I’ve spent the past 5 hours pounding my head against the desk trying to self-teach myself everything about PHP sessions, objects, and MySQL accesses all at the same time by building the login/registration portion of my webapps final project. But hey, it was all worth it, because I understand them now!

The more I do webapps stuff, the more I think this is what I want to do with my life. I can’t identify what it is about writing PHP (or, to a certain extent, JSP or Java Servlet) code that is so addicting… but once I start, I just can’t stop. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself sitting at my computer until $late_hour writing webapp code… and that rarely happens with any other kind of program.

So yeah, I spent a while trying to fix mistakes that came about from misunderstandings about PHP (trying to teach yourself 3 new things at once doesn’t make it easier to learn any one of them)…
-The header() function doesn’t automatically dispatch. You must call exit afterwards if you want to immediately dispatch the headers (ex: redirect to a new page).
-Starting a session (with session_start()) automatically calls in all saved session variables, overriding any existing variables. I couldn’t figure out why the hell $username was being overridden until I realized I hadn’t lost my previous session (which contained a duplicate $username variable), and it was loading the variables.
-You cannot use session_unset() if you set variables through $_SESSION
-If a function returns either an object or false, you cannot do testing with !$variable, you must do $variable!=false (but you can do that with functions that return either true or false).
-Defining things with define() in an if statement doesn’t carry over into the global scope (although this problem might have stemmed from one of the previous misunderstandings).
-The general hash() and hash_hmac() functions are only in PHP5, and my server only has PHP4.
But hey, I got everything working… now I can start on the fun part.

I really should be asleep given that I have class tomorrow at 7:30 followed by an exam. Blah at that.

It’s a Todd! For some reason I like this picture a lot.

I have a bunch of angst I want to write, but I’ll spare you. If you’re really all that interested, you can ask, but I won’t promise I’ll tell.

I finished my web apps homework today in about 4 hours. We had to write an online dating service program that users could create accounts for and use to search the userbase for people matching their criterion, implementing sessions and authentication and all that good stuff. It was fairly easy, given I’ve done a lot of php before (even though this was written in Java as a servlet). So yar.

My partner (Mike) and I are done (pretty much) with our networks project 1. We had to write an SMTP client that would send email using the SMTP protocol. It was easy enough… the hardest part was implementing DNS lookup for MX records due to horrific documentation on the resolver() set of functions. Meh.

So yeah, between those two classes, my life is full of coding, and it’s making me feel happy (….somewhat).
Code is so straightforward… so precise… unlike pretty much everything else in my life right now. Which is to say that nothing in my life is going right at the moment, except for my CS courses.
Meh.

I bought a ton of legal MP3s last night from MP3 Tunes and eMusic. I paid something like $10 and was able to get 4 complete albums (thanks to the free trial downloads thing from eMusic). The best part is that the artists get the large majority of the purchase price, unlike with other methods with the large record companies. Meh. DRM is stupid as hell… buy your music from these sites instead. Whee, I’m starting to sound like Zeke.
Yay for Adam Pascal, Christopher Jak, and Groove Coverage being on independent labels who aren’t assholes with their heads up their butts trying to scam the artists and, to use Zeke’s words, biting the hands that feed them.

Um… yeah.
I don’t want to post pictures at the moment, because thinking about photography right now is making me feel shitty. It’ll probably be a while before I voluntarily pick up a camera again (not counting class assignments, obviously).

Ben is teh awesomely awesome. I have amazing friends… I’m so lucky…