The FuzzyBlog!
Marketing 101. Consulting 101. PHP Consulting. Random geeky stuff. I Blog Therefore I Am.

Sunday, June 02, 2002

And if you Do SQL .... My article Using Distinct for Deletes has been posted on www.phpbeginner.com.  This one isn't rocket science by any means but it's useful.  Article: http://www.phpbeginner.com/columns/scott/distinct All my php articles:  http://www.phpbeginner.com/columns/scott/ Anyone who's a geeky blogger will be familiar with the database table subject: opml_instantoutlines... 10:00:30 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Interesting: 12 Years Later Ontrack is Still Great Here's an interesting postscript to my current travails ("Data, Data, Who's Got My Data", also known as "Yes Virginia, hard discs do crash and losing your blog means you do not pass go or get into the Top 100 for today at least").  About 12 years ago a system I built for a client (Lotus Symphony so that really dates it) crashed and I had to pull the hard drive and ship it to www.ontrack.com.  They sent me back the data on 5.25" 1.2mb floppies -- but it was still there.  When my laptop died on Friday morning (a capping off of a less than good 3 weeks), I ended up going to Staples and  buying Norton Utilities.  I also saw something from Ontrack and bought it.  Well Norton failed.  Ontrack failed too -- but I did call support. A Mr Huggins there gave me wonderful support and I am now using their Easy Recovery Professional product to retrieve close to 100% of my data (I think it is 100% but I can't tell for sure yet).  The single best $199 I think I've ever spent in my life.  Unbelievably good. Some of the more amusing aspects of all this included: when I went out to dinner on Friday night to salve my pain I Got lost 3 times In a thundershower Ended up at the right hotel -- in the wrong town Ended up with one of the worst dinners in my personal history Had to explain blogging to non-bloggers (difficult at best) Defend the Internet vis a vis the recent Connecticut rape/murder where a girl met someone thru a chat room Seeing a visible spark jump from the machine where my 2.5" laptop is now connected (thanks www.cablesonline.com for the parts) and the hard disc itself (terrifying) Witnessing Norton Utilities take > 1 hour to install itself on a PIII 733 machine. Relearning DOS stuff like config.sys to setup a ZIP drive under DOS 4.x so I could get the last few days of data off my dead laptop Writing a perl script to take a dos file listing done with dir /s /b > dir.dat and then generate a n line batch file to copy each file one by one to the zip drive (there's no XCopy under the built in DOS command.com, it's an external command and I didn't have a DOS machine handy to steal it from) Learning the 8.3 format for Radio UserLand filenames when long file name support isn't available #ITEMT~1.txt = #itemTemplate.txt Sounds special, huh?  Ontrack: Still saving my butt after all these years.  I honestly can't thank them enough. 3:04:01 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Social networks by referrer. I took my list of referrers and fed it into blogrollfinder.py to get an answer to the question, Who are the people who are reading you reading that you're not reading? The answer, again, is enlightening and full of surprises: People my referrers recommend Name Links Dave Winer 28 Evan Williams 17 Doc Searls 16 Jeffrey Zeldman 12 Wesley Felter 11 Jason Kottke 9 Meg Hourihan 8 Lawrence Lee 7 MemePool 7 Wired 6 Robot Wisdom 6 Python.org 6 Simon Fell 6 Garret Vreeland 6 Dori Smith 6 Lambda the Ultimate 6 Zope.org 5 Jim Romenesko 5 David Weinberger 5 Paul Ford 5 FARK.com 5 stavrosthewonderchicken 5 BetaNews 5 Ars Technica 5 37signals 5 Jon Udell 5 Matthew Haughey 5 [dive into mark] 1:06:22 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This