Dumb me! I realized when I was done that I could have gotten the parameter lists from the konsole, and worse, I deleted Kwame’s data (he’s been using a shared partition on my hard disk as a backup over the network). I hope he’s picked up most of his files — I don’t like to tell someone 19.2GB of data have gone POOF!

I’ll hopefully begin to move part of my development environment over to Linux in the next few weeks — that is, after I’ve fixed an invisible mouse pointer bug that’s unique to nVIDIA GeForce cards and Fedora. I’ve done it before, but my eyes are a little too tired to follow the highlighting of the various buttons and elements as my mouse pointer moves over them. Hmmph!

I couldn't make the necessary code modifications because

1. I'm lazy
2. Writing some components within that short a time would have required extreme coding. Heck, even getting XMLRPC working'll take me a few days

Enjoy my latest work, Abdullahi -- which Vera refused to give me feedback on.

And here's to table tennis spinning between Kreanga and Chila. I never knew Chila could do this. Ha, ha, 'OKEPON.'

I’ve been spending a while working with PHPBB3 Olympus, working on some obscure site for some [rich] clients (you may take this tongue-in-cheek). Without Zend Studio to help me explore the code, I daresay I’d have been truly doomed. What confounds me now is duplicating the registration and login codes to work out of the PHPBB concept without lumping together all the core PHPBB code together. So far, I’ve been chasing my tail running through myriads of functions that each make their contribution the the complexity of the code. The annoying thing is that since it’s in beta, there’s no code documentation — I have to make guesses and keep trying. What’s that joke — the last thing a coder wants to do is code.

Flex looks like one of those necessary evils — I remember PHP was when I had to give up ASP and recode a crazy site entirely in PHP. Ikezi’s been bombarding me with Flex UIs to no end but I guess what finally did the trick was Ms Dewey. Talk about a pretty girlish yet sophisticated bot who pouts and winks to no end at you, or looks out of the corner of her eye while doing something silly. As a search engine, it fails — as a seductive marketing ploy, well…

I’ve been slaving away at this site for quite a while, rewriting components to fit the design I was given as much as possible. I proffer my work to the client, and he’s quite satisfied but what happens with the designer?

He’s angry I didn’t give the exact stuff shown in his PSD design. For one, I had considerably slimmed the site down from the former developer’s work, and tried to follow his design as best as I could, rewriting some components in some cases to make them fit. I’d originally been told by my client to ignore the styling if it wasn’t feasible.

Was this my punishment for trying to match the design I was given? Designers can be such a royal pain…

I shutdown XP and booted to Vista, installing the DevC++ compiler again, and facing the same errors. Some simple research on the net told me I wasn’t the only one having DevC+ woes. Thanks to Google, I discovered Codeblocks but the MingW/GCC compiler still threw a lot of nonsense errors. I’m currently using the Digital Mars compiler and it works well.

I know I could use it with DevC++, but talk of falling in love with an IDE — Codeblocks rules for now.

I’m working on a lightweight database abstraction layer [now you'd ask me 'what for?'] for Authware, and I think I’m going to use SQLite for my local installation — at least just to get a feel of things. Currently, I’m working with PostgreSQL and MySQL without any incidents. PHP5 rocks — I can’t imagine how much code I had to write when PHP 4 was still the ‘in thing.’

Anyway, things are looking good. I see a dangerous, sharp curve ahead but I’ll deal with that when I get to it.

Back to SQLite. I haven’t tested its performance yet, but I’m still wondering if the single-file databases won’t be a problem — we writers sure can come up with a lot of junk when we choose to. Face it, I hate writing functions in MySQL — but I’m already in love with sqlite_create_function() and sqlite_create_aggregate()… even without having ever used them .

I’ve already come up with a design for Authware — I’ll be posting it on my writing site when I’m done with it. For now, I’m still planning my code architecture. The plan is to have nearly nearly every function callback a series of functions if a plugin has registered its functions as executing before or after, or replacing another function. Of course, the core ones won’t be subject to this rule. I’ll be dumping all my classes except my Db abstraction layer. I intend to test for SQL Server 2005, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

I’ll also be modifying ExamDirect and giving it a new name — what it’s going to be, I don’t know. My ‘oga’ back at CAD Consulting hasn’t contacted me for a long time — I suppose he’s still battling Michelin. I think Examdirect will be released as a commercial-grade piece. There are a lot of security holes in the current implementation and the design is horrible because I lifted it directly from the MTN site. Well, I’ll be doing a very clean rewrite as well as redesign to get something very uncluttered and accessible. My outlook on design, PHP security and AJAX have changed within the past few days.

Hopefully, these two projects should keep me busy for the next few months or so.

Trust me, I’ve worked with the .NET framework both in and out of the web context and the problems it has is the ‘one model fits all’ theory as does Java. I haven’t explored Ruby on Rails or Flex yet. PHP was designed from the ground up with scalability in all directions guaranteed, and I daresay it’s been rewarding. Of course, there are a myriad of security risks when PHP’s put in the wrong hands but they’re worth it. A chainsaw can be used to cut down a tree for wood or to saw off necks, but it’s still a tool — what matters is if it does the job well.

The lack of patterns and a few other features such as no namespace support and inconsistent function names have been criticized in PHP, but I think what matters is that you can implement whatever feature you feel has been left out, in your own way.

I haven’t been able to do any coding for a while but I’ll be moving to Cake soon. Here’s a post from someone who thinks the way I do.

I guess I’m an old stick-in-the-mud, but when the time comes to move on to some new language, I’ll be up for it, however much nostalgia I feel for PHP. Let’s hope PHP 6 gives the other web wannabes a good run.

I’ve done a lot of research on the internet and the way to go seems to be either of Debian and Slackware. I’m currently downloading the Debian DVDs from the University of Illinois HTTP Mirror, and I have all the ISOs of Slackware n my PC, awaiting burning.

I’m particularly interested in developing for Linux — seeing ‘guru posts’ like Xcomputerman‘s on Enlightenment sure gets me excited. My problem has always been my hardware. I’m thinking of building myself a system from scratch — that way I don’t face the myriad problems I’m currently facing with a rare nVIDIA board and an even rarer eMachines model (w3107) that isn’t even featured on the product list. It’s quite funny that many of the incoming hits to my blog are by people looking for W3107 drivers on Google — that should show you what’s going on. I’m beginning to go off at a tangent .

Hopefully, I should get a few jobs on RentACoder (haven’t gotten any yet) and finance a new system with the proceeds. Heck, I’ve not been doing any .NET Client/Server network programming because I have no client. Again, I’m beginning to deviate .

I’m hoping for extreme luck as I join the Linux crew because my command vocabulary is limited to stuff like su, ls, mkdir, mount, rpm (during my Fedora — or is it Stetson — woes) and… I’m beginning to think I know a lot .

Another boring post from me — ha! .

1 & 1 is driving me crazy. I don’t like the way the logs for my domain are being generated. “/” refers to azuka.zatechcorp.com/, books.zatechcorp.com/, zatechcorp.com/ etc in my log files so it’s pretty hard to analyze my stats. I feel like getting their support staff and breaking their heads, because I’m very angry at the annoying customer support.

I’ve always shunned .htaccess files for doing anything but this time, I tried setting the CustomLogs directive in the folder housing th emain domain. It threw a 500 internal server error and I’m sorely aggrieved. I’m sending an e-mail to them now — let’s hear what they say .