the bofe blog

I’ve learned quite a bit over the past 4 months. It’s been four months since I left everything I know. Lots of life lessons, but I won’t bore you with those. However, I will bore you with the nerd lessons I’ve learned.

• Credit Card Processing with PHP, CURL, and Authorize.net. Authorize’s AIM has a few quirks (only via SSL, transaction keys vs. passwords and usernames) but once you get past all of the red tape it’s fairly pleasant to use. The Authorize.net AIM Guide is a great place to start.

• Servers! Server administration was the largest gap in my knowledge of the web. Previously, I’ve always relied on others to do the server setup for me. Currently, at work our department is charged with the task of managing four servers. The servers handle a variety of tasks including: Samba file-serving between Linux/Mac/Windows, email using qmail, DNS using TinyDNS, user account creation/authentication, instant messaging via jabber, LDAP with slapd, and a myriad of other services. I have also seen SSL certificate creation/signing. It’s interesting seeing the concert that happens once all of the components work together. Too much reading to go fetch the links.

• Better programming practices. Object Oriented Design was my primary weakness leaving college. I didn’t understand how to approach it. Now that I’m seeing some more practical examples of it and having to deal with them from birth to inception it’s a completely different world. The Php Object Generator is a great place to start.

• Hubris is a bad thing. Specialization is a good thing. Find something you’re good at and do it better than anyone else. It’s better to specialize than be a “Jack of All Trades”. I’m perfect okay with saying I suck at cutting hair. I’m not going to claim I can, it’s acceptible to say that I can’t. If you aren’t doing what you specialize in, let other people who are better than you do it! This goes for programming, data warehousing, roofing, cooking, and everything else.

Aside from those three, I would say I’ve just gotten better through practice. Perfect practice makes perfect. While I don’t think I’ll ever be able to obtain perfection while having to work at a breakneck pace, but it’s nice to have a dream.

I’ve learned quite a bit over the past 4 months. It’s been four months since I left everything I know. Lots of life lessons, but I won’t bore you with those. However, I will bore you with the nerd lessons I’ve learned.

• Credit Card Processing with PHP, CURL, and Authorize.net. Authorize’s AIM has a few quirks (only via SSL, transaction keys vs. passwords and usernames) but once you get past all of the red tape it’s fairly pleasant to use. The Authorize.net AIM Guide is a great place to start.

• Servers! Server administration was the largest gap in my knowledge of the web. Previously, I’ve always relied on others to do the server setup for me. Currently, at work our department is charged with the task of managing four servers. The servers handle a variety of tasks including: Samba file-serving between Linux/Mac/Windows, email using qmail, DNS using TinyDNS, user account creation/authentication, instant messaging via jabber, LDAP with slapd, and a myriad of other services. I have also seen SSL certificate creation/signing. It’s interesting seeing the concert that happens once all of the components work together. Too much reading to go fetch the links.

• Better programming practices. Object Oriented Design was my primary weakness leaving college. I didn’t understand how to approach it. Now that I’m seeing some more practical examples of it and having to deal with them from birth to inception it’s a completely different world. The Php Object Generator is a great place to start.

• Hubris is a bad thing. Specialization is a good thing. Find something you’re good at and do it better than anyone else. It’s better to specialize than be a “Jack of All Trades”. I’m perfect okay with saying I suck at cutting hair. I’m not going to claim I can, it’s acceptible to say that I can’t. If you aren’t doing what you specialize in, let other people who are better than you do it! This goes for programming, data warehousing, roofing, cooking, and everything else.

Aside from those three, I would say I’ve just gotten better through practice. Perfect practice makes perfect. While I don’t think I’ll ever be able to obtain perfection while having to work at a breakneck pace, but it’s nice to have a dream.

Earlier this month I posted about Google Reader. Today I go to my aggregator and I’m greeted by a great new interface. Amazing job!

It’s now to RSS readers as gmail is to email. Now if the guys who made the Gmail Macro Greasemonkey Scripts would make one for reader… my life would be complete.

If you don’t have any ideas on what sites to add to your Google Reader, I’ve uploaded my feed list. Now if you want to get a daily dose of KC news, my friends from around the world, and tech philosophy/news , give it a shot. This is an OPML feed, so it should import into any other RSS reader. I know it will import into Google Reader.

When doing a Go to Line Number… (CTRL+_) for “ODPromo” nano gave me an error message that made me smile.

It’s definitely one of those days.

Apparently he was on Fox News recently.

The Movie Clip

The Transcript

WJC: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including
all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country: Dick Clarke.

The entire transcript is interesting.

I went to watch a Royals game last night with DMac and KMac.

I get home, around midnight. What do I see? A night-time version of this:

There’s a slew of “workers” beating the shit out of our roof. No advance warning, just sudden new roof. Grrrrrrreat. So much for sleeping.

Per a reader request, here’s a list of my favorite posts that I’ve made on here over the years [probably in descending order by date]:

These aren’t necessarily my favorite reading materials, but they are also times that were significant to me in my life.

• Being a College Student Part 1 Part 2 and Part 3
• Day 5; Promises
• Not Good Bye, but Good Luck
• 2005
• Scum
• Unnamed Boy
• Needs More Vibraslap
• Geek Initiation
• Mark of the Beast
• Damn that Stings
• Positive Reinforcement
• Keycount
• There’s no business like Show Business
• Year In Bullet Form 2004
• Jay-Z and LST 240
• On the Field
• DMac At(t)ack
• Welded Tires
• Apology to Dido
• Easy Money
• Jaded Cookie Monster
• I Surrender
• These guys are awful
• The Plant that Refused to Die
• One Angry Dwarf
• Powerpoint Sucks
• Wild Wild West
• 2003, the year that was

Aside from the TOOL concert on Friday my “window’s view” for the past week essentially been a variants on:

and

I saw my favorite band in concert last night.

I’ve liked TOOL since high school. They always played in Nashville when I had to do things with Racerband. Now that I’m in KC, I got to see a Danny Carey homecoming show, too.

Danny’s from Kansas and attended UMKC.

Here’s the setlist and various reviews.

I was/am too overwhelmed to write a review. I’ll just say a couple of things:

People criticize Maynard/TOOL for not being very animated during their shows. For the most part, the guitarist and bassist were stationery the entire show. I don’t think you can find me a band that’s playing music that’s as busy as any of the songs TOOL played while moving around.

Also, as intense as TOOL’s music can be the show was visually encompassing. The show had a very elaborate Laser-Light aspect which brought the house down.

My favorite song of the night: 10,000 days.

This is just for posterity’s sake and a fix anyone who runs into this problem.

Scenario:

LAMP Box—we need to do queries on an external SQL Server Box.

Enter FreeTDS—not going to get into the details of the install, but you’ll have to reconfigure PHP and add a DSN to your php.ini or use php_set.

Let’s say you’re doing an insert to a system that isn’t really stellar in it’s database design. The tables primary key (ID) is set to a type of INTEGER, and it’s not an identity field. Translation for the MySQL folks: “no auto_increment”. Translation for the MSAccess crowd: “no Autonumber”. Translation for people who don’t understand relational databases: “I can’t believe you’re still reading. The rest of this post will make you want to gouge your eyes out, visit Wikipedia:Unusual Articles for some decent reading”.

Instead of being able have the system determine the value of ID, we have to do it ourself.

$result = odbc_exec(“SELECT MAX ( ID ) as INSERT_ID from TABLE;”);

Since we’re only retrieving one row, it’s not really appropriate to loop through our result, so we obtain the value of the result thusly:

$data = odbc_result($result, “INSERT_ID”);

Now none of your queries will work from this point on in your code. To fix this:

odbc_free_result($result);

Just free the result.

Ah, the lessons learned today.