The keys on most remotes are so called “dome switches”. They consist of a plastic sheet with buttons on it with a little black dot at the bottom. When the black stuff touches the pcb, the button gets pushed.

Turns out the black stuff didn’t work anymore. After doing some reading on one of ‘em internets, I found out this black stuff is supposed to be conducting. Turns out my black stuff didn’t conduct anymore. I could easily fix it by buying some conducting paint or paste (according to the internets), except that I obviously didn’t want to wait a few days for the product to arrive.

On to another solution then: I took some aluminium foil and some glue and glued a tiny piece of aluminium foil to the switch. I then put everything together again and… tada! The button is working again.

Mind you that I have no clue how long the glue will hold, but with some proper glue it should be fine.

Happy glueing!

But enough about my blogging rituals. As some of you guys, my frequent visitors, might know, the National Novel Writing Month. The idea is fairly simple: write a 50000 words novel in less than one month. An easy challenge indeed; how hard can it be to write a fifty thousands word story?

Since last year, I only heard about it when it was half over, I decided to give it a try. Since I had completely forgotten about the weird contest, I heard the deadline started yesterday… yesterday. In other words, I’m starting on this in the purest form possible: without a storyline in my mind nor a letter on paper.

The only way to keep myself motivated to do this is to proclaim my victory here now. This way, if I succeed, nothing happens. But when I fail, I will fail you guys, my worthy visitors.

But do not dispair, I will finish this novel before the 30th of this month. I’ve blogged, therefor I will succeed. Bring it on, Novel! I can take you!

This is the answer I got:

Here is a little sneak preview of what is to come

More information on the renewed battle system and the improved GUI will follow soon. Most of the graphics will be replaced with brand new, very cool looking graphics and a bunch of new gameplay element will be introduced.

Stay tuned for more information!

And here you can find the XKCD version of this song

First of all: make sure your document is written in UTF8. This will make sure that all forms you submit (yes, even in xmlHttpRequest calls) will be encoded in UTF8.

Second: make sure that your database connection is using UTF8 aswell! Using UTF8 as charset in your fields and tables is one thing, you have to make sure that your connection is using UTF8 aswell! You can change the default charset in your mysql configuration files, but the easiest way to make sure you are using UTF8 is actually telling your connection to use UTF8.
mysql_connect (DB_SERVER, DB_USER, DB_PASS);
mysql_select_db (DB_DATABASE);
mysql_query ("SET NAMES utf8");
This way you will lose those ugly non-utf8 characters in your database.

Now let’s take a look at the xmlHttpRequest. This is fairly simple: what do you want to do? Submit a form ofcourse. What do we have to take in mind? & and = are special characters, so we can’t use those in the form. A simple escape in javascript should take care of that.

The html:
<textarea id="myfield">Some data</textarea>
<button onclick="submitForm();">Submit</button>
The javascript (function submitForm()):
// Only escape the form field
var myfield = encodeURIComponent(document.getElementById('myfield').value);
var req= getXmlHttpRequest (); // Use your own function here..
req.open ('post', 'index.php', true);
req.setRequestHeader("Method", "POST index.php HTTP/1.1");
req.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
req.send ('myfield='+myfield);
How to receive it in PHP:
// Just remove the special url chars
$myfield = rawurldecode ($_POST['myfield']);

And that’s it really. Since your document is in UTF8 and your form fields are encoded in UTF8, the only thing you have to keep in mind is the “split symbols”. No need to encode or decode anything.

[16:55] <SlashLife> Even though I’m still sure that you’re an inferior coder to me, I have to admit, that you’ve got ideas.

Now tell me that’s not positive!

Seems like a simple parent-child relation, so I made a MySQL table to store everything in. Every record has a parent_id and, ofcourse, an unique id. I wanted to load the data in a multi dimensional associated array in PHP, so that I could easily include them in my HTML templates (using recursive functions).

The general aproach for these kinds of data is recursive functions, but this leads to a huge amount of overhead and a lot of useless loops. That’s why I decided to take another approach, using references.

The basic idea is simple: for every parent you create, you write a reference to this parents’ children array in a seperate array.

Take in mind that, in order to use this approach, you need to sort your data on the depth level! That means you will have to store the level of a child (= count the parent, grandparent, …) in your table. Order your data ascending on depth level, and you should be alright. If you dont do this, the script will try to add records to unexisting parents.

You can find my example script here.

Apparently, this prayer has been written in the 18th century.

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the lord my soul to keep;
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.