I spent most of today driving wihtout a flasher for the turn signals. It would not have been so bad but when it fails the turn signal won't come on. It leads to an odd feeling as though one is driving totally exposed. It is worth remembering for VW Passat owners that the flasher is the hazard flasher. I had two parts stores not sell one telling me it was different than the turn flasher. The $30 part from Volkswagen includes the push-button control for the hazard flashers. The flasher unit itself mounts in the dash right behind the button.

I just spent some time finding a bit of a glitch with WebMin and the Apache module. By default the PHP configuration portion of the httpd.conf file is configured to add index.php to the list of directory indices. If you try to override this setting in Webmin it never takes. You can add index.htm all day long but it simply won't add. A quick work around is to add index.htm to the various DirectoryIndex entries for the versions of PHP.

An announcement from last week on the 9th circuit court website announces that UNLV's Prof. Bruce A. Markell has been appointed to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Nevada. The announcement covers many of his professional accomplishments. What is not adequately covered in the announcement is how instrumental Prof. Markell has been to establishing a wonderful law school.

Here's a snippet of code to get the most recent entry for a person from a list of records with dates. I use this in a situation where I have a list of GPAs for students. The list of GPAs is updated each day for a couple of weeks. The challenge is that some students graduate and are dropped from the list each day so I need to pick the most recent record for each person in the database.

SELECT name, gpa, standing, run_date
FROM `ranking` AS a
WHERE ( standing = '123' OR standing = '122' ) AND a.run_date = (
SELECT MAX( run_date )
FROM `ranking` AS b
WHERE b.name = a.name )
ORDER BY standing, gpa DESC