SQL is a common language implemented by most databases. While it’s a nice language it does lack some features available in some databases (which often differ from database to database). Some argue, that you shouldn’t go beyond the contrains and limitations in SQL because that removes your ability to switch to a different database. That’s just wrong (in my opinion). SQL usually allows you to do all the searches and CRUD operations you need, and by not going beyond the limitations posed by SQL you can switch your application to another database with an absolute minimum number of changes in your application - especially if you utilize the Perl DBI or the Pear DB (in PHP).

We’re slowly making progress at bringing a new and shiny site back. Today the front page switched into something not too unpleasant. The HTML and CSS credit goes to Aarfing – which made it for his site. I hope he doesn’t mind too much while it lasts – my intended design is less like his.

So after salvaging a bunch of content from Google’s cache and other sources, I’ve started working on getting the site back online with a new design and a few new surprises which has been due for quite a while. First step was bump up the MovableType engine to the 3.12 version and installing a bunch of plugins – MTBlackList, MTMultiblog and others.

I still need a few things left to do in the MT plugin department, but it seems a large number of plugins haven’t been upgraded to MT3.x or at least didn’t bother to tell if they work with MT3. Guess I’ll find the answer through testing then.

Sometime during the night between Thursday and Friday last week, the disk RAID in this server burned two disks and forgot to enable the spare disk in the RAID. The server went down, the lights went out and the site (along with the other sites hosted here).

Thanks to a Linux Magician we have a new server running – and the content should eventually start to reappear with the next few days (and weeks).

I’ve been busy hacking away on a script which would read the XMLTV format and pour it into a mysql database. It’s fun but nothing is quite as easy as it should be. I’ve rediscovered it once again. I had never before tried to parse XML data from Perl, but a quick google visit suggested it should be a breeze as everyone else seems to do it. I haven’t done my homework and really figured out what the various differences between the many methods you can parse XML is – so I basically found a few examples and picked the one the example used (XML::Parser) that.