Redstate

Thermal label printers, not laser. Guess I'm burnt out on typing today.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. - Douglas Adams

As a text-processing language it's second to none. Weird as h*ll, but second to none.

I think of it as chaotic programming. You don't have to declare anything. The magic it can do with arrays is what really gets me. Arrays with strings as keys are goofy enough, but strings and ints at the same time, now that is impressive. Given how loose it is I was actually suprised it was case sensetive.

I had done some chat rooms and db front ends before, but this is the first real app and the first time I've used COM objects in PHP. I was flat out amazed at how well they work. I didn't even expect them to be supported given how geared PHP is towards Linux. It's nice to know that all those program engine classes I have done in Visual Studios for other programs can be ported to a web platform so easily.

The more I use it, the more impressed I am by it. I would kill to have open, centralized, and comprehensive documentaion like PHP does for visual studios. Now that our company is shifting largely to Thin Clients and mobile devices, I will be using it more and more.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. - Douglas Adams

And it really does, even to this day, probably as much because I've seen some of the development of it.

It's the fact that any of this stuff works at all, and how inexpensive it really is. Just in a simple, awestruck kind of way when I consider what's going on here between the instant I push these keys and hit "POST" it absolutely flattens me (especially because this PC is wireless.) Even the people who "appreciate" how far the computer has progressed in the past fifty years really do not understand sometimes how profound the change really is.

For pulling your hair out over this because I have firsthand knowledge that some people at a VERY BIG company didn't realize this. ;) First they tried to blame us as a subcontractor...heh.

Then in a conference call they brought one of their SAs in and we redescribed the problem to a room full of people who up until that moment were ready to sic the dogs on us for "our screwup."

It's hilarious when a room full of people on the other end suddenly get quiet because it dawns on the SA that they SNAFU'd when upgrading their servers...

:)

But during debugging, I guess it's a bit to natural to suspect a syntax error. I wouldn't have thought of the web server permissions for at least a couple days. Would have been too busy searching for that missing semicolon or extra quotation mark. Although I really should upgrade from notepad. At least vi has all the nice colors for tags variables, control structures, etc. Never seemed to like doing anything web based outside of a simple text editor though. Probably from eatly html days where any editor would add comical amounts of bloated code to your web page.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. - Douglas Adams

Man those are fun aren't they? I have yet to be on the wrong end on one of those, but I got to be on the firing squad earlier this week. Our Oracle reseller came up and did our Oracle 10G install and it wasn't pretty. On our Db server, that is there to do nothing other than serve our PDM database, he left all the default install setting on it. Giving Oracle only 132 MB of memory. They did no testing, no tuning, and said we were good to go.

We had been meaning to chew them out since we discovered they only gave 32MB (default for 9i) to 9i when they rebuild our server. The error was obvious when a query of a large table would take several minutes because the DB was thrashing so bad. We fixed it and figured they may have just overlooked it. When they did it the second time, it was obvious they weren't qualified.

By the end of the meeting I was feeling pretty bad for the guy that did the install. It seemed to turn into a venting session and got pretty ugly. I could see how being on the wrong end of one of those meeting would really, really suck.

I could image the awkwardness were we to find out we were totally wrong after getting all worked up like that. That would put you in your place pretty darn quick.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. - Douglas Adams

That's correct and the guys who work with PHP have a good understanding of Windows permissions. I've seen similar things happen because my father writes print applications that install as services and run from the server, and you have to be careful about which account they install under for them to work properly. The System account should only be construed to apply to the *local system* and if you want an application to be able to "reach out" it has to live under a different account with different permissions. AFAIK this is done so that system administrators have to explicitly allow that kind of behavior, rather than it being the default.

And congratulations! I was once a free man; nice Dodge pickup with a camper, gun rack; good nailbelt and 28 oz Estwing framing hammer. I could throw my hat in the air and say, "if that comes down, I quit." Then I bought a house. Next thing you knew I had a wife, kids, four door sedans and mini vans, and eight to five jobs. Still thinking ...

In Vino Veritas

But you really wouldn't want it any other way, would you? Well, OK a couple of weeks out of the year, maybe. ;) But at least you have a wife...and I'm sure your kids are an endless bundle of joy.

But you can also mitigate those concerns about overextension by simplifying your life. You'd be surprised how much you can economize if you nail their little feet to the floor... ;)

but there've been moments; Hell there've been years! I've now seen four, two boys and two girls, through adolescence, and it is good to return to the civilized world. The boys, both stepkids, were sheer Hell for a while; their mother wouldn't raise them and wouldn't let me, but they've turned out OK finally. One just graduated from college and one's in the 1st Armored. The oldest, mine with Wife 1.0, is some sort of IT type in SEA that makes more money than God, votes Democrat, and drinks too much coffee, but married, stable, and productive. Younger daughter has to do everything the hard way but is a good kid with a job and looking out for herself; thinking there's a ring and a date before long. So, yeah, living real life is better, but I had a great ride being a cowboy back in the Pipeline days. Glad I did it, hate to know I had to do it again.

In Vino Veritas

A great ride as a cowboy, eh? I wish I had had mine.
But, fortunately, I'm in the Army, my wife is in the Army Reserves (and about to start pulling down a Starting salary of between $80k and $150k depending on which job offer she accepts). So I have time to do it when this tour is up.
The scary thing? I've decided to take the political rode as my Cowboy ride. This'll be fun...

"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal comfort... has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
--John Stuart Mill