That's Notta My Boat

Running the year down, this post gives me one more than last year's low of 44 posts, not great but at least I'm trending in the right direction...

That program I was working, you know the one that was "finished?" Yeah, about that... I decided to add a few more features, mainly getting material properties from a database. This meant learning how to "do" databases, such as MySQL, hence that book Learning MySQL.

Getting off the ground proved to be remarkably difficult, I had a lot of trouble just starting the program and connecting to the database engine (the mysql daemon runs on my machine as part of the system) -- it didn't help that I apparently had already played with MySQL some time in the past, set a password and then forgot it. Luckily, it was easy enough to guess, and once past this learning-curve road-bump it was smooth sailing, in fact using SQL is so easy I'm now surprised it had me intimidated.

Right now I'm doing some experimenting with the API for C, before my next big step, which is to build a materials database -- a small one, just a few common materials  with their temperature-dependent properties -- in preparation for re-doing the materials portions of the header program.

Anyway, Happy New Year! See you in 2014.