Here’s my argument: as a male, it’s already okay to carry a briefcase or laptop bag. However there’s few smaller options for when you don’t need all that space. Take today for instance. I needed to bring with me

• a novel,
• my headphones and their charger,
• an iPod,
• coffee mug,
• a yogurt for breakfast.

That amount of stuff doesn’t require either of the two aforementioned personal bags. They’re almost too big with out smaller pockets for some of the stuff! A purse would have been perfect.

I guess there are personal space issues and gods know that not everyone who gets on a bus is a person you wish to sit next to, but at least stand if you want to try and maintain some personal space! Don’t just sit there being a douche as others clearly wish to sit.

Always nice to see the stomping grounds in the news.  Even better to see that it’s a story about higher then expected voter turn out.  Let’s hope that this keeps up.  Whether you’re Republican, Democrat, Independent, Green, Libertarian, or whatever, go vote!

[L]iberals are dismayed with Obama not because this or that initiative was insufficiently lefty. They are mad at Obama for blowing what had to be a Roosevelt moment, and thereby ushering in a totally needless period of far-right resurgence, dominated by a lunatic right that makes Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove look like moderates.

Actually, some of us are dismayed not only at the loss of some sort of Roosevelt moment, but because the initiatives were also “insufficiently lefty.”  Just sayin’.

Here’s the full story: British Angler Catches an Elusive Giant Piranha : TreeHugger.

According to the Alliance For Truth, the Humane Society (which backs the bill, obviously) has a “radical agenda” and is “misleading the public with its intentions on Prop B. The society seeks only to raise the cost of breeding dogs, making it ever-more difficult for middle-class American families to be dog-owners.”

The money line, Anita Andrews from Alliance For Truth told Talking Points Memo (the source for my little rant here) that the Humane Society doesn’t like animals. Where the hell does she get that? They’re the freaking Human Society!

The only thing that gains a little traction is when the Alliance For Truth comments that the bill would limit the number of females a breeder can have at any time for the purposes of breeding. While their comparison (in the article) to limiting the number of houses a realtor could sell appears appropriate, you have to remember that a house isn’t alive and doesn’t suffer in the same way from poor conditions, lack of food, no exercise, and poor or non-existent medical care.

Can anyone in MO tell me if this is likely to pass? Is the Alliance actually endangering the bill?

One thing that was a little complicated was cleaning up after I finished.  I didn’t want to remove the zipped files and the archive before I could feel confident that the visitor to the site had downloaded everything they wanted to.  Thus, a separate process had to do the clean-up operation.  I opted to add some code to the index.php file within the same folder as all the created, temporary files.  Then, when someone visited it, that code would clean-up all the extraneous files.

Here’s what I did:

[cc lang='php-brief' ]
$now = time();
$iterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(new RecursiveDirectoryIterator(“.”));
foreach($iterator as $file) {
if(substr($file, -3, 3) == “php” || $file->getFilename() == “template.docx” || ($now – $file->getCTime()) < 300) continue;
$temp = explode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $file);
$folders[] = $temp[1];
unlink($file);
}

$folders = array_unique($folders);
foreach($folders as $folder) rmdir("./$folder");
[/cc]

The if-conditional just makes sure that I don't delete php files, the template word document from which others are generated, or any files that are less than 5 minutes old.  That time constraint makes me feel like anyone who doesn't get the files they wanted probably didn't click the Open/Save button in the dialog after making the files and they can just re-do the work.

How did I use the template document to make new ones, you ask?  The PHPWord class, that’s how!

That decision made, I had to figure out the best way to handle the CREATE TABLE queries that would be required of the system when the plugin is activated (and updated).  I’ve never been a fan of the long column of SQL statements that some plugins use when creating their own tables.  I’m big stickler for code that looks pretty and is functional, so I wanted a way to store the CREATE TABLE queries in a secure fashion while also keeping them in a separate file from the main Phorum code.

To that end, I created a folder and in that folder I put the SQL statements.  Then, if the tables needed to be changed, I can use file_get_contents() to read in the queries and then use the WordPress dbDelta() function to actually execute them.  This worked very well:

[cc lang='php' escaped="true" tab_size='3']

$prefix = $wpdb->prefix . self::prefix;
$dir = WP_PLUGIN_DIR . “/phorum/sql”;
$files = new DirectoryIterator($dir);
foreach($files as $file) if(substr($file, -7, 7) == “sql.php”)  {
$table = $prefix . basename($file, “.sql.php”);
$query = file_get_contents(“$dir/$file”);
$query = preg_replace(“/<\?php | \?>/”, “”, $query);
$sql  .= sprintf($query, $table, DB_CHARSET);
}
dbDelta($sql);

[/cc]

There’s an interesting tidbit on line 7 above. I had to add the PHP tags around my statements to avoid them being printed on-screen if someone actually browsed to the files.  If they were simply text, then browsers would show the table information to anyone who happened by.  This way, the result is a blank screen.  It’s not yet the most elegant solution but it works for my purposes of the moment but I’ll probably keep trying to think of a better solution until one presents itself.

One of the things that I ran into on a previous site was a general lack of solid forum software for WordPress.  Sure, there’s bbPress and Simple:Press but the former seems a little light of features and fairly difficult to theme while the latter is feature rich, but almost too much so, and equally difficult to integrate within an already existing customized appearance.

To that end, I’m gonna try to make my own.  Yeah, yeah; I know what you’re thinking.  Shocking that a programmer would want to try and re-create the wheel.  I recognize that it’s probably not necessarily the best use of my time to do so, but I’m treating it like a learning experience and as a way to help me blog a little bit more.

There’s a few other forum plugins beyond bbPress and Simple:Press, but oddly no one just went for the silly name of Phorum.  So, I’m totally going to call mine that.  I did some work on it today, but I’m going to talk about what I accomplished tomorrow in a separate post.  I just wanted to slap this one together this evening to put some thoughts into words.