MySQL, but I'm going to try and support PostgreSQL (anyone who can give me PostgreSQL hosting will be thanked) and SQLite, one of the main principles I set out when I decided to make it support more than one database server, was I'd make it so you have to change as little as possible, and that's likely to just be the connect function...

What licence am I going to release it under? I want this to be open source, yet I still want control over it, I decided to go with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License. I'll explain my reasons for each part:

Attribution

I don't want this script to be slightly modified, and then be given no credit at all

Noncommercial

Many complex reasons, although, I'd like to say, anybody who wants to use it commercially, please do not hesitate to contact me

Share Alike

To stop people from changing the license to one that I count as inappropriate

Please, check it out, download it, or at very least visit it's website at http://mydb.geoffers.uni.cc/.

With WP 1.5 going gold, a lot of plugins are now becoming available for it, some of these being anti-spam plugins, I've installed a couple, so welcome to a spam free zone.

One of the two plugins I installed was Eric Meyer's brilliant WP Gatekeeper 1.5 RC1 - on the comment form, it displays a stupid question, which, though blindingly obvious to humans, stops bots from posting :)

The other, was WPBlacklist, which runs off the MT Blacklist, maintained by Jay Allen.

These measures, I hope will help to make this a spam free zone, without me having to delete them personally :)

Found this one on annoyances.org through CF. It maybe funny, but it's sad this is how many forums have turned out like this.

Q: How many forum members does it takes to change a light bulb?

• 1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed
• 14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently
• 7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs
• 1 to move it to the Lighting section
• 2 to argue then move it to the Electricals section
• 7 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs
• 5 to flame the spell checkers
• 3 to correct spelling/grammar flames
• 6 to argue over whether it's "lightbulb" or "light bulb" ... another 6 to condemn those 6 as stupid
• 3 standards zealots to point out that light bulbs have been deprecated in the LB 2.1 spec
• 1 to call upon everybody to ignore this deprecation
• 2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is "lamp"
• 15 know-it-alls who claim they were in the industry, and that "light bulb" is perfectly correct
• 19 to post that this forum is not about light bulbs and to please take this discussion to a lightbulb forum
• 11 to defend the posting to this forum saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts are relevant to this forum
• 36 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique and what brands are faulty
• 7 to post URL's where one can see examples of different light bulbs
• 4 to post that the URL's were posted incorrectly and then post the corrected URL's
• 3 to post about links they found from the URL's that are relevant to this group which makes light bulbs relevant to this group
• 13 to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety including all headers and signatures, and add "Me too"
• 5 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy
• 4 to say "didn't we go through this already a short time ago?"
• 13 to say "do a Google search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs"
• 1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again.