I am a very happy geek.
Today, what is apparently the first installment of my birthday present from Pat & Terry, came to me via email.
A digital subscription to Macworld.
Yes: a digital subscription. It uses a special file format and an application, Zinio Reader, which is like an uber-PDF.
(I recommend trying this out. The Reader is free, cross-platform software. There are sample magazines that you can download and read, and a surprisingly large number of magazines is available. And the animated page-flipping thing even has Sarah excited.)
So now, no more reading the magazine with a note pad to jot down websites I want to look at. They’re linked in the file. No more misplacing or finding storage for an issue. A single file on my hard drive. No more smudgy, icky fingers from the ink on their NOT COATED(!) cover. (The only thing about Macworld that ever really bothered me.)
And Sarah’s fond of my not being able to take it into the bathroom with me. She’ll be able to get in there sometime before Rowan’s old enough to vote.
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I found out the other day that there’s a remake of the movie Salem’s Lot. This amuses me. And I’ll probably watch it.
But what’s funny is: Rutger Hauer plays the vampire, and Donald Sutherland plays one of the people who trys to stop him from taking over this small American town.
This is not the first movie for this two to be paired thusly. (Yes: I said thusly. Get over it.) And I find this very funny. I’m a little weird that way.
How weird, even I didn’t know.
I decided to take this opportunity to figure out if I could write a PHP scripted web application quiz/poll kind of thing, showing a bar graph of the results. There are people all over the internet who’ve designed these things but they’re all quite clunky (the scripts; can’t say about the people).
I don’t know an awful lot of PHP, and what I do know is mostly generated by Macromedia Dreamweaver, a WYSIWYG web-design application that I use almost specifically for PHP scription. Hell of a loop, that: I don’t know it, so I use something that helps me avoid learning it. And this was my chance to do something about it.
I sat down and tried my hand at writing a script that would present users with some options (I chose six), gather what they chose out of the form, submit that to a database, and then re-write the page to show the results, with dynamically-created images for the bar graph, based on the percentage of each response.
Whew. For a guy who didn’t even really know what he was doing that sounds like an awful lot, doesn’t it? And it was.
I learn mostly by example. So I started by figuring out a little bit of what it would look like if I did it in Dreamweaver. This was far from ideal, since I wanted this to be a single PHP page that just re-wrote to the browser depending on whether or not the question was answered. And Dreamweaver wanted it to be four (4!) pages: the question page, the results page, a page to connect to the MySQL database that would collect the answers, and another script to gather the option that the person reading the page chose.
It’s been several days, a whole other PHP-script-writing challenge in the interim so that I could learn a couple of tricks first, but it’s all done. I give to you, my adoring readers, the final PHP page. So go. Have a look. Answer the question.
It’s alive! Alive!
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Wednesday is my birthday. I’ll be 33 years old. Or not, depending on just whom you ask.
Yesterday Sarah went to the grocery store to buy cereal. We had recently discovered that they still make Count Chocula, so I jokingly suggested it (though she’s most probably allergic to it). To our surprise, she’s not. So she bought a box. This made me happy.
Opening the box to pour some cereal I found a cut-out toy on the back. All of the pieces fit together to make a little toy helicopter. Neato! Suddenly I couldn’t wait to finish the box so that we could do this.
Finishing the box shouldn’t take too long, either. Since Count Chocula is much tastier than either one of us remembered from our childhoods.
I love being 8 years old!
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