For various reasons, I've been a bit quiet on this blog since setting it up. The reasons:
- I'm recovering from this operation. It's going well, but it's painful to sit down for long periods writing stuff, and the morphine still clouds my concentration a bit. I'm reducing the dose steadily, and I should be off it before too long. In the meantime, I still ache like hell quite a lot of the time. I've uploaded the X-rays (AP and Lateral), along with the before-and-after X-rays from my first operation.
- I've been spending more time thinking about the page layout. I'm not happy with this theme, although I like the whiteness and simplicity. However, I hate those dropdowns. So, I'm trying to come up with something simpler and better, while still keeping the cleanliness.
- I've been working on an article originally intended for this blog. However, it ballooned into a 4000-word piece with diagrams and listings and stuff, and it's been provisionally picked up for publication in a real ink 'n' paper techie magazine, for payment and everything. Wahey! I rock! However, until it's published, I'm not going to tempt fate by talking about it.
- I'm starting to look at doing the Zend Certification exam. I paid for it last year, and never got round to doing it. My excuse was that it only covered PHP 4, but since the PHP 5 exam is due for release shortly, I should really start revising.
Anyway, once I've got all that off my plate, I'm thinking about writing a few more bits for this site, including "JOINs for Dummies". In my experience from interviewing PHP and database developers, very few actually get SQL joins, especially outer joins. At Lonres, Steve and I wrote a small test to give to candidates, involving some simple joins. None of them gave 100% correct answers, even though they were really trivial. I'd like to teach the world to JOIN in perfect harmony, so I might give writing a tutorial a shot. I'm not a recognised expert on this stuff, but my ad-hoc tutorials in my office went down pretty well, so I might as well. At the very least, it means I won't have to teach it again.
So, that's why there's such a huge gap between updates. I hope to get some decent content up here. I also have a chunk of PHP code to release, but I'm not going to do that until I can devote some time to building some example code for it.
Pah. My SQL answers were 100% correct. :-)
I seem to remember you missed the inverse outer join, ie. the one which gives you rows that don't match. :)
Well, after an archaeological mailbox expedition, it seems like I solved it using some weird UNION instead of the OUTER JOIN you expected. :)
Maybe not a join, but the assignment didn't say anything about that.
Didn't I ask you the one about finding non-matching rows? Usually solved with a NOT IN subquery, but done better with an OUTER JOIN and an IS NULL?
Hmm... sloppy of me. Oh well, I stand corrected :)
Ah... just noticed we did two rounds of interview tests, and you came in the second round. That explains it.
:-)
Let me know when you come to Paris next, and I'll buy you a glass of wine.