That’s right. I finished the 90 minute test in 30 minutes and passed with flying colors!  It was a really hard test, but I got through it!

For anyone who wants to go for it, remember to spend a lot of time studying!!

I hope this is going to be a good year.  I’ve got many ideas and hopefully more time to build them.  But above all, I feel like this year I need to take Douglas Adams’ most important advice to heart:

Yes, I got this in a fortune cookie, I kid you not.

Happy New Year!

May the robot uprising be swift and painless.

At work, I occasionally need to move database changes from the development server to the live server.  We have about a hundred tables, which makes it difficult to review by hand.  So there is a comparison script that basically runs a `mysqladmin` schema dump on both databases and then diffs the two files.  The result is a little difficult to decipher at times and still requires manual scripting to make the final ALTER commands.

What if I could run a PHP script that would compare any two schemas and generate proper ALTER commands to correct the two of them.  I would probably use some combination of these SQL commands:

• SHOW TABLES
• SHOW CREATE TABLE ‘tablename’
• SHOW COLUMNS FROM ‘tablename’

I’m going to have to think about this tonight.  Maybe punch out a test script tomorrow.

I’ve started playing Disc Golf with my best friends about a month or two ago and I am addicted.  We play at the Fairfield University Course in Fairfield, CT because it’s close, easy for new players, and loads of fun.

Sadly, their website hasn’t been updated in some time and it lacks a good map for new players to use. So after a game or two, I designed a new map in Google Earth (due to all the construction that is going on) that could be helpful.  Be careful, as the numbers on the tees and goals do not always match the ones on the map (again, due to the construction).

Here is the Google Earth KMZ file if you want it.  Good hunting!

I know, I know. It has been over a month since my last post. Sadly, this graduate project of mine has been taking up all of my time.

Of course the time spent has not been a waste. In fact, it has been far from it. Part of the project involves users participating in a multiplayer trivia game done in Adobe Flash. The idea is that Flash will communicate with PHP via ZendAMF and PHP will talk to a C++ server via network packets. Since I haven’t written in C++ in ~3-4 years, it has taken me a bit to get back into the hang of things.

Things have changed since the last time I wrote in C++, especially because now I’m writing for a Linux OS, using direct network communication, and running in a threaded environment. I followed some people’s advice and started to look into the Boost Libraries. After about a week of frustration working with Boost.Thread and Boost.ASIO, I realized that everything I need to do can be done with pthread.h and sys/socket.h.

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