My work week has been spent rebuilding stats that were supposed to be collected by my reporting application. I was missing a month's worth of data. Why? Turns out that a bug fix I made actually introduced a new bug, and was causing silent failures. Something about me not setting the proper PDO attribute to buffer queries. My testing didn't reveal the bug, so the first thing I did was change the tests and bingo! it revealed the bug. Silly Chris. Luckily, I had created a tool a while back to allow me to fix the stats for a specific day, so with a list of dates for which data was missing I set about collecting the data. Unfortunately, it takes between 5 and 10 minutes per day to hit our 30+ sites that we are collecting data from (probably due to huge record sets and improper indexes) so that meant a minimum of 150 minutes of continuous data grabbing. Of course, it took longer because I kept testing things, and was tweaking the stats reporting software code (I found out about the magical BETWEEN function in MySQL to use when looking for records in a date range) so it basically took me all week to retrieve the data, make changes to the reporting application and test everything. Phew.

Now, back to what is in Chris' Brain for January 2007

• I'm working on the article for A/R/T, which is php|architect's online article repository. First draft is done, just waiting to find out from Marco who to send it to and if they like it.
• Finished phase one of my work on Mustique Island, a side project I had been doing some PHP work on. The work isn't online yet but it was interesting to do: search engine for villas-for-rent on a private island in the Caribbean. I got to flex my Ajax skills a little with some forms that refreshed without refreshing the page, etc. Good practice for rallyhat
• Thinking about how to modify my presentation for my talk in February. Have to mix it up a bit, make sure what's in there is still relevant. Things do change fast, and my work with CakePHP should probably be worked into the presentation as well.
• Continue pestering Derek to do his fair share of the work on Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler and write the documentation that we are missing.
• Start working on the outline for that Ruby training course (I hope I haven't gotten in over my head)
• See if I can't have a working beta of Rallyhat to show people by the end of the month