In the land of tech support where the PEBCAKS lie,
One t-shirt to rule them all, one t-shirt to find them,
One t-shirt to bring them all and in the darkness despise them

First exercise high in several weeks at the Sunday Sundowner tonight. Unexpected because I was feeling quite frowsty before we started. Inspiration came from Jo to my left, Hugh to my far left, Elly to my right, all the other lifescyclers and Martino’s unique footwear.

(And let’s not forget that final track!)

Thank you all!

The Doors’ LA Woman is fantastic to cycle to! Even better if the mojo rising section starts just as you pull away from a stop.

Not that you should be cycling to music, of course.

By the way, just had my first ever personal training session – interesting and fun. This follows last night’s spinning session which was packed and very, very hot. I wanted my bike to start moving so I could leave my acrid sweat-pong behind. Uurrgghh!

So I handed in my final classwork on Monday. (It’s some thoughts on risk management in software projects and is here.)

So having taken yesterday and today to do some postponed personal stuff, tomorrow I launch into my MSc dissertation. I’ll work on that 3 days a week (I’m a part-time student), leaving 2 days for freelance work, self-guided study (PHP, other web-programming stuff and further explorations of Java, probably), teaching cycling skills, …

I won’t be bored!

https://www.esurveycreator.com/s/c134393

My current classwork, to be submitted on Monday, is an evaluation of risk management in software projects. Of course, this is because I intend to have a career in management. (No, really I’m not [runs away screaming])

OK, I’m back and am amused to learn that there have been at least two international workshops on software aging and rejuvenation! Here’s one of the papers.

By the way, I’m currently in awe of the Digital Object Identifier system.

A web-designer I know has just tweeted about the Magic Dance of the Epic Un-bork. How many of you have danced this, and do you dance widdershins or turn wise?

I’ve become minutes secretary for Leith Central Community Council, even though I live in the West End. Their AGM is on Monday the 27th of May. Your attendance is solicited.

Further, new office-bearers will be needed – if you are eligible, give it a go. Contributing to the only body that has statutory, independent input to your local authority and is designed expressly to gather and communicate community opinions can only be a good thing.

So at the ‘show me your website – prove you did the work’ session yesterday, the lecturer added another requirement. This was the ability to delete a record from the database.

It was reasonably trivial to implement – I took longer than I’d have liked because I wanted safety trapping and reporting.

• only an admin could delete a user’s record/account (so delete function was only on the admin page)
• admin accounts can’t be deleted. (I’ve added a bit to the write up, suggesting a superuser who can delete admin accounts)
• The admin has to manually and correctly enter the deletee’s screenname and password. Mismatched or non-existent data earns the admin a lambasting.
• After a successful delete, the webpage reports User Arnöld, whose email was T-101@skynet.com, has been terminated.

I could have built in more safeguards or options such as You entered user JöhnCönnör but email address sarah.connor@resistance.com. JöhnCönnör‘s email address is john.connor@resistance.com, and sarah.connor@resistance.com‘s username is SärähCönnör. Did you wish to terminate

• JöhnCönnör/john.connor@resistance.com
• SärähCönnör/sarah.connor@resistance.com
• both
• neither

(The bullet points would be buttons.) However, this would have added to the complexity of the code without demonstrating any new skills, apart from possibly the PHP script which is called in cases of mismatch calling (and passing suitable parameters to) a separate PHP script to do the actual deletion. I’ve only passed parameters from PHP-enabled webpages to PHP scripts and JavaScript scripts, from PHP scripts back to PHP-enabled web pages and from JavaScript scripts to PHP scripts, not from one PHP script to another, so this might have been interesting.

But deletion is stupid! As was pointed out in the database systems course at the start of the MSc, and again in the Information Systems Engineering course last term, and by another correspondent, deleting a user-account is likely to delete transactions associated with that user. (Thank goodness I didn’t try to implement an e-commerce site – I’ve no idea [yet] how to set up relations in MySQL but I suspect it can’t be too hard.) Instead, such users should be marked as inactive. If the number of inactive users degrades performance, they can be moved to a separate database (with the option of reinstating them if so desired).

And as for adding an extra requirement 5 days before the submission deadline, BAH!

Anyway, I’ve now submitted my website code and printed my write-up (note no TurnItIn check!) to hand in on Monday.

I’ve done as much as I’m going to do on the web design coursework. The site is here. If you want the database stuff to work, you’ll need to feed this script into PHPmyadmin.

For those of you who aspire to be administrators, go here.

The write-up has taken a working day. Writing it helped me find several errors (now fixed, I think) and plenty of scope for improvement if this site was ever to go live. Enjoy!