Well hopefully my efforts at being an insurgent from within is finally paying off. I have been part of very large University project to pick a new email client for the Universities email system. I’ve been pushing Thunderbird like there is no tomorrow and managed to convince some of our higher ups to buy in on the idea.

Today I witness the fruit of my efforts, Open Source on a large scale is not being realized at the U of M. I’m proud that our support team was on board the whole time as well. Now to get them to start converting over all the Browsers and OSes.

Considering I struggled for about a day to think of the easiest way to do this I feel completely stupid that I forgot how to randomize a set of mysql results in PHP. Especially after remembering the secret to it all. Simply adding ‘ORDER BY RAND()’ to your SQL statment.

The source of confusion is in the fact that once you have a set of rows from MySQL in PHP you cannot randomize them. The calls are retrieved individually through a ‘mysql_fetch_array’ or similar call and there isn’t anyway to randomize the object returned by ‘mysql_query’. So in an effort to prevent myself from forgetting this easy fix I’m documenting it here. I also hope it helps someone else.

Goddamn. I can’t believe I forgot something that simple … it’s like forgetting how to tie your shoes.

Even though I have 10 posts half completed I figured it was about time just to start writing something to post. Lately I’ve been finding myself fixing issues at work which myself and others have been pegging as issues for a long time. Some of which were didn’t get any attention until after the worst case scenario has already happened. *sigh*.

I’ve been redesigning the way that our online training functions for one of the divisions at the U. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to make sure everything is fully standards compliant (that’s a separate project entirely). I’ve just been charged with converting it from ASP to PHP and getting it live ASAP. While this leaves me the ability to fix some of the HTML/XHTML compliance issues as I come across them (I refuse to produce any code myself which isn’t XHTML Strict). I still wait till I can go back and fix the rest of this application.

Other than that I’ve been trying to find the time to play with Ruby a little more as I’m currently building a Web Services interface for another division. While my interface is working correctly it is actually my first Ruby app, and as such I’d really like to give some more time to learning the language. So I picked up the ‘Pick-Axe’ and have been slowly reading about it. I like what I’ve seen so far and I was actually thinking that it might be a good exercise to complete a raytracer in Ruby. If I find the time for that be certain I’ll post it up here.

That’s about it for now, I’m getting ready to attend some weddings this summer. I have a trip out to NYC again soon and then I’m just waiting for SIGGRAPH after that.