Confessions Of A Berson Mind

Let’s see…where are we at with things?

Right now, the main focus is to move some antique plates!  I’ve had these things in my possession for far too long now, and they need to get into the hands of whomever desires them.  The page…www.berson3.com/plates got some major updating yesterday, and today I hope to add larger images, and also a shopping cart so that people may purchase online.

As a little sidenote to this, you may have noticed that the PC store is closed.  No worries, as Berson3 will continue to sell computers to the masses.  However, I wasn’t pleased with that store, and it also needed to go away.  The “Plate Project” will act as sort of a dry run for the new PC store which will hopefully debut by the end of next week.  Hopefully there will be some PHP and SQL incorporated into the new store, but if nothing else there will be some wonderful computers featured, including the brand new Intel Core Duo Extreme — the world’s fastest processor!

What else?  There’s more, but there’ll be more posts to cover it…

Not a Family Guy fan?  Nevermind then.  Anyway, Berson3 Computers is selling antique plates.  Yes, that’s right, antique plates.  If you go to berson3.com/plates (or click the link on the right that says…ahem, plates) you can see the list of Sterling Silver, Norman Rockwell, Porcelain, Franklin Mint…all the good stuff in the world of plates.

Other news?  Not much to report other than cinncitybakeshop.com has been parked, and will start to transform into a beautiful website in the coming days/weeks, and cornfieldcustoms.com will be coming to a web browser near you in the next month.  For now…it’s too early for wisdom so I’ll just sign off before I make a fool of myself.

What I’ve been working on most here of late has been on incorporating PHP code into my normal HTML text on this website.  However, I’m pretty much still a novice at it myself, so offering tips on this sort of thing may be pretty hard.  What I can say is, is that when working with PHP and MySQL, it seems to be more important to understand MySQL then anything else.  The active content on our front page is PHP code that calls up our database…with SQL queries.  The trickiest part of the whole code segment was trying to figure out what query I needed to produce the exact results I desired.  Example:

For the front page, I wanted the last 6 posts from my blog, along with the time created, and a link taking you to that blog entry’s own page.  This requires a query that selected the name, date, and ID of each post from the proper table.  Then, I needed to have that list of results sorted by descending order…but only limited to six.

Select name, date, Id
From posts
Order by dsc
Limit 6

Now, granted, the PHP surrounding this query isn’t the easiest thing to pick up on, but the meat of what is actually happening on the front page is this simple MySQL query.  So, the tip of the day is….if you’re going to be working with PHP/MySQL…learn SQL first!  It makes the whole learning process a lot simpler.

Ok, so maybe that might not excite to many of you out there reading these posts.  But for Berson3 Computers, it’s an exciting accomplishment further displaying the growth of their web development department.  For any new customer that enters the B3C fold, they can expect top notch web pages created with streamlined HTML, layout creating CSS, and now have the possibility of having active content with the addition of PHP!  The next step in the B3C web development, ahem, development, is to start creating our own PHP/MySQL based shopping carts.  Expect to see an exciting new shopping cart for our store in the coming months!

So today’s post is on the overdue conversion of my frontpage to a PHP active content page.  When I chose to convert the “News” section into this blog, the idea was to use PHP to access the database containing the blog, and then display the headers on the frontpage of the site.  This was a little time ago.  Today, the procrastination stops.

Also…look for some actual PC configurations to appear in the PC Store in the coming week…

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Sign up for an account through these links today and feed your itch for poker and support Berson3 at the same time!

Today’s tip has to deal with optimization of services.

Microsoft Windows XP comes preloaded with individualized portions of its software called services.  The logic behind the dissection of the interface is two-fold…1) If a particular service crashes, the entire OS does not crash (part of the NT Kernel logic) and 2) Not all services need to be running at all times.  As a matter of fact, many of the services included with Windows XP do not need to be used by the home user at all.  Even better yet, with the addition of Service Pack 2, Microsoft has chosen to disable a few of its useless/trouble-making services for you.

Here are a few that you can almost definitely disable without reprocussion:

Clipbook, Error Reporting Service, IPSEC Services, Messenger, Remote Registry, Webclient

How do you disable a service?  Open the Run dialog and type: services.msc    From the Local Services window you can select the service you wish to disable, right-mouse click, and select Properties.  From this box you select Disabled from the Startup Type drop-down box.  Your services will be “off” the next time you reboot.
There are plenty of other services that can be disabled, but you should do some more extensive research before you begin to haphazardly disable random services.

Congratulations to Daniel Negreanu and his 229th place finish in this years WSOP Main Event!

It may not seem like a huge accomplishment, but finishing in that position after the tournament actually began with 8600 people….to me, that’s a huge accomplishment.

Support Daniel and his online poker site (and my own site as well) by clicking on some of the soon-to-be-appearing fullcontactpoker.com ads on this site.