Older blog entries for Waldo (starting at number 2)

I figured out the solution to my problem: Don't show images on their own in the browser, but call them from within body tags. Avoids the whole thing.

Gosh, if I worked in a big corporate place, I'd probably get some award for "thinking outside the box."

Munk & Phyber, Inc.: We think *around* the box!" :)

Oh, and today's my birthday. I'm 22. I can't bring myself to be excited.

I've got a weird little problem with a program that I wrote in PHP. It grabs an image via the filesystem, rather than through http, in order to provide some security regarding who has the priviliges to look at the image. It works good.

Except.

I need to provide a header to specify the image type. Otherwise, some browsers (like some versions of Netscape) can't tell what kind of image that it is. I never really thought about it, but I guess that NS doesn't look at the headers of an image, but just looks at the file suffix. Which sucks. If I want to call a GIF "image.jpg", I should be able to.

Anyhow, I guess I could force the browser to flush the headers or something...I dunno. But sending a header in the middle of a page of HTML ain't so cool. I guess I need to go read how it's supposed to work in http.

The more that I learn, the less that I know. At least, it seems that way.

I started on O'Reilly's "Masterin g Regular Expressions" last night, in an effort to get over my fear of RegEx. I've only gotten a few chapters in, but it's really been very helpful. I also started on Jakob Nielsen's "Desi ning Web Usability" and Joe Celko's "Data & Databases". The Nielsen is 'cuz it's good for me, and the Celko is because I feel like I'm missing some basic concepts of SQL 92, no doubt in part to MySQL's sketchy implementation of portions of it. We also got the camel book, "DNS and BIND," "Learning Perl," and "SQL For Smarties." Aren't I a good little geek?