Niall’s virtual diary archives – December 2003

Friday 19th December 2003: 8.37pm. I'm hoping that no one noticed, but nedprod.com moved web host some twenty days ago now. The switch was almost seamless in operational terms except that as you may have noticed, the web counter at the top of each page is now textually based. This is because the new hoster didn't support custom C++ CGI and didn't have Muquit's venerable counter available, so I had a small problem. I wanted a solution which meant I could maintain the old page counts - not because of any sentimental reason but rather the thought of having to edit each and every single page manually to reflect its new date. I scoured the web, but to no avail.

Anyway, luckily I'm a programmer, so I went and did some programming. I downloaded the PHP manual and wrote this which is what powers my web counters from now on. It's a somewhat frivolous use of a MySQL database, but hey - it works very nicely despite spending an hour and a half manually feeding the old counter values into the table. And I now have experience in PHP4 which does no harm, it was actually much better than I had thought it would be - basically C adapted to server side scripting.

And what else has happened in the past month? Well, absolutely nothing except for more programming. It's likely v0.5 of TnFOX will be out before Christmas and that will be the second last alpha release ie; v0.5 will be the last with new features and then I'll be doing Tn. All works towards getting it to a reasonable level by summer as time will most definitely run out then. I have met up with the South Cork Enterprise Board (SCEB) with a view to getting in touch with some sort of advisor early next year, see what advice he might have. We'll see.

Ok, back to the grindstone. Current problem is unwinding the python stack when POSIX thread cancellation is invoked. But it's surmountable - and progress shall continue. I'll post another entry after christmas, so happy christmas everyone! May happiness be onto you!