Digital Sandwich

Somehow the release of MySQL 4.1 slipped right by me. This (in my opinion) is a huge production release. Mysql 4.1 offers support for subqueries. These have been a long time missing in MySQL and will prove very useful to many, many people. Another huge thing for me is that I can now start using the MySQLi PHP extension in my scripts. This extension will do great things in helping me make some of my DB abstraction alot smoother in my apps with the prepared statements. I know, I know, you are now saying that ADODB has supported prepared statements for just about ever. Well, which do you think is faster? Parsing statements in PHP? or Parsing statements with C? I might even throw up a bookmark to see if my point and objection to using ADODB for prepared statement is one to be taken .

For those that care, here is a link to the Changelog for MySQL 4.1.

In my never ending battle with spam I (in my overzealous way of thinking) accidently set things up so that after an entry is 1 day (!!!) old it would force comment moderation. Well, as you can imagine this is extremely annoying and has been fixed to be a little more lenient. SO....Ocomment away.

I've also promised all of you that I would post some information on the inline-block css display attribute. Read on.

Well, I'm now working on that new server I wrote about this morning. Turns out we have absolutely no server OS CDs anywhere in the office so I decided to do a FreeBSD install via ftp. Well, either we have some major connectivity issues here at the office or the pipe over at freeBSD.org is being heavily used. I am stuck at about 5 KB/sec. So, that gives me alot of time to sit and stare blankly at the blue download screen. However, I got bored with that fairly quickly so I decided to go get a book to read. I picked up Fresh Styles for Web Designers and decided to give it a shot. It's written by Curt Cloninger over at Lab 404. He does some editorial work for A List Apart as well. I'll post my thoughts on it when I finish it. It looks to be an interesting read. It just does an overview of the different styles of design that are out there today. Being that design is a weak area for me I am hoping to learn lots. We'll see.

Well, my workplace has purchased a nice new Dell PowerEdge server that I get to work on. It'll be my first time using real server hardware or an enterprise version of Linux (Redhat Distro). I'm kind of looking forward too it though. I enjoy learning new things and playing with computers, so when I get a task that lets me do both I am usually ecstatic.

On another topic, I will soon be making a post concerning inline-block. All I will say about it now is that I am horribly suprised to have finally found something IE does right and Mozilla doesn't do at all.

Catch you all later.

**Update 10/30/04 **
First off, it has been brought to my attention that this DOES NOT work for Linux servers. It has only been successfully tested on FreeBSD servers. In particular a FreeBSD 4.10_STABLE server. I am currently working on a similar solution for Apache on Linux. (Redhat9 in particular)
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I think I have finally found a way to do what I need to do with parrallel versions. My situation is my company's hosting farm doesn't give us the ability to run two seperate apache servers on one box and I don't particularly want to run a CGI version due to the loss of $_SERVER variables and other security issues. So I endeavored on a trick to get php5 to use a different mime-type. Well, it's not a trick, but it's also probably not obvious to most people how to accomplish this so read on.

Well, I have finally cleared off my workload and learned a few new things in the process. This has all given me some inspiration to again start posting to my blog. So I hope I am able to impart some knowledge to all you folks. Feel free to post any comments to my thoughts and what not.