,
So what's up?
Am I still alive (where have I heard those words before?)? Yes I am! But as you might have guessed, I'm enjoying my holiday. In other words; pretty much doing nothing all day. Sleeping out, nerding behind my personal computer, playing games on my PSP, watching movies and series (Friends season 1, 2, etc. anyone?), enjoying the sun, stuff like that. Two weeks of free-time left right now, before I start my internship at Strukton Systems. But there is still something I owe my readers and that's the 450+ photos I made in England during my vacation.
Actually I'm still working on those. Sorting, selecting, editing and finding out a way to present them all to you in a comfortable way. Slideshow Pro is a photo gallery build on Flash which has a lot of features usefull when presenting a lot of photos. So I bought myself a license, downloaded a trial *cough* version of Macromedia's Flash 8 and starting fooling around with it. 'Soon' you'll all be able to enjoy the photos in a flashy euhm... Flash animation, complete with informative captions.
The most work, the last couple of weeks, went into fixing Digilin's spam-infected and corrupted Pivot database. The entry files of this weblog and every other Pivot Powered weblog are serialized files. A fragment of a typical serialized pivot file looks something like this:
s:4:"user";s:5:"admin";s:5:"title";s:11:"paifot test";s:8:"subtitle";s:0:""; s:12:"introduction";s:...
In short, the spam somehow messed up the structure of the files with as a consequence, essential key values not being correct. The values after each 's' indicate the length of the following string or integer. These 's'-values were sometimes incorrect, causing other key values to disappear after deserialization. Resulting in entries with no titles, dates, authors etc. To fix it, I wrote a quick-and-dirty PHP script that simply looks for the s:x:"key";s:y:"value" patterns. For those interested, it can be found here: Pivot Serialized DB Fix.zip