Viewing by month: February 2004
MySQL Whooped
This is for the benefit of those of you who found as little information as I did on Google about MySQL converting dates to Binary when using DATE_FORMAT, or just about any other formatting function inside your SQL. Now, I could have sworn I'd tried this before, but I must have been high on Pepsi. Anyway, here's the SQL that was giving me binary data:
DATE_FORMAT(tbl.field,'%Y-%m-01')
And here's what I did to make it work...:
CONVERT(DATE_FORMAT(tbl.field,'%Y-%m-01'),CHAR)
Your mileage may vary, but enjoy :)
Amazon SalesRank Tracker
I'm playing with a new project, and if you're an author and interested, please check out the Amazon SalesRank Tracker and let me know how you get on with it. There has been at least one report of difficulty with login/session scoping, but I'm leaning more and more towards a local issue on that user's machine since I can't pinpoint (until further notice I'll be blaming Norton).
Anyway, play and let me know what you think. Feature requests and bug reports are welcome, and there is a contact link on each page of the application to let you send your comments to me.
Remote MP3 Library Access
For some reason the guys at Muse have closed up shop (taking with them the same service at DivX). I was adrift in a sea of quiet... no music at work. 3500 songs on a PC that I didn't have access to.
About a billion Google searches later I found MP3Mystic. It's not the prettiest program in the world, but it sets up a self-contained server on your music PC and allows you remote access to the tunes from anywhere. The single user version is free (what a price) or you can buy a multi-user license for either $9.99 or $29.99. So far it's working really well, I'll just have to come up with a nice template so I don't have to look at the unpurty HTML layouts :)