Trails!

As you know, I'm still one of those simple-minded Visual Basic people. But check out my new site, developed in Visual Web Developer Express: www.marathongis.com

I just switched the domain over yesterday. Still a lot of work to do, but a big improvement over my old site, which I built in Adobe GoLive.

It is looking pretty sweet. Not all of your hyperlinks/javascripts are working yet. If you like VB you should try C#. More power! I have never used Visual Web Developer. Its a lot nicer looking site than...well other sites.

I have been wanting to develop a generic shoe mileage counter app to host on a site. Looks like I have a victim. I guess I need to get started on the code now huh?

Yup. Yeah, the site is not fully built, so most of the links don't go anywhere yet. I really like Visual Web Developer. I develop in Visual Studio at work, and I can't tell any difference for the stuff I am doing...plus VWD is free.

My "running" link will have a lot of "experimental" stuff. Right now I've just got an Access database gridview with my racing schedule. It will eventually link to the Blog with results. If you make a cool shoe counter, I can plop in on there for advertising sake at least. (Draper Development, Inc.). Beh, unfortunately my hosting package doesn't accommodate SQL Server databases, so I'm stuck with dorky 'ol Access. And MySQL, whatever that is ;-)

Cody - if you already know or are willing to learn PHP, you can add it to FRB. Send me an e-mail if you are interested, I'll help you get started.

You guys don't even need to talk in code for me to have no clue in the world as to what you are talking about!

Ha! Welcome to my world James. Although, I think I am starting to get a hang of the basics- like I know what c# is, I know what a web site is, and links, I know what they do...

OK, introductory lesson for Bethany:

http://php.codenewbie.com/articles/php/1485/Hello_World-Page_1.html

James, read that one as well. Teachers do not get paid enough, being able to hack on the side may come handy.

And a joke to help Cody and Bethany talk more - What does a process need to become a daemon? A fork!

And another - Who is this General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?

Sasha- General Failure is the tiny little gremlin that lives in your computer. He has to read your hard disk in order to cause havoc in

My clever reply got cut off by a timeout error during the post. Classic...

And how did I ever miss a suggestion that MS SQL server is superior in some way to MySQL? One of the things a DBA can do to kill the performance of his web site is to fall for Microsoft marketing ploys and downgrade the DB back end to MS SQL! MySQL will not babysit you if you do not know how to write your queries and build indexes, but if you have a bit of programming common sense, MS SQL cannot possibly beat MySQL on performance, there is way too much fat in the code, too many objects talking to managers, and managers instantiating objects, all for the purpose of human managers believing the programmers know something about Object Oriented Programming and "industrial-strength software design", and taking the CPU cycles that should be used to get the real work of putting the data in and taking the data out done. Commercial closed-source development can happen without fat no better than you can eat lard and not get cholesterol. MySQL is on the back end of the Fast Running Blog, and not just because it is free!

Cody - looks like there was an ISP outage. My post above suffered from the same problem, but a Refresh in Firefox followed by an OK to the "post again" message once the ISP took care of itself allowed me to post again without retyping.

Heh heh. My comment was purely in jest. My Wordpress blog runs on My SQL as well, and you're right, I have no idea how to use it! Some of us web wannabes need to be babysat, so I'm okay with Microsoft.

Sasha, what do you think of PostGre?

Paul - Postgres is a decent database. However, not my favorite. They have being open-source to their advantage. The disadvantage (that some will think is an advantage) is that conceptual correctness have historically been more important to them than practical considerations of usability and performance. Not surprising - it started as a university project. MySQL, on the other hand, was initially created to solve a specific practical problem and grew from there.