It’s been a while since I last blogged. So, it appears that I’ll be entertaining myself with a good dose of AJAX for the next few weeks as I was reassigned to work on the frontend of a big but interesting project at my part time job. I’m not cheering my ass up on this one since I gave up on serious Js programming about 4 years ago when I took up PHP. The reasons were the fact that js did not give you too much to do back then. A good IDE for it? Nope. Debugger? Yes, if you were lucky enough for it to work. Great big things to do with it? Yes, if great big things mean flying menus and a fluffy text following your mouse pointer.

In other related news, for the last few weeks I’ve been working on a C# project for myself, a nifty weather tracker that is supposed to sit silently in systray and let you know the temperature outside by acquiring, decoding and interpreting a METAR report. The on thing that gets a PHP programmer down on his knees when being introduced to C# is the fact that everything has to have a type, always. And I know that is logical, but it’s a huuuuge difference from the PHP approach that tells you “here, take this variable, it’s good for anything”.

Additionally, Java is a concern and a preocupation as well. My colleagues in college tell me that we have a Java class.

If this:

$sql="SELECT col FROM table WHERE id=5";
$dbh->query($sql,DB_FETCHMODE_ASSOC);

yields a very informative “DB Error: mismatch”, revise the way you are submitting the query… Removing DB_FETCHMODE_ASSOC gets rid of the error. Why? DB_FETCHMODE_* is used only when you are using GetAll, GetOne, FetchRow, etc.

If you need to use it, do this:
$dbh->setFetchMode(DB_FETCHMODE_ASSOC);
$result = $dbh->query($sql);

In a surprising, but yet so typical advertising bluff Dacia Renault announced the Logan Steppe Concept, a wannabe SUV built with respect to the Logan series. Bluff I say because the weirdos self slashdotted themselves by sending out thousands of emails to enlisted users and the server took stance and choke itself to nearly death (fainted).

It looks weirdo… I think I’d get one though. It will be presented at the Geneva 2006 car show. Pictures copyrighted by dacia.ro follow below.