Plaidophile

Project - Two is finally live. If you want to participate, now is the time!

So, the local Guitar Center is finally open. So today, I met up with Paul (who I also call Ringo, and is back in Albuquerque until the 5th before he goes back to Japan until July) there, to check it out.

Unwilling thrustiness into the role of home-front tech support aside, I think this was a good week.

After spending 9 hours working on PHP+SQL for an eCommerce package, the last thing I need is to get home to find that my parents' network is all FUBARed, and then end up spending 3 hours trying to troubleshoot that.

And then it all just turns out to probably be their crappy NAT router anyway.

I saw on BoingBoing that Rusty has finally decided to do something about the troll problem.

A bit too little, too late, I'm afraid.

Ohio has decided to give special license plates to people who have been convicted of DUI.

Unfortunately, they just happened to choose the same color scheme that New Mexico has had for the past 20 years...

So, I went ahead and just worked with the existing codebase. Every time something was braindead or fugly I "refactored" it. Within two hours I'd rewritten all of the shit which had taken this other guy two weeks to do.

Although in the long run it'll be creating new, decent code, in the short run I have to hack some functionality into this FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT that the previous temp wrote.

It is absolutely HORRIBLE - bad PHP, bad SQL, bad HTML, bad user interface, bad programming practices in general, and totally monolithic, undocumented, and full of wacky code duplication. It also reeks of security holes.

But this is just "proof of concept" work I'm doing this week, which means I "need" to just use the existing code, since he "already paid for" this horrible crap.

UGH.

I decided I should learn how to do a proper inner join.

Which I did. It's actually pretty easy. It also made me realize that I was being really stupid in using phpbb_fetch_all calls for the "recent discussion" list, so I rolled my own SQL, which does a very elegant and sexy inner join to get all of the data formatted perfectly right off...

So, at 8:30 I thought I was running late to my first day of work, so I started to drive like a bat out of hell.

The user registration spam happened while I was not-asleep on the couch, stuck in a sleep paralysis/hypnagogic hallucination loop.

So when I finally forced myself out of it and made my way back to my computer, and saw my email dock icon indicating 444 new messages, I had to make extra-sure I wasn't still inside the loop.

Fortunately, the strongest cue that I'm having a hypnagogic hallucination is that my vision is in letterbox format.

Really.

trikuare.cx/forum was just hit by a mass-registration-flood script, in some sort of attempt to DoS my server (or at least make the member list useless). It failed to do either thing, but it left me with 222 bogus user accounts, which had absolutely no effect except for spamming me with activation requests and message bounces. Go figure. Fortunately they were all easy to clean up (I mean, it's not like doing DELETE FROM phpbb_users WHERE user_id >= 47 is all that difficult, and of course I also have strong email-fu). Unfortunately, this makes me realize that I need to do something to make it not happen again.

Today I looked at houses, specifically townhouses, since it looks very likely that I'll have a permanent position soon. (No, not with the VoIP provider I'm temping at starting Monday. To anyone who wants to keep their sanity: Never, ever look at the Asterisk codebase. It's horrid.)

So, tonight I jammed with Cosmic ReBop. It was fun.

Well, it fixes all of the problems which I had with the R520m.

Unfortunately, it adds in a whole buttload of problems of its own...

(Last updated: 3/18/04 10:16 AM)

The answer is ME!!!

He wanted someone with more direct SQL experience. I'll find out tomorrow, in any case.

Oh well, it was a fun interview anyway.

Those of you who read my weblog back in the Kuro5hin days would probably remember my ultra-conservative crazy psychobitch aunt (my dad's sister). You know, the one who (at the time) believed that all gays and transsexuals should die of AIDS, and that freedom of information was only for terrorists and criminals. Well, she's only gotten crazier and more conservative over time.

On the other side of my family, my mom's sister's husband is a die-hard liberal.

They are both about the same age, and they are both Always Right, and have no qualms about proving it.

They are both coming to passover seder.

This should be interesting.

Looks like I have a short-term (1-month) PHP/SQL gig starting sometime next week. Woo. Writing phpbb_integrate pays off.

So, I finally ordered cellphone service for Albuquerque, along with a shiny new Ericsson T610 from Amazon for $-75 after rebates. Woo. (So it was actually cheaper to do this than to just transfer my existing service, and I get a much nicer phone too.)

You got your webdesign in my game theory!

Well, I already got an offer on my house, for $79,500. So I thought I'd be making like $11K on it. Nifty. But then things added up fast.

I have finally found an OSX theme which is actually a suitable Aqua replacement. That theme is Latium.

(From February 29.)

I am fairly certain that all of my code and everything else on this site is Y2K-compliant.

I was poking around inside the iTunes resource files, and came across a couple of interesting icons.

Someone just tried to reset my password on my dyndns.org account. So either someone really wants the username "magenta" for some reason (even though the username never actually shows up anywhere aside from the person's configuration file), or they're trying to take over trikuare.dyndns.org (which is just a pointer for my own convenience, and currently not even in use) for some reason.

Some people are weird.

Remixfight featuring a baker's dozen remixes of Sunny Day is up. It is the awesome. I especially like Dr. Kong Balong, Mental Anguish, UnDesirable, Omnitechnomatrix, and Fourstones. Prank Monkey's is funny, too.

Also, Niveous wrote a silly fluffy porcupine theme song. (The "it's blinking" stuff is a reference to my forum avatar. I hope.)