As the pictures show, my graphics card decided it was time to die. I was using it tonight, when suddenly the music stuttered and that nice random pattern appeared across the screen.
That's not quite right
I powered off the PC quick, but it was too late, the card is damaged. Grrrr. Scratch one nVidia 8600 GT. 
Interesting random pattern!
Big Whiskey And The Groogrux King is the title of the new upcoming Dave Matthews Band CD. Please let it be a vast improvement on the last one, Stand Up.
Having followed DMB for many years, Stand Up was a real low point for my tastes. Apart from a couple of songs, it washed over me without any real lasting gems.
The free taster track, Funny the Way It Is, indicates that they’re back on track. Great lyrics and even… a guitar solo! 
Roll on the 2nd June .
I’ve added more classes to the Snooker App. A news table has been added to the database too.
I also spotted a glitch with the migration data. I forgot about walkovers, well the missing player in a walkover. The migration routine had created a new player without checking if the name was empty. Ooops. I’m glad I resisted the urge to migrate all the seasons that are stored in the old database format. Fully testing one league from the 2008 season has been manageable.
The next big step will be the SQL query to work out the player’s win loss averages. Also, with the new database design, I will be able to display a lifetime average (well back to 1996 anyway 
) and many more statistics. History of wins and losses in any match will be interesting too.
All the data for displaying a full scorecard from the Snooker league app is working. Viewing the var_dump() shows all items and objects are correct.
Next job is display it. I’m thinking a AJAX/JSON call to display it as a pop-up might be nice.
Saturday was a good programming day, I almost completed all of data migration routine. Just the high breaks and match comments needed finishing today. The latest season migrated without errors… yata!
Next is the big task of the scorecard class, it’ll be a busy class.
Kaz teamed up with some of her friends from one of the Primary schools she works at and ran the Race for Life today. The weather was perfect, dry and not too warm.
They completed the course in 53 minutes and raised a wad of cash for Cancer Research. Well done girls.
I had a great programming run last night and didn’t finish until after 1am! The static database class is taking shape and has returned meaningful data… which is nice.
Tonight, Kaz helped me to get the results from one division in 1996 into the new database. This will allow me to write and test the league table query. With several years of flat HTML pages to work through, it’ll be a while before all the old data is processed.
In recent times it’s become apparent to me that my Snooker League site needs updating and consolidating into a full blown Object Oriented PHP application. The database design was limited by my knowledge many years ago, resulting in some horrible queries. It does the job, but is hardly a good advert for my PHP and SQL skills these days.
So today it all kicked off, a couple of draft classes were written to retrieve some results from week one of the 1996 season (the year I began making the results and league standings available on the web).
The database has 14 17 tables to date and is being updated regularly. I’m using the excellent MySQL Workbench to design and layout the tables. The database design has been work in progress for months, finally I’ve made the time to get things rolling.
Oh and it’s my birthday today too.
Sadly, I finished working at the secondary school today. I’ve been in their IT support team for 3 and half years, but unfortunately, as a contractor. When the school recently announced a massive debt, I immediately felt vulnerable. This turned out to be true.. “it’s nothing to do with your level of service, it’s purely cost”. Thanks.
The teachers and support staff couldn’t have been nicer, many of them came to wish me well and express their disbelief and concerns for the future (Ofsted have put them in special measures now). I left with several bottles of wine and some money towards an Eee Box. I plan to replace our old Pentium3 mp3 server with an Eee Box very soon. The cards signed by so many staff were very moving to read. I thank you all.
The joint 18th (Steven, Cuttin Edge bass) and 50th (Mike, Cuttin Edge guitar) birthday party was a great success. We got to meet lots of friends and family. The music provided by the The Gophers and Cuttin Edge was superb. The food… well the food was even better. Too much of it, but that’s never a bad thing.
Roll August 2010 when our David hits 18!