SQL JOINs y u no do

So I'm working on the Flower Town database/script, trying to write queries for more detailed reports, which so happen to include the things that the player hasn't yet done.  So, LEFT JOIN, right?

Well, sorta.  It works, but not completely.

Background: I have a table with two columns: breed_id and color_id.  They're foreign keys to a table of all breeds of the game's flowers and a table of all colors of the game's flowers, respectively.  It's indexed by the combination of the two, which is always unique.  This table contains data that never actually changes, grows, or shrinks; it's used as a reference for a second identically structured table.  This second table's contents reflect what the user has actually accomplished in-game.  Normal usage is totally fine, I can pull out anything about what the user has already done.  So, it would be logical that, using LEFT JOINs, I could easily pull out data on what the user still needs to do, right?

I said "sorta" above for a reason.  So long as both breed_id AND color_id are NULL, it works beautifully.  Related to a few other table columns here and there, I can get data back on things the user has yet to do in-game.

Because most breeds can be grown in multiple colors, though, it doesn't work completely.  I am finding myself unable to get data on which colors the user has yet to grow for a given breed, if they've grown some but not all colors for that breed.  I've mangled the JOINs and table relations and WHERE clause every way I can possibly think of, including trying to split certain parts off into subqueries here and there, all to no avail.

I may know SQL, but I'm no SQL god.  If anyone happens to be reading this who IS an SQL god (or, at the very least, knows more than me), by all means, drop some knowledge in the comments.  Relevant info: it's MySQL, because this is web development and I'm not an RDBMS snob.

Ridge Racer 3D: Duplicating Duels (Simpler Method)

So, a while back when I posted that other post, I had this really long and complex method to duplicate a StreetPass Duel that involved backing up data on the SD card and game title IDs and all kinds of nonsense.  The bonus points duplication was far simpler and therefore the preferred method.

Well, I'm an idiot.  Duplicating a duel is, in fact, just as easy as duplicating the bonus points.  You do, in fact, get to a point where you have completed the duel, but the game hasn't deleted it yet, and it politely waits for your input before actually deleting it.  So, without further ado, the method!

1. Start up Ridge Racer 3D once you've gotten some StreetPasses for it.
2. Go to Single Player → StreetPass Duel, get your bonus points, and then hopefully also a duel or two.
3. If you got a duel, race it, and win so you get the points.
4. Once you finish the duel, there will be a screen saying "you finished first!" and showing you the points you just earned.  Press A.
5. The game will now save, which credits you with those nice juicy points you're after.
6. Next up is a dialog that basically says "okay, we're just going to delete this now...".  Pressing A here causes the duel to be deleted.  So don't press A.
7. Press HOME instead, and close the game.  Repeat the process from step 1 and the duel will still be there, because the game never had the chance to delete it.

See?  It's that simple.  Unfortunately, it's still faster in terms of points gained per minute to duplicate the bonus points instead, especially if you have a full queue of 8 StreetPasses, where you'll get 16000 points per duplication.  But it doesn't have to be as complicated as I initially made it out to be.

I Got My Ubuntu Box Working Again

When I moved last year, I went to set it up at the apartment, only to discover that it wouldn't finish the boot process.  I was worried something had gotten fucked up when I drove it across the city, and the most obvious of methods to diagnose and fix what was wrong completely escaped me at the time.

In fact, it wasn't until I was setting up SpillPass-Pi and in need of a working SD card reader that I decided to try again to get it to work.  After a few fumbles, one of which strangely got me to the GRUB menu but no further, I remembered something.  Something critical, something useful.

Good old Ctrl+Alt+F1.

You see, in console mode, *nixes have a few virtual consoles that you can switch between by holding Ctrl+Alt and hitting the function keys.  GUIs typically run on the one presented by Ctrl+Alt+F7.  So when it was stuck during the boot process, I hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 and got greeted with the text-mode login screen.

Now, a long time ago, when I had it hooked up to my parents' plasma monitor, I'd had to do a small tweak using xrandr to force the Ubuntu login screen to use the proper display resolution.  I said to myself, "well, I'm not using the computer on that monitor anymore, so let's go disable that...".  Disabled it (I had aptly named the script "lightdmbitchslap.sh") and rebooted, and surprise!  A GUI.  A finished booting process.  "IT'S ALIIIIIIIIIIIVE!".  Etc.

The strange thing is, when I moved, I thought to myself "I wonder if that xrandr script is going to mess things up", but then as soon as I was trying to get the computer going again, that thought completely exited my head.  I was actually more worried about having to hook up a monitor and keyboard to my server so I could go and change the static IP that it was configured to use, even though I never bothered to do anything with my server and it spent the entire time I lived there holding up a box fan so it could blow air over my lofted bed.  Trivia: that box fan is now serving as a cooling fan for my main computer and I need to go get another one to keep myself cool while I sleep.

I can watch anime again, guys.  It's been a year.  I can finish Railgun S.  I can watch UTW-Mazui's release of Kill Me Baby.  I can watch the Steins;Gate movie.  All because all of that is encoded in 10-bit h264 which this single-core computer can't decode in realtime.  My Ubuntu box is a 64-bit 1.8GHz dual core Intel processor, and even though its major chokepoint is its single gigabyte of RAM, that extra CPU core makes all the difference.

Now I just need to procure myself a network switch, a spool of cat5, and some RJ-45 crimping tools so I can have all my shit hooked up to the network at the same time.

FUCK

This morning before I went to bed I had the bright idea to try and install Plop Boot Manager to my hard drive's MBR, so that it would control the boot process instead of the Windows boot loader.  It offers a lot of extra capabilities, hence why I wanted it.

Except that trying to install it fucked up my partition table.

Fucked up partition table = BIOS no see OS = Can't use computer.  Simple as that.

So when I woke up, I j-j-jammed in my WinXP install disc and reinstalled XP.  All was fine, except for one thing that I swear I've fixed before but can't remember for the life of me how I did it: my boot drive was K: instead of C:.  One of my other hard drives had taken over the stupid C: drive letter.  And with Windows being so infinitely intelligent, you can't use its own disk management software to change the drive letter of your boot drive.  It won't even entertain the thought of queueing it up as something to do when the computer is restarted and then telling you "Reboot your computer, moron!".

In the process of rebooting and trying to get it fixed, my BIOS started doing its thing again, where it goes "lol what IDE Primary Master?  I see no IDE Primary Master!".  Usually if I just turn the computer off and let it sit for a while to think about what it's done, when I turn it back on it goes "lol jk" and starts up.

That was several hours ago.  Letting it sit has never taken more than 20-30 minutes before.

So I go "okay, might as well see if it's the hard drive" and swapped it out for what appears to be a brand new 120GB hard drive that had never been formatted before.  Start up computer, and it still can't see it.  In other words, suspicion confirmed, it's my BIOS.

First thing you're thinking is "lol, you still use IDE devices?"  Yeah, yeah.  I built that computer in 2004.  You know, before SATA became really popular.  Hell, it's got a 64 bit processor.  I've never been able to use it at full power because I've lacked a 64 bit OS for it to run.

My plan was, if the 120GB drive magically worked, I was going to partition it about half and half, and set up Windows on one half and one or another flavor of Linux on the other half.  But that doesn't mean much now, I can't use the damn thing.

All I can hope for now is to earn enough money from this job that I can buy the stuff for an all-new computer.  Which will take very uncomfortably longer than I really want it to.  If anyone I know is reading this and you have even a semi-decent computer you can lend to me for a while, I'd be really grateful.  I'd want to be able to install stuff on it though.  Stuff meaning my usual day-to-day setup, rather than me being a retard and FUBAR'ing your computer.

I should have just gone to sleep at 4:30 AM like I wanted to, but noooo, I was just like "lol let's install plop to the MBR!  This won't take very long!"  Well, half of that was correct.  It didn't take very long.  But now due to circumstances entirely unrelated to it, I can't even use my computer at the moment.

I'm downloading the latest Ubuntu livedisc, I'm going to see if I can't boot off of that and not have to use my parents' computer.  I won't be able to watch anime (sadface), but...  At least I'll have the internet.

Fewer Complaints About Flash Cookies

So, after updating Firefox, installing a newer version of BetterPrivacy, and managing to accidentally delete all my flash game saves before hacking BetterPrivacy again, I decided on a whim to keep the settings cookies around this time.

The settings cookies store your settings for each domain that has ever tried to set a flash cookie on your system.  They're stored in a separate directory structure from the actual cookies themselves.  In the past, I kept deleting them, but as I've found through experimentation, they're important.

I'm not sure what else they store, but it doesn't matter.  They store one critical piece of information: whether or not you want to allow that domain to set flash cookies.

Yeah, how could I have overlooked that?  lol

You access a menu either by right clicking on any given Flash object and selecting Global Settings, or by (at least on Windows) going into your Control Panel and selecting Flash Player.

This settings dialog has four tabs, but we're primarily interested in the first one, titled Storage.  There, you can click one all-important button: Local Storage Settings by Site.

In here you can see every domain that's ever tried to set a Flash cookie, and set each one to Ask me, Allow, or Block.  Don't want a flash cookie from a specific domain?  Select Block.  Want them?  Select Allow.  Rather get a question from Flash asking for each individual cookie?  Select Ask me.  There you go.

Honestly, once you get this set up for all the Flash-using sites you visit on a regular basis, there isn't much need for BetterPrivacy.  Set Flash to ask you when a new site wants to store information, hit Deny when that new site wants to store information (or Allow if you'd rather allow it, lol), then open the settings and configure for that domain.  There you go.

Now I've got Newgrounds automatically allowed and all the other domains ever blocked.  And it hasn't affected my use of Flash games or video players at all, unlike the "disable third-party flash cookies" option that's only available if you somehow find your way to the other, more obscure settings page buried on Adobe's website.

I haven't yet tested this with locally-run Flash games, including the titles I previously mentioned: Machinarium, TRAUMA, and The Binding of Isaac.  Therefore, I don't know how configurable that is.  But internet-wise, I'm set.

Just remember: keep the settings cookies.

Fuck This Shit

CAINE is depending solely on me to migrate the forums from lulzbb to Simple Machines.  I honestly thought I could do it.  Really.  So here's the history of CAINE's forums, as they pertain to the migration.  No dates, because I forget them.

We decided we needed forums, so our webmaster (the person with access to CAINE's account on the student webserver) bartered for some storage space and installed phpbb 3.  It didn't work out.  I found a free web host with PHP and MySQL and set up phpbb2, because phpbb3 wouldn't install on the server.  That took off.  Then we figured that having a real domain name would be better than something like "caine.freelinuxhost.com" or whatever it was (doesn't exist any more, I let my account expire).  L eventually bought us desudesudesu.org, where the forums are now housed.

L and I, both being into programming, immediately started hacking apart phpbb2 and making it fit our needs more.  I focused on mainly stupid shit, like coloring usernames according to access level (i.e. administrators, moderators, and regular users all had different colors) and dicking around with the theme until it looked like 4chan.  I was a lot more of a /b/tard back then than I am now.

One of the most useful hacks was image posting.  Forum activity really took off when we could upload a picture alongside a post.  We're currently on the third iteration of the RANDOM PICTURE THREAD, which gets closed when it reaches 100 pages.

L, fed up with how much shit phpbb2 is (I'll back him up, it really is a pile of shit unlike most software he calls shit), wrote a drop-in replacement called lulzbb that we've been using to this day.  Then, kind of like 4scrape, he abandoned it.  I've been the only person working on it for quite some time now.  I wrote the private messaging feature.  I improved L's in-place editing code to have a cancel button and be protected from clicking edit more than once.  Eventually I found that L had written mod controls but hadn't integrated them into the site, so I did that.

The boards still to this day lack many features, such as an admin panel, bug-free in-place post editing (certain characters will prevent a post from being edited, I haven't figured it out), bbcode buttons (the posting area is just a large text box, I get the feeling that the newer users don't really know that bbcode even exists.  The wordfilters we have, while funny, fuck with posts in weird ways on occasion.  We also need a post preview feature and other essential forum features.

So, it came up.  I had wanted to do this immediately when we got the domain, but I don't know why I didn't do it then, it would have been much easier.  We want to migrate the forums from the piece of shit we're running to something polished with features we've been lacking and the ability to expand as the userbase needs.  There's a lot of forum software out there, frankly most of it is shit.  I was a fan of Invision Power Boards until they went to a pay model.  Since then, I've taken a liking to Simple Machines.  A couple other members also liked it, so I decided we'd migrate to that.

I had preservation on my mind, so I made bold promises left and right about posts, forum structure, PMs, user accounts, and so forth being carried over.  I'd known that existing conversion scripts probably wouldn't work due to the sheer modifications we'd made to the database, and the total frontend replacement going from phpbb to lulzbb, so I said I'd write one for the purpose.

That was before the end of the spring semester.  It's July 12th.  I've done quite a lot of delving through SMF's database, comparing it to lulzbb's, and correlating fields.  SMF's database is understandably a lot larger and more involved.  It stores a lot of information that lulzbb's doesn't.  Conversion is no easy task.  I thought I was up to the challenge.  It's not looking that way.  Things I have to resolve pop up left and right.  I momentarily thought we were in the clear when while leafing through SMF's source I discovered that it allows you to log in with a password hash from a lot of other competing forum software.  It even converts the stored hash to its own format once that's successful.  It looked awesome.  It really did.

But going through, everything else just kept getting more and more complex with every step I took.  I no longer feel like I can write a migration script to convert lulzbb to SMF.  So, in vain, I tried SMF's existing phpbb2 converter, knowing full well it probably wouldn't work.  Indeed, it didn't.  It couldn't even start.

So now, I'm thinking the best option is to set the existing lulzbb forums to read-only, then wipe the main domain (www.desudesudesu.org) and install SMF there and just start the fuck over.  I'm tired of editing code and looking through database tables.  Under this plan, the old forums would still be accessible in read-only format on dev.desudesudesu.org.

Only problem: I don't own the domain.  I don't have access to the account that the domain is hosted on.  I have write access to the development side via group permissions.  That's it.  I'll need access to the account to set up SMF.  I don't have the money to take over ownership from L.  SMF also FTPs into itself to change file permissions when you install a mod, something I view as kind of strange but don't really know the alternative to, save for setting every single source file and directory to be world-writable.

I've been doing migration testing on my server that's sitting nearby my desktop.  Due to various issues mostly related to Arch Linux, any time I try to install something, things break.  This means I can't fully test SMF.  It's kind of a moot point, but it aggravates me that I can't seem to get all the components of a fucking web server installed and configured properly.  Also, recently I tried to update PHP, everything broke, and I had to downgrade it to get it working again.

tl;dr I'm very sorry, CAINE, but I can't do this.  I feel kind of like a dead man walking on the forums right now.  I talk big but can't back up my words with actions.  I hate making promises I can't keep, but it seems like I've done that this time.  The forum migration everyone has been waiting for isn't possible with me at the helm.  lulzbb is too different from phpbb and SMF.