YoMoBlog.com suports Drupal

August 30, 2006

Dave Winer has setup a new service at YoMoBlog.com to make it easy to submit blog posts using PDA web-browsers. The great thing is it works with Drupal right out of the box.

I haven't caught the "mobile blogging" bug yet for public blogs, but it will be nice for private blogs where I need to add a note quickly on the run.

Update: It doesn't seem to get the category on the post all the time. I'm sure this will be worked out shortly but in the meantime there may be a need to check the category.

MySQL views and MS Access

August 29, 2006

So the CASE... WHEN solution posted previously works very well for MySQL. Lots of nice views popping up and databases going forward.

However, when attempting to link a view as a table in Microsoft Access the calculated columns won't show. It's a real drag as it is such quick work to use views to de-normalize data for backwards compatibility.

Enter the pass-through query which solves this problem as long as having the data in an Access query is suitable.

Monday

August 28, 2006

Survived the first Monday of the fall term. Barely.

Air conditioner died weeks ago, in the hottest part of the summer. Makes little difference because we use the swamp cooler. Saturday we set about rebuilding the ailing swamp cooler. Its motor had given up. New motor and things are well. However, the new motor is so powerful it blows more water droplets than cool air.

While we're outside we notice the water system does not come on as it should. Looks to be a bad timer. As in the 9-5 job never a dearth of things to do.

CASE.... WHEN

August 24, 2006

The answer to my previous post comes in the form of the CASE statement in MySQL.

Basically SELECT (CASE WHEN alt_grade = '' THEN grade ELSE alt_grade END).

On another matter, am I the only one who is having terrible performance from the MySQL site online? During the day it's reminiscent of the good old dial-up-modem days.

Select IF...

August 22, 2006

So today's brain teaser, how to best select either column A or column B in MySQL. Here's the setup. We have three columns that count. They are:

  • Name
  • Grade
  • Alt. Grade

In most rows there is a grade and no alt. grade. But every once in a while there are both a grade and an alt. grade. If it were an either-or case it would be simple. But it's an either-and. The question of the day is how to best accomplish it in MySQL 5.

State of Nevada

August 22, 2006

With some regularity I catch a bit or two of KNPR's program State of Nevada. The shows have always been some of the poorest examples of mainstream media. Today for example they talked about credit card debt. The oft ineffective interviewer let the industry representative Nessa Feddif do a Nixonian job of not telling a lie. When the chap from consumer credit counseling said that universal default information is in small print, for example, Feddif responds that credit cards are required to put the default rates in large (10-point) type. So more spin goes without notice.

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