This time it’s just annoying, and I have a workaround. But, annoying IS annoying.
Progress DB on the back end server. PHP/Apache using ODBC with unixODBC and DataDirect drivers for Progress.
For whatever reason, I cannot odbc_execute this SQL: “select count(*) from table”. It errors out with a 158 SQL State 9 every time. I CAN, however, use isql to test the command and it works fine. I can use PHP/Apache to run similar commands against MySQL tables. There’s just something about that combination that isn’t allowing the count() to get through the unixODBC/DataDirect layers. Not only that, but I’ve never been able to get the LC_MESSAGES worked out for these DataDirect ODBC drivers, so I can’t get the REAL message that goes with that 158 to tell me what’s wrong.
Very frustrating. For now, until I have time to work on the issue more, I just read in the rows one at a time and increment a counter. Not exactly the most efficient way of doing things, but it’s getting the job done for now.
I’ve been on Facebook for several months now, giving it a try. I skipped Myspace when it was all the rage, mainly because it was painful to look at and seemed to be full of teens. But Facebook seemed to have more structure and less mess, making it at the very least readable.
I wasn’t on Facebook long before I started getting contacted by old classmates from high school. My 20th reunion is coming up and they are using Facebook as a way to locate and keep in touch between now and then. It’s actually working pretty well to keep a group of people in touch. I’m doing the same thing with my family reunion, building a group of “friends” – in this case relatives – by looking for someone I can find and then using their friend list to find other people.
So now I’ve gathered a decent list of “friends”. I log in once in awhile to check what they have to say. I automatically pull my posts on my blog sites into Facebook via RSS so I’ve got a running list of entries for my Facebook friends to read. But guess what? No one, and I mean no one, comments on my articles. Not one of my friends writes any type of article themselves or writes anything with any content. Yes, there are a few things of interest – one girl is using the site as a way to keep all her friends up to date with her pregnancy. But for the most part, my Wall is filled with STUFF. “I’m eating X for breakfast”. “I just took a shower”. “Blah blah blah Mafia Wars”. I’ve got to sift through so much junk to see if there’s anything important stuck in there that I missed.
I guess I expected more. I expected actual conversations about things of importance. There are significant things happening in our world today, and not one of my 33 Facebook friends has anything to say about them. The one time one of their friends make an offhand political comment, I responded, and after a few volleys back and forth, they quit right when it was getting fun.
I’ll probably stick with it for awhile, but I’m very tempted to just email out my regular email addresses and abandon Facebook. If it weren’t for the reunion stuff, I would have ditched it already. It may be a useful tool for some, but for me it’s just another online persona that I have to keep up.
Things never seem to go right at 1AM. If something is going to fail, that’s when it will happen. It’s when we’re typically the most worn-out, slow, careless…. that things give us problems. Luckily the problem I had tonight I had seen before so I knew how to fix.
Of course, then I spent another 10 minutes trying to fix an alarm that wasn’t really there. Reloaded the GUI management interface, and magically the alarm was gone. This is why I have never grown to like using GUI interfaces. They obfuscate what is really happening and provide it to you through filtered lenses.
Course, add onto that a spam report that called for adding an ACL to a firewall to log any further issues, and here it is 2AM. I’m wound up, so it’s time to BLOG!
