08/26/99

A couple of rants today.

First of all…. Malda comment your bloody CODE! In
playing around with the slash source
for getting Iambe’s comments threaded, I came along such uncommented
gems as this:

my $sibs=$$comments[$$C{pid}]->{kids};

for(my $x=0; $x< @$sibs; $x++) {

  ($n,$p)=($$sibs[$x+1],$$sibs[$x-1]) if $$sibs[$x] == $cid;

}

The threading is a whole other story. I hope I can do it without
being completely insanely sql and processer intensive. Far as I can
figure right now, I do something like the following.

The table is set up with the data fields and a cid
(comment id) and rid (reply id) field.
rid is set to -1 by default. If you click on reply
to a comment, it’s rid is set to the cid of the comment you are
replying to.

Simple huh? Well, my problem is in the rendering. Unless I can suck
everything into memory and manipulate them in perl I’ll end up doing
something like this.

for each comment…

Select any comments with a rid of it’s cid

For each of those comments

Select any comments with a rid of it’s cid

…

When there are none left print out the comments

all

the way

Pretty ugly huh? Anyone got a better idea? I could probably make
some sort of struct in perl and suck the data into that and then do
the same thing, but with only one database access (select * from
comments where pid=$pid;). Wish I had a faster box so I wouldn’t have
to worry about all this. Hmm… I really should email the guys from
dell/compaq/alpha to see if they want to donate some hardware.

Rant #2:

While I love Alan Jackson as a singer, he has some really good songs,
but he, and JRFM (my radio station) are driving me crazy by playing
his fscking “Little Man” song all the time! Argh!
Sorry, but I’m really beginning to hate it.