Although it is fairly easily to get a single query string value, I recently found it was very difficult to get the entire querystring which I wanted to include in an error report. In order to store the querystring in a variable you need to create a NameValueCollection from the System.Collections.Specialized namespace: <%@ Import Namespace="System.Collections.Specialized"%> Dim param As NameValueCollectionparam = Request.QueryString
Then you will need two For loops (i.e. nested loops) to get the collection’s keys and values: Dim i, j As Integer Dim arr1() As String = param.AllKeys For i = 0 To arr1.Length - 1 Dim arr2() As String = param.GetValues(arr1(i)) For j = 0 To arr2.Length - 1 strQueryStringValue = strQueryStringValue & arr1(i) & “=” & arr2(j) & “&” Next Next
This problem came up because I was trying to troubleshoot some code which I did not write. The previous developer gave a form the GET method and was passing a memo field in the querystring. This is bad programming because the querystring is not meant for lengthy amounts of text. There is a limit to the allowable length of a querystring. Many firewalls will truncate a querystring because lengthy querystrings are used to cause buffer overflows in web servers and browsers. Therefore I wanted to get the length of the entire querystring for my error report.
I don’t like how my voice sounds when recorded with a PC microphone so I ordered over $500 of audio equipment. I bought a PreSonus Firebox 6x10 FireWire Recording Interface, a Shure SM58 Dynamic Handheld Microphone, a Sony MDR7506 Large Diaphragm Foldable Headphones, and a CBI HiZ Microphone Cable.
Unfortunately my computer does not have any firewire ports so I cannot try it out yet. I thought my computer had firewire ports but they turned out to be USB ports. So I had to order a 3 Plus 1 Port Firewire PCI Card which has not arrived yet. If my recording studio allows me to record the natural sound of my voice I will be able to narrate my screen capture videos.
Yesterday I visited the Smithsonian Natural History Museum rather than hang around the National Book Festival. The 2006 National Book Festival was pretty boring. You could only buy books by the featured authors, stand in a long line to have your books autographed, or watch authors read in various tents. I bought Thank You For Not Smoking by Christopher Buckley and Stone Bow Prayer by Amy Uyematsu although I’m not very interested in reading either book.
There was a light drizzle so I decided to visit the nearby Smithsonian Natural History Museum instead. It was really amazing! On the first floor I saw lots of dinosaur skeletons; including a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Triceratops. They also have mammal fossils. The most impressive mammal fossil was a giant sloth that was as huge as a dinosaur. I also saw a woolly mammoth skeleton fossil.
The first floor also has a mammals exhibit were I saw stuffed animals; tigers, lion, monkeys, gorilla, bear, bats, kangaroos, zebras, etc. There was also a special exhibit of the Sikhs from the Punjab region of India. I liked this exhibit because I’ve never heard of the Sikhs so their culture appeared quite exotic. There was a model of the Harimandir Sahib, a golden temple, and images of their ten gurus.
The second floor has the gems and minerals exhibits, the bones exhibit, insect zoo, and meteorites exhibit. I saw the Hope diamond which had a crowd around its glass case. The gems and minerals was a spectacular collection of crystals in many different shapes and colors. I saw some moon rocks and meteorites. The bones exhibit had skeletons of many animals including very large sea turtles. I saw a live tarantula in the insect zoo.
At the museum store I bought two books; Tyrannosaurus Sue by Steve Fiffer and Vanished Kingdoms: The Wulsin Photographs of Tibet, China and Mongolia 1921 - 1925 .
The Smithsonian Natural History Museum made me feel some existential angst because it presents you with the physical evidence for the vastness of time and space. The animal skeletons and dinosaur fossils seem a grim reminder of how short any lifeform’s existence is compared to the time required for crystals to form and grow or meteorites to travel through space.
The bus trip was arranged by the James V Brown Library with a focus on the 2006 National Book Festival. The bus stopped at a Cracker Barrel restaurant for diner and I was forced to watch the Whoopi Goldberg movie Sister Act on the bus.
This is a video on YouTube, a web site for video blogging or vlogging. Text blogging certainly hasn't proven very effective for any of my goals. My blogs don't get any comments except for spam and they don't drive any traffic to my web site. I think text blogs are just being used to improve Google Page Rank by creating one way links to web sites which improves link popularity. Video blogs are fun to watch and clearly generate a lot more communication. At least they get more response. Personally I prefer written communication and don't like to see myself on video but there may be a way around that. I don't even like talking on the phone.
I have some experience in multimedia production because the web development company I worked for did some projects involving video using Flash and DVD. We did a web site for a doctor using streaming media to deliver videos about various common medical conditions. And we did promotional videos for a hospital and a college student who wanted a DVD for his college admissions application. I mostly tested the custom Flash interfaces for these projects. And I did a lot of programming in Director to develop an application for putting together a video piece.
Over the weekend I tried to upgrade my Corel Linux system for PHP 4.0. Unfortunately I was unable to accomplish this because Corel Linux is so obsolete. All I managed to do was upgrade Apache from 1.3.3 to 1.3.35 and PHP from 3.0.5 to 3.0.16. I did document my Apache HTTP server configuration file, httpd.conf, in my notes and gained some experience but it was extremely frustrating. I ought to scrap my Corel Linux system but everything works and it took me a long time to get it that way. I have the Linux version of WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe installed on that system. It includes WordPerfect and Paradox 9.
My other Linux system is Mandrake 8.2 which is much better. Unfortunately it is installed on a removable hard drive for my best PC which means I have to swap out my Windows 2000 Professional hard drive for that one. So it requires a lot of hard drive swapping to work on Mandrake 8.2. If I had more disk space I could run Mandrake 8.2 as a virtual server.
The XBM image format is a simple image file format that can only be used for black and white line art. But the cool thing about XBM files is that you can create them through JavaScript. This means you can add an image to a web page without using an image file. Instead the image is text within the HTML source code. Although black and white line art isn't very fancy it does have the advantage of not allowing the user to right click on the image to save it.
The following sample code will create a little trash can icon but it does not work in Internet Explorer. Try to view this in Firefox instead. I was unable to get an example to work properly in this blog entry. You will need to create your own web page.
Yesterday I blogged about how to document a MySQL database by a rather involved process of importing the database into SQL Server and then Microsoft Access. Actually you could simply use phpMyAdmin 2.5.0 to display the same information by clicking the Structure and then the Data Dictionary links. However importing a MySQL database into SQL Server and Microsoft Access is still a useful task.
phpMyAdmin 2.5.0 probably queries the information_schema table to obtain its information about the database design. The information_schema is a special database table that contains data about all the other databases and tables on the database server. Querying the information_schema table can be very useful for dynamically generating code. You could construct tedious INSERT and UPDATE SQL statements or stored procedures based on this information. I have found the correct syntax for running information_schema queries on SQL Server and MySQL:
SQL Server Queries
SELECT table_name FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_catalog = 'dbName' tables in a database
SELECT column_name, data_type, numeric_precision, character_maximum_length,is_nullable, column_default FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_name = 'tableName' columns in a database
MySQL Queries
select table_name, create_time from information_schema.tables where table_schema = 'books' tables in a database
select column_name, data_type, numeric_precision, character_maximum_length,is_nullable, column_default from information_schema.columns where table_name = 'reading' columns in a database
