roopurt18

Which is exactly why WoW isn't all that fun, it becomes a job. Unless you're happy leveling up one character after another, constantly completing the same quests, then it runs out of new things to do rather quickly. And honestly, how many times can you collect 15x Troll's Blood, 10x Magic Mushrooms, 2x Some_Other_Item and still be enthralled by it? Once you hit the level cap, the whole game is gear oriented. As far as PvP goes you can have great skills but lose to some noob who happened to do more PvE, which is retarded. If you want the best gear, and honestly who plays an RPG and doesn't care about their gear, you have to PvE. You can't even buy the gear off the auction house or other players because of the stupid Bind on Pickup system, where once a character "owns" a piece of gear it can never be given to another character. I'm not going to bother on what a pain it is to have to run the same dungeon over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again hoping you'll finally get that last piece of gear you want from there. Then when you finally reach a point where you're mostly happy with your gear, Blizzard releases new content with new gear that totally blows everything else away and you start all over again. There's a list of about 20 things they'd have to do before I seriously considered playing that game again. I used to like Blizzard's games because they were fun, fun, fun. But WoW isn't about fun. From a business standpoint it's a huge success, but from a fun factor it rates with rubbing my nuts against sand paper on one side and cactus on the other. Now, I may have given you the impression that I want things to come quickly and easily, which is entirely untrue. I have nothing against investing some time into my character so that I can be that uber cool internet bad ass. I don't have any problem with the time it took to level a toon, I don't have any problem with doing quests, I don't have any problem with running some dungeons at end game to get some gear, etc. Here is what I do have a problem with. The first time I went to the Molten Core dungeon was 11-14-2005 and the last time I went there where I got a piece of gear I wanted was 6-14-2006; I know the exact dates from the DKP records from my guild website. That's 7 months of the same god damned dungeon, one time per week (because of reset timers), with 39 other people. Do you have any idea how tedious that is? To take 40 people every week into a dungeon, kill 10 bosses, and only receive ~20 pieces of loot? At best only half of the entire player base in the raid will get a piece of loot. And as people get their items and redundant items drop, most of it ends up going to waste. Towards the end of it you have 40 people spending 3 to 4 hours and out of the ~20 items, only a couple actually get taken. The rest just gets disenchanted. Now you said you won't accept the "game devs don't make good games" argument, but what do you call that type of design? It was no accident. WoW is not designed to be fun, it's designed to be a job. Now you're counter-argument will most likely include, "But no one forced you to partake in that, it was all voluntary." And to some extent that is true. But like I said before, if you want the most out of WoW, you have to put in serious amounts of time to the point it becomes at least a part-time job. If you still enjoy it though, kudos to you.

CV, I agree with you to a large extent, but not quite all the way. I used to play nothing but console games, especially RPGs. I used to hate PC games with the few exceptions of C&C and SimCity. When everyone was "oooh-la-la"-ling over Doom, I thought it looked like a turd. Freshman year at UCSC, my room mate was a huge PC gamer. He showed me online play in Quake and Starcraft and that was that, haven't touched a console game since. I usually play no more than 2 games at a time. I have one FPS that I resort to when I just want plain old fun. Then I have another game where I try and be the best because try as I might, I can't always shutdown that competitive spirit inside me. For a long time that game was DAoC. I played on the PvP server and loved it. When Mythic started to screw the game up with bad expansions, I moved on. No more MMOs I said. Then my fiance, who was vehemently against DAoC from the moment she met me, decides she wants to play WoW. So we start playing. I'll give WoW credit where credit is due; that was the first time I enjoyed leveling up a character in a long, long time. Beautiful scenery, fun quests, lots of character in the game. But the fun ends there really and for me, once I level up 1 character I'm done leveling up. The PvP in WoW has always lacked; the mechanics are just plain bad and always have been. Further, Blizzard has no idea how to make PvP enjoyable IMO. So I gave up on that aspect of the game. I started end-game raiding. While fun at first, it's just a huge timesink. Now you said games are supposed to be time sinks and I agree; if you had something better to do you wouldn't be playing a game in the first place. But the amount of work WoW is to make it anywhere after hitting the level cap is just plain ridiculous. Anyways, here are the golden rules of MMOs: 1) Never make a stealther (or rogue) 2) Never make a hybrid 3) Never make a pet class 4) Never make a caster In fact, just always play pure tank or pure healer. They're the only classes that are never totally f***ed in design.

My name is Rob, I'll be 27 in March, and I live in Lake Forest, CA.  I've been a die hard video gamer my entire life, which is what got me interested in programming.  For the longest time I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, but one day during my sophomore year I was playing games and thought to myself, "Or maybe I could make these things."  So I suckered my grandfather into buying me [u]Teach Yourself Visual C++ in 21 Days[/u] and started chugging away with MSVCPP version 1 or 2.  I made it up to references and pointers before I started devoting more time to my social life and put programming on the back burner.  I picked it up again my senior year by taking Visual Basic 5.0 classes at the local community college. When it came time for college, I had this crazy notion that if you didn't go to UC you're just wasting your time.  So I applied to 4 UC schools and didn't get accepted into any of them and was all prepared to spend a couple years at CC before transferring.  Then I get this acceptance letter from UC Santa Cruz, a school I didn't even know existed, and ended up going there.  I consistently lead most of my CS courses when it came to tests and assignments.  However, I dropped out after three years due to mild depression; I couldn't stand the city itself and I was in a long distance relationship and it was really taking it's toll on me.  So I returned to So. Cal. thinking my girlfriend would be happy to see me and that I could take a little time off school.  I guess I didn't seem like such a hot prospect, going from top-of-my-class student to bum who just wanted to play video games, because she dumped me.  O.o Fast forward just a bit and I had applied to CSU San Marcos but was denied on the notion that I'd not taken writing and public speaking, even though I'd finished [i]all but one[/i] of my GEs at UCSC.  So I was back in CC taking those and eventually made it into CSUSM.  A few more years of CSUSM, most of which I spent as a waiter in a Newport Beach restaurant named Taco Rosa and playing WoW, and I got my first programming job just a little under a year ago. Ironically, in the almost 10 years I've been in and out of school, I'd never taken a PHP or database class.  Since I wanted to program video games, I took graphics courses, A.I. courses, and added a minor in physics to my degree.  I once said that web developers get paid way too much money for what they do, especially considering how easy it is. Getting into a video game company proved a little more difficult than I had hoped (big loss for them!), so I started looking at other types of programming jobs.  Lo and behold an entry-level PHP / MySQL position 5 minutes from my house.  It was the one and only position I ever managed to get an interview for and I landed the job. After a year of working there, I still stand by my original comment concerning web developers: I'm way overpaid for what I do and it's not terribly difficult, but that's not a complaint!  I've since read as many O'Reilly books on javascript, php, MySQL, etc. that I can. So officially I've programmed / used: c, c++, visual basic 5.0, pascal, assembler, HC11 (motorola assembler), php, javascript, SML, MySQL, openGL, directX, and probably some that I've missed. Some of my favorite school projects over the years include: * A queue in assembly * Writing a compiler for a subset of the c language * OpenGL game - for this one I argued with the professor for 2 straight weeks to be able to work alone, which he stoutly counter-argued it was too much work for one person.  My game ended up being a tie for the best in the class, if not the best. * A refrigerator that learned your grocery habits, this was for an A.I. course.  After giving my presentation I sat down and this guy gives me a blank look and says, "What the fuck man?  You show up like 4 times the entire semester and your project is the best?" * Building a simple CPU on a breadboard (part of my physics minor) * Building a small robot (also part of my physics minor).  Indeed if I hadn't acquired such a distaste for institutions of higher education I'd probably pursue a degree in computer or electrical engineering. As for my personal life now, my fiance and I own a small condo together in Lake Forest.  Like I said, I'm almost 27, she's 22.  She's going to school full-time for accounting.  When she finishes we're toying with the idea of moving somewhere with cheaper housing and having kids.  We have no wedding date set as of yet, so don't bother asking. I've been thinking about teaching a course at CC in programming.  I've always been that guy in class where people would ask me for help before the teacher / professor and I'm quite good at explaining things. That's more about me than most people know, so I'll leave it at that for now. :D

Horrible game IMO. Time sink after time sink after time sink.

I think the original comment about validation errors were in response to the page itself not having valid markup, not the lack of validation by his forms. Personally, I don't care if you validate data or not, but you should at least sanitize it.

[quote author=448191 link=topic=96282.msg537515#msg537515 date=1172326465] But then we wouldn't be able to: [code=php:0]$obj->{$foo.$bar}(); ${$foo.$bar}->foobar; $obj->${$foo.'bar'};[/code] [/quote] Not so. [code]<?php $obj->{$foo.$bar}(); // Would become... $obj.{$foo.$bar}(); ?>[/code] If $foo is an object, we mean the property of $foo indicated by the variable $bar.  If $foo is not an object, we mean string concatenation, since there is no LPAREN after $bar. If $obj is an object, we mean to call the method of $obj named after the concatenation of the variables $foo and $bar.  If $obj is not an object, we mean to concatenate the contents of $obj with the results of the function named after the concatenation of the variables $foo and $bar. [code]<?php ${$foo.$bar}->foobar; // Would become ${$foo.$bar}.foobar; ?>[/code] If $foo is an object, we mean the property of $foo indicated by the contents of $bar.  If $foo is not an object, we mean string concatenation of $foo and $bar since $bar has no trailing LPAREN. If the variable named for the result of the curly bracket expression is itself an object, we mean the foobar property of that object, otherwise you have a syntax error (expected T_DOLLAR_SIGN before 'foobar'). [code]<?php $obj->${$foo.'bar'}; // Would become $obj.${$foo.'bar'}; ?>[/code] If $foo is an object, it is converted to the string 'object' and concatenated with 'bar'.  This is done because 'bar' is not a legal identifier.  Otherwise the contents of $foo are concatenated with 'bar'. If $obj is an object, we mean the property contained within the variable named by the curly bracket expression.  If $obj is not an object, we mean string concatenation.

I can't say why the PHP developers chose the -> operator over the dot operator, but I disagree with jesi's comment. It's not terribly difficult to have one operator that performs different operations depending on the context in which it's used.  PHP already does it with LPAREN, which denotes function arguments or order of operations.  C++ uses context to allow function overloading.  Javascript uses the + operator for both string concatenation and arithmetic addition.

Firebug is great for javascript debugging.

I switched us from Synergy One to a VPS with Server Powered at work and have been happy with the results.

@boo_lolly, you are correct in how PHP works. But what he is attempting can be done purely with PHP. This is no different than any real-time system that listens and responds to external events. In this case, you listen to the events in the database and they're posted by another script running elsewhere.

I have a few minutes to kill before taking off for the day, so I'll expand on my previous post. I'm assuming your long-running script is in a tight loop. Each pass through the loop it checks a messaging table within the database for new messages since the last time it checked. It must process any messages it finds and then continue with it's tight loop. You might even want this script to post messages back to the database. Now you have an extra script that is accessible through a web browser. When the page loads, it checks for new messages since the page was last loaded from the long-running script. This page has a form that when posted, sticks new messages into the DB for the other script to process. You could get very fancy with this using AJAX. Alternatively, you could also just have your web page script's form handler serialize the post array and just stick that in the database for the other script to unserialize and process.

I'd set up a message system via MySQL database.

This will be slightly off topic at first. I can't speak for large companies, but if the small company I work for is any indication, the people who make decisions about what to do next are business people. They aren't technically inclined, they don't care what technology is used, they don't care about a great deal of things that us regular old programmers care about. Their only concern is does it work and can I sell it? So for an individual like that to ask you if the new website should be done in PHP or ASP, they'll think PHP is great at first. It's free, it's fast, it can (functionally speaking) do just about anything ASP can do. Then you tell them if there's a major problem there's no technical support. There could be potential downtime while the problem is fixed. That downtime could be more than one day. Once you say that, they shit their pants. Any amount of downtime directly translates into loss of revenue in their brain and having no technical support directly translates into longer downtime, even if that's not necessarily true. I don't think that above scenario is always the case, but I do believe it is often the case. In any case, there are a great many concepts an individual has to understand firmly to be an effective programmer: computer architecture, abstract data types, algorithm efficiency, programming methodologies, etc. In addition, to be a good web developer you need to have a good understanding of: server side scripting, client side scripting, database design and access, HTML / XHTML / XML, CSS, regular expressions, etc. It's a big list. So to get this back on topic, pick one to excel in, familiarize yourself with the other. I personally would pick PHP to excel in since I don't like tying myself to a technology based on a specific vendor / company because then you're at their mercy. And as everyone stated, if you're familiar with programming concepts in general, moving from one language to another is pretty damn easy.

You don't want to do anything like this: form_handler.php <?php $sel = $_POST['selected']; if($sel == "Bob"){ // Do bob stuff }else if($sel == "Sally"){ // Do sally stuff }else if($sel == "Fred"){ // Do fred stuff } // ...and so on. ?> It's very inefficient, tedious to type, and impossible to maintain. Instead set the value attribute of the form options to an appropriate value, such as the e-mail address of the recipient. form <select name="recipient"> <option value="bob@co.com">Bob</option> <option value="sally@co.com">Sally</option> <option value="fred@co.com">Fred</option> </select> form_handler.php <?php $email = $_POST['recipient']; mail($email, "Hi2u", "Hello, World!"); ?>

This isn't a MySQL thing. How about posting some actual code?

You need to categorize everything you do as a priority or a non-priority. My priorities, in no particular order: spouse, family, hobbies, work, some aspects of school My non-priorities: everything else Now you need to determine where you want to spend all your time; for most people this is a no-brainer. I like to spend as much time as possible engaged in priorities, which means anything else I do I try to do in minimal time. I'm an extremely efficient person; I constantly analyze my procedures for accomplishing tasks and try to find ways to cut down the number of steps or total amount of time required. I live by a very simple rule: Don't spend any more time than is necessary to complete a non-priority task. As an example, given two equally difficult school assignments for equally difficult classes, one in computer science and the other in history, I would always spend more time on the computer science assignment. Computer science is my priority, history is not; I do not factor my GPA into this at all. If I know that I have approximately 10 hours total to work on both of them and I can spend 2 hours on the history assignment and guarantee at least a B, then that's all I'll spend on it. That leaves me 8 hours to spend on my priority (or less if I feel that I'll receive an A after only 6 hours of work). You also need to learn how to multi-task. Everyone has a certain amount of dead time during the day when they're not really doing anything. Time spent driving, waiting in traffic, taking a bath / shower, at the gym, sitting on the toilet can be put to good use. I almost always read while sitting on the toilet or taking a bath. If you have a regular 1 hour commute to and from work, that's 2 hours you can spend thinking about what argument you want to make in a paper or how you want to solve a particular programming problem. Same thing with the gym if you're on the treadmill or elliptical. Another important skill is evaluating how long you have to work on something. If you're looking to kill 30 minutes before you start working on homework, don't engage yourself in an activity that is likely to go over 30 minutes. I also find it helps to spend a good amount of time doing nothing. A lot of times I think people might set out to do something that would only take them 30 minutes but really takes an hour because they're tired and their mind is consequently distracted. Taking a 20 minute nap and then completing the task in 30 minutes saves 10 minutes overall. The most important thing to remember though, is that we're all gonna die at some point, so don't sweat the little things. They're really not that important.

I just try and control my breathing. Long, deep breaths, holding it for a few seconds after each inhale. I don't think I've ever had the hiccups for more than maybe 5 minutes. (EDIT) I thought the same about the drunk inspired post.

The company I work for develops software for a very specific sector. It is a very small company, family owned and operated, and I constitute half of the entire programming staff. We currently have two products. One of them is a server based software that is about a decade old and is maintained by our other programmer. The newer product is a web-based sister application to the server application which has about 3 years worth of development time; although only the past year of that time is by me. When I started, ~90% of the web application didn't work for shit and they only had 3 clients using the web app. I've since fixed a majority of the long-standing problems in addition to adding several new features and the client base is now just under 20. Now I thoroughly enjoy my job and I think my coworkers are great people, all 6 of them. However, I disagree strongly with much of the owner's business model. Also, our main application (the server application), is problematic. It's built on old technology, it's not user-friendly, it's expensive, etc. I've tried time and time again to convince them about the best way to develop the web application (#1 on my list is breaking the dependency away from our clunky server application) to no avail. Long story short I think I could singlehandedly do better but I'm financially unable to quit this job without finding a suitable replacement. I'd rather not find a replacement job as it's a very relaxed office environment and only 5 minutes from my house. So my question is, how legal would it be for me to continue working at this place and independently perform my own market research and develop a competing product? P.S. I live in the U.S. and never signed any form of N.D.A. or document declaring I had no right to develop a competing product. Further, I wouldn't be using any of the server application's source (I don't have access to it) or even my own source from the web application since the framework that was set up by the previous developer sucks IMO.

I don't call it anything or translate it into any sort of phrase. Although if I did, I suppose I'd go with the following: $foo->bar = 1;  ==> foo's bar equals 1 $foo->bar(); ==> foo does bar

I'd wrap this up in a nice little class to make it easier to use, but here's the basics. You need to store the current data into an array. We already know this array will have a maximum of 5 elements, so you can arbitrarily decide small indexes indicate older data and bigger indexes indicate newer data; i.e. $Data[0] is the oldest recorded visit and $Data[4] is the newest visit. Define a function that allows you to add a data to the array. You append the data as the last array element, remove the first array element, and then re-order the indexes of the array back to 0 through 4. Define a function that allows you to save the array to a cookie by serializing it. Define a function that allows you to load the array from the cookie by unserializing it. Let us know if you get stuck.

Use sessions for data that you want to persist between pages in an individual visit to a site. Use cookies (or a database) for data you want to persist between browser visits to a site. In your case, I'd probably go with a database-only approach. Here's why. You've already said you want the data to persist between browser sessions, so we already know you'll need to use a database or cookies to store data long term. For this I'd use the database for two reasons. The first is that users can turn cookies off, thus disabling this feature of your website. The second is that cookies have an expiration so eventually they'll disappear on the user's machine anyway. The next task is to deal with how you'll access this data in your scripts. Sessions are very convenient and easy to access, but here's the catch. As soon as the user closes the browser or the session ends due to inactivity, the session is over and all data contained within is lost. There is no way, that I'm aware of, to register a function to run at the end of a session. This means that any data in the session you wish to save long-term, be it in a cookie, server-file, database, etc., will need to be saved every time that data changes. So every time you update a value in the session, you'll be saving it to the database (or a cookie) as well. So in my opinion you might as well scratch sessions as a solution to your problem as that will just introduce extra overhead. Write a nice utility class to interface with the database (or cookies) that allows you to easily store and retrieve data and it'll be just as easy to use as sessions but the data will last between browser instances. My $.02.

Your first encounter with regular expressions is like falling into the lion exhibit at the zoo 15 minutes before the lions' regular feeding time. Once you get familiar with them, your relationship with regexps is a lot like Siegfried and Roy's relationship with their tigers. Usually you can get them to do what you want, you can even bully them a little, but it's only a matter of time before one eats you. That said, regexps are a powerful string pattern-matching tool. Honestly, you can't live without them.

I didn't bother reading that huge mess of code you posted since it's not in [ code ] tags, but my guess would be you need to read the URL using $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and set the selected attribute of the appropriate < option > items when building your select control.

<?php $query = "SELECT count(*) FROM basket WHERE pID=".$item; $result = mysql_query($query); while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){ // $row will be an array after the line above, so checking // $row >= 1 is like saying Array() >= 1 which doesn't make any logical // sense. if($row >= 1) { $exists = true; } } ?> Make a small change to your query and your test and it'll work fine: <?php // Add the 'AS Num' to your query $query = "SELECT count(*) AS Num FROM basket WHERE pID=".$item; $result = mysql_query($query); // Assume non-existence $Exists = false; // Check if the query was successful if($result){ $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result); // Check for existence $Exists = is_array($row) && count($row) && $row['Num'] > 0; } // Rest of code follows if($Exists){ // Update }else{ // Insert } ?> It's worth pointing out that if you are using keys and have the proper version of MySQL that you can just use an INSERT ... UPDATE query. It's also worth pointing out that you don't necessarily have to check if the record exists before hand. Just try and do an UPDATE, if it fails you know the record must not exist and that you need to do an INSERT.

@tcollie, so what happens if the user is logged in and on a page within the site and types the information into the address bar? The referrer will be within the site and they will have done exactly what the OP didn't want. As ToonMariner pointed out, validate the data before you use it.