Post: The sweet sound of silence
As you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t made any posts for over two weeks. In a blog, this could conceivably be viewed as a Bad Thing™. I wish I could claim that I’ve been spending my days working so hard that I haven’t had time to post here. Which is almost true, but not entirely. I’ve been spending my days either working, drinking in the bar, or playing games, most notably the disturbingly addictive Evil Genius. (Think Dungeon Keeper meets Austin Powers and you’re about there.)
On the work front, most of my time has been taken up with thinking about my dissertation for this year, which essentially consists of implementing a piece of software (or hardware, if you’re so inclined) and then writing 10,000 words about it. My idea for the project (inspired mainly by my web development experiences) is going to be implementing an intuitive graphical manager for SQL queries (in a “dragging-little-boxes-around” way). The good thing about this is that I might actually finish my project with something that’s actually vaguely useful.
The bad thing about it is that, as part of my research into existing solutions, I’ve had to install Microsoft SQL Server on my computer (security holes and all) and am currently wrestling with it.
On second thought, I think I might just go and plot to take over the world for an hour or two instead.
collapses You posted! 😀
Nice to hear you’re keeping busy. As for MSSQL, does it run as a service on Windows XP? If so, you could always set it to start up manually (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services) and then only run it when a) you need it and/or b) you’re offline.
That’s what I do with my Apache server and PHP running on my normal machine (which I’m guessing is far securer anyway, whether or not I switch it on).
Good luck with it all!
If I understand you correctly, this isn’t what you’re going to be doing, but make sure you check out PHPmyAdmin in your research. There are also a number of open-source reporting tools that do a similar thing (I’m investigating which to use for a project at the moment) but they are mainly about dragging and dropping reports together. http://datavision.sourceforge.net/ is a good place to start — there’s a list of similar tools at the bottom
While a year ago you might have caught me in the ‘bash SQL Server ’cause it’s Microsoft’ bandwagon, but I’d like to chip in with the ‘we use at least a dozen of SQL Server servers at work (one I can name containing about 50-odd databases) and, simply put: I can’t name a problem that we’ve had with them. So ner.
Since I use it every single week day, I’ll also assure you that it pisses all over MySQL for power. Twice. Admittedly, our database guru whinges about it not being as good as Oracle, but that’s all relative I guess.
Do yourself a favour and get hold of a copy of the SQL Server 2005 Beta (and maybe the free standalone-for-programs version “SQL Server 2005 Express”). I’ve not had a chance to play yet, but the potential of being able to programme stored-procedures in C#.NET rather than T-SQL should be fairly self explainatory.
But what we all need is an idiot-proof and totally customizable photo gallery script that be incorporated into any website or weblog – that we can give to clients so that they can update their own gallery without having to understand ftp. Somebody might even pay for something like this if it was good enough. Shit, if you know of one already point me to it! I’ve tried multitudes of scripts only to find them all lacking in some way.
And then after you’ve done that you’ll be free to take over the world, for sure.
PS I think I disappeared from your blogroll for a while, and it made me sad. Glad to see I’m back in there
Hmm, the only gallery script I’ve really tried is the imaginatively-titled “Gallery Project” – the setup can be a bit of a bugger, but it seems to work quite happily, and lets you upload photos with a shiny web-based interface.
Oh, and Mr Mullenweg seems to use it, so it can’t be all bad…
Yeah, I tried gallery, but I really want something that I can just slot into an existing xhtml file – something that is totally customizable. I can’t fathom why there doesn’t seem to be a solution to this. We shouldn’t need to wrestle with non-standard code and restrictive layouts. Ugh. Anyways.