Happy Halloween everybody!

This is just a really quick post to wish everybody that celebrates this holiday a happy one. I hope you all got lots of candy and carved some great pumpkins.

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Did you miss me? Sorry I didn’t get a blog post put out last night. I was without my computer for the whole day, due to the fact that I am working on fixing my mother-in-law’s computer. She basically inherited her son’s old Pavilion desktop, and it is chock full of all sorts of performance-degrading software.

Of course, before I wipe the whole thing, she wanted me to back up all of his old stuff, in case he ever needs it. I had no idea what I was getting into when I agreed to work on it.

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of trying to figure out how to rip the audio soundtrack off of a DVD. To say the least, it was an extremely painful process. The end lesson for me was that there is no easy way to rip the soundtrack from a DVD.

I’m certain that there are tools out there to make this easier, but with the short amount of time I had to complete the project, I wasn’t able to find one.

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In my previous entry, I tried to introduce you to binary numbers and all of their uses. Obviously a single blog entry is not nearly enough to fully explain binary, but I at least tried to summarize the information to the best of my ability.

In this entry, I plan to do the same for bitwise operators. I want to explain briefly what they are, what they do, and why they might be useful to Web developers.

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I am currently working on taking a few courses to get certified in various programming languages. At the moment, I am enrolled in a Zend PHP certification course, and have learned quite a bit even though I’m only halfway through the course.

The main concept I’ve learned is that, although I knew quite a bit about the standard PHP functions, and although I know a good bit about programming specifically for the Web, I know very little about traditional programming. Having never learned C, BASIC, etc., I have no base of information that a lot of other, more experienced programmers have.

I plan to explain how useful binary numbers can be in programming, and how often they are overlooked by people programming for the Web. To put it simply, most of us Web programmers (and I am basing this off of both opinion, and a very small sample of the programming population—the rest of the people in my class), simply have never needed to use binary numbers because we’ve never programmed in assembly languages. They can be extremely helpful, though, and incredibly efficient.

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Okay, so Marble Madness was a really cool game back in the day. I am willing to admit that. However, using that same concept as the navigation for your Web site is a really poor choice.

Janet Jackson’s Web development team obviously disagrees, however, as that’s exactly what they’ve done with her site. I happened upon her official Web site a few weeks ago (please don’t ask me to explain why I was there, I’m really not certain) and found it to be the most horrendous site I have ever encountered.

Navigating Janet’s Web site is similar to playing a puzzle game like Marble Madness. You apparently have to move your mouse at just the right speed and place the pointer in just the right place in order to get anywhere on the site. It’s a skill I have not mastered, although I did take the time to try simply to see if I could figure it out. I didn’t.

If you visit the site and click on one of the initial links, good luck getting back to the main navigation.

I submitted the site to WebPagesThatSuck.com a few weeks ago, but I don’t know if it was ever published there or not. Regardless, I just had to share my experience with the public. Enjoy!

Let me preface this article by assuring you that, as far as I have been able to ascertain, no one was harmed in the incident I am about to discuss. Further, let me assure you that everyone in my family is okay.

With the Columbine shootings nearly 10 years behind us and the much more recent Virginia Tech shootings almost six months behind us, I am extremely disappointed in the way crisis communication still seems to be so lacking in our schools.

As parents and as employees at learning institutions (I work at a community college and my wife works at my children’s middle school), we both are rightfully concerned about how our schools will react in the face of a crisis. Being a key player in my college’s crisis communication plan, I have a great deal of faith in the way things would be handled at work. Up until today, I had no real reason to doubt how things would be handled at my children’s school.

Today changed all of that, though.

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Amazon has announced today that it is offering 20% referral bonuses for affiliates to promote the new Amazon Music Store. What’s interesting is that they didn’t provide a widget for easy linking and frankly searching for a song to put on this page has been very frustrating.

If you are an Amazon affiliate, check out the details on the affiliate blog.

Here is a sample:
Big Girls Don’t Cry (Personal)

We have reached the final installment of this particular series. In this installment, we will explore how you can write a function to return and print the results of a form (actually, it doesn’t have to be a form, this function will simply pull information out of a database and print it on the screen for you).

As in the previous installment, I will be using a few outside functions to format specific information nicely, etc., and we will be using a database. I find that pulling the information out of the database is the best way to show the results of a form, because it’s going to show you exactly what was stored.

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In the last installment, I discussed how you can write functions in VBScript and PHP to help you generate multiple instances of the same form. I will now discuss how to write a function to process those forms. In the next entry, I’ll show you how to display those results once you’ve processed the form.

In this entry, I will be assuming that you are using a database to store your information, but you don’t necessarily have to do that. You can certainly use the same logic to write functions to send an e-mail message instead of storing the information in a database. I will also be assuming that you already know how to connect to a database in your given language.

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