Jody Mickey

After recently upgrading to PHP 5.3, the news posts on my old webpage (http://www.duelingmonkeys.com) were being truncated to a maximum of 256 characters.  To make a long story short, it appears that prepared statements with the mysqli extension were only allowing 256 characters when pulling data, even if the field type is text.

I should do my duty and file a bug report, but I need to do some more experimentation and see if it happens only with SELECT statements or also with INSERT/UPDATE statements.  For now, I’m getting around this by dropping the prepared statement.

FYI.

Almost 1 year to the day, I have returned to my abandoned blog.  A few months ago I wanted to make an update but couldn’t remember the url to the admin page and forgot the password to ssh in and take a look.  I was far too lazy to figure all this out until recently when I moved the site to a new host.

I have almost completely forgotten what I started this blog for except that I know I wanted to snatch up jodymickey.com before someone else did (paranoid much?) and needed something to put on it.  I did mention learning Python (which I’ve done absolutely nothing with) but I think I did say that I’d not be so specific and expand to all things web.

Over the past year I’ve had the misfortune of losing my job in this poor economy, although things are looking up so it seems.  I’ve had a few freelance projects and while more keep falling into my lap, it’s still not constant enough to make me feel comfortable.  So, I continue to search for a full time job.  I’ve missed out on some great opportunities for various reasons (hesitation, bad timing, other crappy excuses) and some others that looked promising didn’t work out for reasons out of my control.  I guess I’ll just hope that it was for the best, but my credit card statement would argue otherwise.

For one large project I decided to learn the Symfony Framework with Doctrine ORM and I like it quite a bit.  If I had kept up with this blog I’m sure I could have written lots of posts about it along the way.  I’ll try to remember to jot down handy things in the future.

Hopefully the next update will come before the turn of the decade.

DISCLAIMER: This entry doesn’t have anything to do with web development at all, it’s just a rant.

The “Reply To All” button needs an idiot warning.  Moreso, the “Forward” button should be abolished.  The only thing I hate worse than getting forwards is getting forwards in my work support inbox.  The only thing I hate worse than getting forwards in my work support inbox is getting replies to forwards in my work support inbox.

Look folks, I don’t care about your seemingly funny joke, your political views, your religious views, or probably anything else with a subject line starting with “Fwd:”.  Before you go selecting your entire contact list, please consider who’s on that list.  If you fall victim to an email forward, please restrain yourself to the “Reply” button and do not tell us all that you don’t want to recieve emails any more.  I don’t either, but I especially don’t want to hear you whine about it.

Let me put this out there at the very start:  I am not a graphic designer.  I wish I had the eye for it, but I don’t.  I don’t really know the difference between the colors mustard and custard, but I can tell the difference between two distinct shades of gray.  So can Firefox, and Safari, and Opera isn’t bad at it either, but Internet Explorer is having some issues.

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Apache’s mod_rewrite is a beast.  The opening lines of documentation admits it before you even get started.  It’s very powerful, but sometimes hard to wrap your head around what’s going on.

Today I needed to dynamically point a request to a folder depending on what the %{SERVER_NAME} is. After reading a bit of documentation, I’ve found a slick little solution.

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In my first blog entry I said that this blog was all about my quest to learn python.  Well today I was thinking that if that were the case, I should have registered jodymickeysquesttolearnpythonandnothingelse.com  But I didn’t, and that would be silly.  So instead, I am going to make the python quest a project of the site, along with some other projects that may or may not ever come to be, and also some little entries for things like handy mysql queries, linux commands, and various other tidbits of information for when I can’t remember how to do something.

Sadly, this entry provides no useful information aside from telling you what’s going on, but at least I’m up to date for the next two years of required blog entries.

I want to learn the programming language Python.  I need a project, and for once I’d like to document my learning experience so I can look back later, and in case someone is bored enough to follow along.  My first idea was to do both in one swoop:  write some simple blogging code and document it all at the same time.  There is a bit of circular reference goign on in that scenario, and getting Python to run under mod_python was a bit troublesome.  Once I did get it running, I saw that most implementations use PSP (Python Server Pages) or frameworks like Django.  That’s all fine and dandy, but I was hoping to learn more core Python than building a site Ruby-On-Rails style with a framework targeted at getting sites up as quickly as possible.  I’m sure once I learn more, I’ll look at those frameworks with a humble eye and use what’s available to make things easy, but for now, I want to figure it out.

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