And This Blog.

And This Site.

This Summer

Oh yeah :3

<?php
//Generic PHP/MYSQL database connection and data transfer example
//Jake Siegers - 4/19/2012

//For my example, I have a database called 'test' and a table called 'words'. 'words' has 2 columns: 'id'-type int(AUTO_INCREMENT) and 'word'- type text

//Database Info
//==============
$location="localhost"; //location of MYSQL. It's usually 'localhost'
$user="root"; //username to your MYSQL server
$pass="******"; //password to your MYSQL server
$database="test"; //name of the database you want to connect to
//==============
$link = mysql_connect($location, $user, $pass); //creating connection to our database
if(!$link) //if for some reason, we get an error, kill the program.
{
	//gah! something went wrong! Displaying error!
	die(mysql_error());
}
echo'Connected to MYSQL<br />'; //Yay, connected to MYSQL!

if(!mysql_select_db($database, $link)) //selecting the database we want to connect to. Also checking to see if it doesn't return an error
{
	//gah! something went wrong! Displaying error!
   die(mysql_error());
}
echo'Connected to database: '.$database.'<br />'; //Yay, connected to MYSQL!
echo'----------<br />';

if(isset($_POST['data'])) //Checking to see if the form was completed. If it was, we have data to put into the database
{
	echo'Adding the word \''.$_POST['data'].'\' to the database<br />';
	$data=addslashes($_POST['data']); // the addshashes() function will escape characters so the database can accept them.
   $query=mysql_query("INSERT INTO words (word) VALUE ('{$data}')");
	if(!$query)
   {
   	//gah! something went wrong! Displaying error!
   	die(mysql_error());
   }
	echo'Success!<br />';
	echo'----------<br />';
}

//showing the form
echo'Would you like to add a word to the database?<br />'; //prompt user
echo'<form action="" method="POST">'; //creating a form using POST submission
echo'<input type="text" name="data" size="10"/>';
echo'<input type="submit" value="Submit" />';
echo'</form>';
echo'----------<br />';
echo'Current words in database:<br />';
$result = mysql_query("SELECT id,word FROM words");
if(!$result)
{
	//gah! something went wrong! Displaying error!
   die(mysql_error());
}
while($array = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) //while it's not empty
{
	echo'id: '.$array['id'].' Word: '.$array['word'].'<br />'; //print out word and id
}
echo'----------<br />';

mysql_close($link); //Closing connection to database
?>

Installing these isn’t the hardest thing in the world, nor the easiest. That’s why I’m here to walk you through it!

Quick step-by-step on setting up apache With PHP:

• Visit http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi and download the latest build of apache
• Follow install instructions (just run the setup executable in the download)
  1. I recommend installing to C:\Server\Apache2\ – It will make it easier later on
• Download the latest PHP from http://windows.php.net/download/
  1. Be sure to download the “ZIP” version, not the installer. Otherwise It comes with a bunch of bogus you don’t need.
• Extract The PHP zip to C:\Server\PHP\ ,That is assuming you installed apache to my recommended location.
• Now open up C:\Server\Apache2\conf\httpd.conf in a text editor. My editor of choice is PSpad, but you can use others like Notepad++ or textedit on mac.
• At the top of the file add the following code:

  LoadModule php5_module “C:/Server/PHP/php5apache2_2.dll”
  

  AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
  

  PHPIniDir “C:/Server/PHP”
  

  1. If the location of your PHP files/directories are different, be sure to change them.
• Restart your Apache server to activate the changes we just made
  1. The Apache console:

     

• You Apache server should restart with no errors and you should now be running PHP!
  1. To be for sure, you can create a test.php file and put the following code in it:

     <?php phpinfo(); ?>
     

  2. Place the file in C:\Server\Apache2\htdocs\ (this is you webserver’s root directory. When you navigate to “localhost” in your browser, it will go here.)
  3. Then navigate to the page in your web browser. Mine was http://localhost/test.php
  4. You should see something like this:

     

• All done!

I’ve been busy with college over the past few months, but I can say that I have been working on my site in my spare free time. Here are some things you can expect in the future:

• An Updated Pixel Pirate Game (It’s becoming really polished, and you can play your own music now)
• A light design “face-lift”: I’d like to start some new design standards for myself, so I can keep things constant. I’d also like to add some nice backgrounds so you don’t just see a boring black background all the time…
• Also, I’d like to add images or logos for each of my posts, i’m just not sure how I want it to look yet…
• This blog text design/font/color/thing isn’t something im fond of either… I really want to make it more appealing to the eyes.
• Dropping the “beta” tag… or not. I kinda like it because it means I’m never finished with my homepage. I always change it. I love to experiment.
• A new super cool website? Big maybe on this one. It’s a sort of game/art portal concept I came up with a while ago. I even had a sexy design to go with it.

So, yeah. I’m not dead. Just a busy bee.

P.S. Time moves fast. I never really noticed that until I made this blog… We’re already a quarter into 2012…. crazy.

So, one morning at work, I felt like installing Windows 8 Developer Edition on one of the older desktop machines. I was going to use it to test the compatibility of some of our older applications and to just play with it a bit. Well… installing Windows 8 was easy, however I noticed that windows 8 ran REALLY slowly on the desktop I was using…

That’s a sad number 2 on 2D graphics…. and Windows 8 ran really show because of it! Ugh. I needed a new graphics card. My boss happened to have an old Nvidia Quadro card laying around, but the fan on it was broken.

Notice the dark color of the fan… that means it won’t be spinning any time soon. Lucky for me, I happened to have an extra, awesome-blue colored fan to use on this graphics card. Unfortunately, my excitement didn’t last long because I quickly noticed that the two fan cables didn’t match at all. (sadface)

 I was kinda stuck. Until I just decided to strip both connectors on the blue fan and the old fan on the graphics card, because I can.

I also made sure the blue fan worked by touching the correct red and black wires together. It did, so I was ready to continue!

All I had was some duck tape, so I just taped the wires together in a very messy fashion, because I just needed it to stay together.

 There. all fixed ^.^

It Works! I was now able to run Windows 8 at full speed with the new 3.5 2D graphics rating! It’s also a great day when I get to build myself a “frankin-graphics-card”

Like it? Leave me a comment!