Public holidays on Saturdays don’t mean a thing

Unless it’s on Sunday or a weekday, public holidays on Saturdays are practically useless to me. I don’t need to work on Saturdays anyway.


I have been communicating with my company’s webhost for the past few days. Mostly because I have to shift our website to a Linux server from a Windows server. We needed 2 websites on the same server in order to share the same database. Main point: the admins must be working so hard and are so tired that they typed ‘play’ instead of ‘please’.


A lot of updates/changes have to be done with my codes for Linux systems are strict on case sensitivity. ‘Cat’ and ‘cat’ may be the same thing to Windows but different to a Linux. I guess I have myself to blame for bicapitalizing my table names. There were some issues with mySQL that lower cased my table names but I wasn’t affected much since I was using Windows on my development machine so was my webhost.


Haven’t been playing Lineage 2 much because of an update. The update servers were so flooded I had to wait 2 days for my updating to speed up. But because of that, I was able to spend some time on my other tasks.


And finally, owing to what I experienced at work today, I would like to shout out INDEXES ARE IMPORTANT to all who wish to dive into databases. Because they may help speed up your sql queries greatly and ENSURE NO DUPLICATE ENTRIES.


Good luck and may you have better clockspeeds. [:)]

time

Almost skipped another night of sleep. I was watching TV while on bed, waiting for sandman to come but he didn’t. Coffee at night kept the sandman away[X(] . So I got up and played around with my blog page again, adding backgrounds to 2 of the panels and fixing up some CSS code to maintain compatibility for some of the internet browsers out there.


It was then 4am. I usually wake up at 7 to get prepared for work. I felt sleepy while watching Mezzo TV halfway then I paused, shut off the monitor, and slept on my chair with the desklamp on till 7am. 3 hours sleeping on a chair is enough to give me a mild shoulder ache now [:(]. At least I know I should be able to sleep easier tonight.


Last night, I was watching this Taiwan variety show, “xi chong tian jiang”, where they play elaborate pranks on celebrities. Something like Punk’d. So the victims this time are 2 members of 5566, a popular boyband. The masterminds are the other 3 of the boyband. Now, I think it’s faked. Or perhaps the victims are terribly dumb (no offence to all their fans).


There was a scene where they were tied up on a boat by some mafia people and 4 of them thrown into a room. They were blindfolded and had their arms taped together at the wrists. 2 of them who were masterminds had already removed their blindfold despite their taped hands, which also got untaped afterwards. The other 2 victims who were in the small room just sat there being played with by his friends. They could too, easily remove their blindfold which they did not, and I find this highly suspicious.


Those who have watched the same program as me, what do you think?

hows and whys for PHP

Ever since I picked up PHP as my next server scripting language, I did not look back to ASP or ASP.NET. PHP has so many built in functions such as file uploads, sending email that we can readily use unlike ASP, where we would have to purchase and install 3rd party DLLs.


I can’t say much about ASP.NET cos I’ve only experienced it for 3-4 months during my Final Year Project at Nanyang Polytechnic. But I believe it is as good as PHP and could be better because the ASP.NET page is “compiled”. PHP may have this same feature by purchasing Zend’s products or some free alternatives I’ve seen.


Why I’m so concerned about already-built-in functionalities is because of webhosting providers. The company I work pays a certain webhost company to host our projects. The first project for me when I first joined the company was done in ASP. It was hell because I needed file uploads and the script I was using heavily burdens the CPU on the webserver. Uploading a small file would take ages and I do not have access to install 3rd party DLLs to handle file uploads. The webhost only provided mySQL as the database server. No SQLServer. Getting ASP to run with mySQL was another big problem. [:(]


Then for my next 2 projects, I decided to give PHP a try. I had confidence in my learning skills because of my past experiences in ASP and some other scripting/programming languages. I believed I had a good grasp of the essence of programming (and I still do now! hee).


It didn’t take me long to get used to the new syntax and coding style. In fact, it was quite easy. Pretty soon, I could code without the need to refer to examples in ebooks I have downloaded. I loved the file uploads capability built into PHP. We could even specify a maximum filesize limit so the user doesn’t have to upload the whole file only to realize it’s too big and then he has to go through the long process of uploading again. PHP has support for mySQL so I didn’t need to install any plugins like I did for ASP on my development machine in order to connect to a mySQL database. [:D]


I learned to use the PHP manual online which turned out to be the greatest help. I also got some simple questions answered on IRC at freenode’s #php and #mysql (in case the links don’t work for you, the IRC server is irc.freenode.net). Questions like “How do I do this?” would be asked at a forum called NerdBrains where friendly knowledgeable people would provide helpful hints to the best solution.


I wouldn’t mind .NET only if instructed by my boss. I would never go back to ColdFusion or ASP. I am currently satisfied and happily living in the world of PHP. [XD]


Note: I do realize that my blog and quotes website are in ASP. They were both created before I learned PHP. I just needed to find time to convert them both to PHP but I’m quite reluctant to do so because I wish to use Access database to store my data. [:)]

Getting busier

Firstly, a warm welcome from me to all the visitors from SearchSG! [:D]


I’ve moved most of my sites over to my webserver I lovingly named Chii. Hah! How contradicting. Chii from the anime Chobits is a powerful persocon whereas this Chii of mine is a Pentium2, 233MHz. Even PDAs nowadays are more powerful. The first thing you might notice is there’s no more http://elusive.wyred.nu/weblog/index.asp anymore. Just a nice http://elusive.wyred.nu in the address bar.


Recently added the link to my blog at http://searchsg.org/ . I got a rating of 1 [:(]. Perhaps I need a better layout? Or the content I provide too dull, boring and possibly lame. Anyways, this is my blog so I ain’t worrying much about ratings. I just needed some web space to rant and design and I’m inviting people from all over to come comment/complain. Haha


I browsed some other blogs at searchsg. Came across a few bloggers who stopped blogging because they didn’t want strangers to read about their life anymore. It’s as if what they do everyday is automagically blogged (No offense). As for me, I don’t type out every single detail of my everyday life. I type what I see fit. [:)]


Before I end here, I feel I should provide my definition of the words “elusive” and “emotions”. Taken straight from dictionary.com, expressed in PHP style.
<?php

$elusive = ‘Difficult to define or describe.’;
$emotions = ‘A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling.’;
echo $elusive,$emotions;
?>

I’m gonna make some minor changes to my layout! Hopefully done by tonight. [XD]



The changes didn’t take too much time! Well, I’ve created an iframe on top of my background. There’s gonna be a little more extra work each time I change my background. I’m going to convert this main page from ASP to PHP some day. Definitely not today. lol

it has begun

I’ve started making use of my Pentium2 machine to offload some work from my main computer so I can play games smoother! I just started moving my mail server over and went through the configurations more thoroughly. Will be moving my websites over once I have some free time cos now, both of them are using different web servers so I will need more time to configure each website I have.


Chii
Windows Server 2003: Web Edition
Pentium 2 MMX 233MHz
384MB PC100 SDRam
4MB AGP
6.4GB Harddisk
2x3GB Harddisks soft-raid Stripe


I’m just doing this for the fun and experience. So don’t come telling me I should be getting a faster, leaner machine for web hosting. [:)] I’m just a home user. And it’s not that laggy running Win2K3 on a Pentium 2. It’s good enough for me to browse websites as I play games on my other machine.


Here’s an photo of a corner of my room. I’m too shy to post the one taken with the flash on. Haha. That’s why the monitors appear so bright. The light you see near the top is my very old desklamp. I need to get it replaced soon because it’s releasing “magnetic waves” or something which is affecting my monitors and any electrical stuff near it.