Chatteren

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

I knew I wasn't going to make it through today without crying, but geez. *vbg*

Good luck, President Obama.

*happy dance*

What's so bad about liking SQL? About enjoying the beauty of a really damned well-written and concise query? Seriously, I just don't get the hype about ORMs versus writing the queries yourself.

Don't give me the "but it makes everything portable!" argument. How many times have you designed something, only to have to switch to a different RBDMS partway through? Or had to switch to a new one after the project's done? *snort* Yeah, that's what I thought. If you're that worried about this elusive and inchoate thing called "portability," design the system so all the queries can be put in one directory or file, and provide a way to swap out the optimized queries for each database-specific version. You know, kinda like we already provide language translations.

Please explain to me how a system that takes hours (eight and counting) to debug and runs a separate query for each fucking result is superior to the single optimized query I can write in less than thirty seconds and which produces the exact results that I need and no more, with none of the tearing out of hair and hours of frustration?

Also, if you're going to write a framework that alleges that the ORM can be easily decoupled from the framework so that you can write your own SQL? An easy and—most importantly—well-documented way to get the damned results into the format the rest of the framework expects would be really nice. (The crap that makes up 99% of all documentation for programs—open source or commercial—is a rant for another day.)

This is the code for a Django template tag I adapted (also posted here). It was based on this snippet, adapted to split a list into n number of sublists, e.g. split a list of results into three evenly-divided sublists to enable display of the results in three columns on one page with CSS.
Continue reading 'Django snippet — Template tag: split list to n sublists' »

I've been setting up nginx, qmail, vpopmail, ezmlm-idx, etc., on my new VPS on slicehost (yay, slicehost!), and figured I'd post my notes in case they're useful to anyone else, since finding even tiny bits and pieces helped along the way and kept me from tearing my hair out while trying to work out how everything fits together. *vbg*

These are my (very brief) notes about how to set up a new mailing list in ezmlm, when using vpopmail's virtual domains with a mysql backend. (Yes, I realize I haven't posted about the parts of the server set up that came first, but these are the most complete notes I have at the moment. *g*)

Continue reading 'qmail + vpopmail + ezmlm + mysql: ezmlm list-making notes' »

I like CodeIgniter so far (I've been fiddling with it on and off for a bit), but I've run into an issue that is driving me insane, so if anyone sees a typo that's causing the issue, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know. *g*

I posted about the issue on the CI forums this afternoon, so all the relevant code's over there.

The gist of the problem is this: I'm using the same form for both adding a record and editing it. The model, view and controller work fine for the form when adding a new record. They also work fine when I submit the edited information. However, where it doesn't work is when I initially load the record to be edited by grabbing the data from the database and then filling the fields on form. Text and textarea inputs get filled in just fine, but radio and checkboxes do not get checked to match their stored values. *sigh*

Any ideas out there?