Finally! As of about five minutes ago the AMA Crystal Awards site is now live and open to the public. Check it out and let me know what you think. This is actually the second iteration of the design, the first was entirely done in CSS and the barest XHTML and it worked quite well cross-browser but it was decided that we needed more uniformity across the print and web pieces and so this is what I came up with.

If you’re interested in seeing more of Miss Richfield 1981, he has a very informative website where you can find out all about him. I’ve heard rumors that he might be flown down for this year’s awards as well. We’ll see . . .

I’ve been having some really weird problems with my mime types lately, which has put a hamper on some of the RSS and standards compliance stuff I want to do here. Every document generated by PHP was being sent with a Content-Type: text/html; encoding: iso-8859-1; regardless of whatever was being specified with header in the code. I’m still not entirely clear on what fixed it, but I believe it had something to do with no default content type being specified in the php.ini file, but a default encoding specified. This confused things somewhere and it’s all resolved now. There is the default content type of text/html which works for 99% of stuff, and the overrides now work for the rest. Now I can rest easy.

Most of the scripts I offer on this site are things I’ve written myself, for myself. As part of this living site they are constantly updated and tweaked, yet sometimes I don’t update the scripts section with what’s running live here, usually because I tell myself that the code is so ugly that no one would ever want to use it. Well . . . it works. I’ve decided to put the updated autop code up for all to use. Impetus for the change came almost two months ago from Phil Ringnalda, though my implementation is pretty different from the one he suggested in his post.

Basically what the update does is make the paragraph code ‘smarter’ to deal with lines that end with block-level tags, therefore not creating extra spaces and invalidating your HTML. Try it out! I’ve left the simpler version there for people (like me in some applications) that don’t need the extra code at all.

Sometimes when reading what should be a very dry article you see an unintentional typo or some similar snafu that makes you spurt Dr. Pepper. Sometimes I wish my keyboard had the equivalent of a sneeze guard. From Tuning MySQL Server 4.0 Query Cache:

You may increase or degrease query_cache_size to find the value, which provides best performance for you.

So am I going to need one of these if I want my database to be tweaked to perfection? All joking aside, the query cache in the 4.0x series is, for practical web applications, one of the best improvements thus far. Though it annoyed me back in the 4.02 days when they changed the syntax for the configuration options. Why? No good reason. They’re on 4.09 now and things couldn’t be smoother though. I know of several major sites that run MySQL 4 as their main backend.

There seems to be some sort of Microsoft SQL worm is making things darn slow or outright inaccessible. Of course the patch for this vulnerability was released months ago. This is really cramping my style though; I’m trying to do some web development work, but I guess I’ll have to wait it out.

I’ve been noticing now with the fancy caps watermark that most of my posts begin with the letter I, and so I wondered how many of my posts were like this, so I put together a little query like so:

mysql> SELECT DISTINCT LEFT(post_content, 1) AS letter, COUNT(*) as count FROM b2posts GROUP BY letter ORDER BY count DESC;
+--------+-------+
| letter | count |
+--------+-------+
| < | 373 |
| I | 10 |
| T | 2 |
| A | 2 |
| W | 2 |
| C | 1 |
| S | 1 |
| M | 1 |
| O | 1 |
| Y | 1 |
+--------+-------+
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)

What does this tell me? Pretty much nothing except that before I came up with the autop function I started each post with a tag instead of text. Maybe it’s time to go back and clean up some old content.

Speaking of things that haven’t been updated in a while, what ever happened to Winamp?